You can get drunk on Tintoretto, the subject of a rare and wonderful retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. I did the other day, and came away convinced that the sixteenth-century Venetian may or may not be the greatest of painters, but he’s the only one for me right now, supercharging my faith in art as a means to invigorate the world. I’ve sobered up a bit since then, but the effect lingers. It’s not because Tintoretto created masterpieces. He did at times—often on a grand scale, in vast canvases peopled with gesticulating, soaring, tumbling figures—but perfection wasn’t his game. What excites is what he was: a born rebel with a lowdown drive in service to a staggeringly resourceful intelligence. From humble roots—the oldest of three children of a tinto, a dyer—he waged, more than conducted, a career in competition with favorites of the Venetian aristocracy, chiefly his sublime elder Titian and his elegant rival Veronese. Just look at him. In the first of two self-portraits that bookend the show, the artist is in his twenties, in the late fifteen-forties, and hellbent for glory, flinging a sudden gaze over his shoulder at us. His features are coarsely, even vulgarly emphasized, with red lines around his eyes that all but pop them off the canvas. The raking light and shadows were new in painting, pointing decades ahead to Caravaggio and the Baroque. The picture announces that this artist will do what it takes, and only what it takes, to astonish.
The second self-portrait, from 1588, finds Tintoretto old, tired, perhaps in physical pain, and thinking—he is not “thoughtful” but, mysteriously, cognizant. Édouard Manet, who made a copy of the work in 1854, called it “one of the most beautiful paintings in the world”—a judgment that may seem odd for so muted an image, until you accept visualized presence of mind as a species of beauty. Tintoretto is properly identified with epic narratives, such as a supremely powerful “The Deposition of Christ” (circa 1562), which is especially prophetic of the Baroque. In a swirling confluence of mourners, the heavy corpse of Jesus is lowered onto Mary’s lap. She faints, with open, unseeing eyes. But the portraits are a special revelation in the show: worthy complements, at the genre’s peak, to those by Velázquez and Rembrandt. Among the best is “Portrait of a Man with a White Beard” (circa 1555), from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, which was made famous in 1985 by Thomas Bernhard’s dazzling novel “Old Masters: A Comedy.” The story concerns an old music critic who, for thirty years, has spent hours every other day sitting in the museum and gazing at the portrait. Bitterly dyspeptic in the Bernhard way, the critic has contempt for artists generally and begrudges Tintoretto, too, but finds reliable solace in the company of an impressive man who appears annoyed by an interruption and beset by some deeper malaise—a disappointment, perhaps, with life. As usual with Tintoretto, the paint handling is fast and loose but exact: hip-shooting marksmanship. The picture feels born of a fleeting moment, like a snapshot—or a film frame.
The great French art historian and theorist of cinema Élie Faure (1873-1937) held that Tintoretto had a premonition of movie aesthetics, with “an eternal undulation that is captured but not stopped.” Jean-Paul Sartre agreed, calling the artist “the first film director” and devoting years to a projected (eventually abandoned) book on Tintoretto as a man acutely at odds with his society and ahead of his time, foreseeing values that, if not quite proletarian, incubated revolutionary portent. Authors tend to fall like dominoes for Tintoretto; among others of the intoxicated—eloquently stammering, mostly—were John Ruskin and Henry James. The most significant writer who did not succumb was a contemporary in Florence, the mediocre painter and priceless gossip Giorgio Vasari, who allowed that Tintoretto had “the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced” but charged him with a careless hastiness that was “without design, as if to prove that art is but a jest.” Vasari brought on his visits to Venice the prejudice of Florentine Mannerism—hewing to the ideals of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Raphael—for disegno, a knitted wholeness of drawing and composition.
In truth, Tintoretto had taken major inspiration from Florentine art, but not from its painters. As a concurrent show at the National Gallery, “Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice,” makes plain, he went whole hog on pictorial equivalents to the sculpture of Michelangelo. (Observe, in Tintoretto’s drawings of figures by the sculptor, how he translates three-dimensional musculature with staccato marks into templates for painting.) Tintoretto didn’t arrange figures in perspectival space. He drew and painted figures whose movements precipitate space, just as much as they need to accommodate their gestures. Vistas may open behind them, but less as settings than as airy or plunging ambiences in dreams.
You don’t behold Tintoretto’s big paintings so much as fall into them, vicariously feeling, in your body, the action of the figures, which he often painted nude before adding their clothing. His compositions are deliberately unbalanced, with forms that surge from one side or along forward diagonals. They are fields of energy rather than structural armatures. He could insert odd elements at will without fear of disruption. In “The Last Supper” (circa 1563-64), one of his nine known paintings on the subject, Jesus’ disciples react with violent alarm, each of them differently, to his statement that one of their number will betray him. Details emphasizing the group’s poverty include a fool-the-eye patch, ostensibly stitched onto one disciple’s legging, and an overturned rush-bottomed chair, as poignant in its ordinariness as any by Vincent van Gogh. Bracketing the scene, which includes a playful cat, are, on one side, a lovely still-life of books and garments on and around a chair and, on the other, a child of ten or so who looks like a delicate boy, standing apart from the action. (It is likely Tintoretto’s beloved daughter, Marietta, whom he is said to have dressed as a boy so that he could take her everywhere with him; the child holds an indistinct object that may well be Tintoretto’s paint-splotched palette.) Then there are the ghostly figures, all white: one sketchy female at the top of a dark staircase and a filmy couple drifting by on a distant veranda. What are they about? Different times, perhaps—the past or the future of a tumultuous present in which we are too caught up to have leisure for wondering. Tintoretto’s art happens.
Tintoretto would do just about anything for just about anybody when it came to commissions, even working gratis to secure one. In between, he practically spewed lesser works, maintaining a large workshop that may account for the many bad or, not to dither, very bad paintings (none in this show) that would long becloud his reputation. He most notoriously outfoxed the hostile circle of Titian, in 1564, to decorate the palatial Scuola Grande di San Rocco. (A scuola was a wealthy brotherhood or club, putatively devoted to charity.) Rather than submitting a conceptual drawing, like the other candidates for the job, he painted a ceiling panel, had it installed, and announced that it was free of charge. Because San Rocco was forbidden by its rules to reject any donation, that was that, despite considerable outrage among the losing artists. The resulting sixty paintings, on Biblical and allegorical themes, made in two intense phases across twenty-four years, add up to a Venetian equivalent of the Sistine Chapel. Having beheld the Scuola, Ruskin was moved to rate Tintoretto “at the top, top, top of everything, with a great big black line to stop him off from everybody.” James raved, of Tintoretto’s art, “It seemed to me that I had advanced to the uttermost limit of painting,” adding that “Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which Tintoret alone is master.”
I know the feeling! However, I must caution that it’s not instantaneous. Tintoretto takes getting used to, as his startling inventiveness engages unsuspected capacities of your eye, mind, and, in particular, body, which must surrender to the kinesthetic precision of elements that may bewilder at first blush. An awkward spell of becoming acquainted is unavoidable. See the show twice if possible, with a break in between. It was on my own revisit, after lunch (having had only a soft drink, be it known), that inebriation reigned. I had a weird feeling of having been anticipated. The works seemed something like glad to see me, as if they’d always known I’d come around. ♦
