A Venetian cloth dyer’s son, Tintoretto spent his entire career in Venice,
becoming widely considered the last great painter of the Renaissance.
The lagoon city’s churches and palazzi essentially serve as a permanent
retrospective of this native son’s formidable talents in using dramatic color,
bold brushstrokes and daringly innovative perspective on often-enormous
canvasses.
Still, curators here have encountered challenges when mounting tributes
this year to mark the 500th anniversary of his birth.
Some of Tintoretto’s paintings couldn’t be included in the main exhibition,
hosted at the landmark Palazzo Ducale (Doges’ Palace), because they couldn’t
fit through its 16th-century stone doorways.
Masterpieces
And several Venetian churches, where the painter did much of his best work,
balked at loaning their masterpieces. Not surprisingly, they are eager for
visitors making the Tintoretto pilgrimage to visit their venues and not just the
stellar show, which, since opening in September, has drawn more than 100,000
visitors.
After it closes here on Jan 6, the exhibition travels to the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. for a four-month run starting March 10. That
will be the first-ever Tintoretto retrospective outside of Europe.
When Venice last hosted a Tintoretto retrospective, in 1937, church
paintings were cut out of their frames, rolled up and carted off to the
exhibition. That method would be met with horror by today’s art world,
especially since nearly a score of Tintoretto paintings were recently restored,
thanks to the Save Venice organization.
“The churches generally felt, and we understood, it didn’t make sense to
move his masterpieces across the city,” said Robert Echols, a Boston-based art
historian who is one of the curators. Some of those church works will go to the
US exhibition, however.
Some of Tintoretto’s greatest works can never travel, of course, and are
being celebrated here.
In the Chapter House in the Scuola di San Rocco, admirers can lay on their
backs to see Tintoretto’s work, which has been likened to the monumental
achievement of Michelangelo in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. Thanks to new
lighting and strategically placed mirrors, the Chapter House last month had its
own renaissance of sorts. Now visitors can see details in what before had
seemed like a gloomy, cavernous room.
Devoted
Echols and co-curator Frederick Ilchman, chair of European art at the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston, devoted much of their art historian careers to weeding
out paintings that had been dubiously attributed to Tintoretto, whittling down
what had been a list of 468 works to just over 300 paintings of his authorship.
“Tintoretto, to some extent, is a painter who was a victim of his own
success,” Echols said.
Tintoretto, a pseudonym of Jacopo Robusti, obtained so many commissions,
particularly in his later years, that he farmed out some work, notably to his
son, Domenico. While his genius was acknowledged in his own day, some works
done by imitators or his workshop had been incorrectly attributed to Tintoretto
in successive centuries.
Tintoretto cleverly maneuvered to snag commissions from nobles and churches
during the heady years of the sea-going Most Serene Republic of Venice.
“The Shakespeare play is not the “Merchant of Florence”, it’s “The Merchant
of Venice’,” Ilchman noted, recounting how Tintoretto sometimes offered
discounts to ensure commissions didn’t go to his rivals, who included Titian and
Veronese. Another great Venetian artist, Tiepolo, worked later, also with
paintings in the Grande Scuola di San Rocco.
Tintoretto’s imaginative use of perspective and his dynamic, inventive
interpretations of mythological and religious themes are on convincing display,
including one which sparked scandal in his day. In “St Louis, St George and The
Princess”, a dragon’s head emerges from between the legs of a woman and from
under her billowing, burnt-orange gown.
In the “The Abduction of Helen”, the
kidnapped woman, with a ... poking out above her blouse, seems to be tumbling
out of the frame toward the viewer. Tintoretto had an impressive production of
portraits. The exhibition displays many of his finest in a long, narrow hall,
as if in a noble family’s own palazzo. (AP)