Jacopo Tintoretto: Identity, Practice, Meaning

Introduction. Jacopo Tintoretto: Identity, Practice, Meaning
Tom Nichols

“Thence comes it that my name receives a brand”: Tintoretto’s Nickname Reconsidered
Philip Cottrell

The rise to prominence of Tintoretto as the ‘little dyer’ took place in 1548, the same year in which the world’s first technical manual on dyeing, Giovanventura Rosetti’s Plictho de larte de tentori, was published in Venice. Are the two events purely coincidental? To what extent was the painter’s nickname shaped by Venice’s increasing renown as a leading centre of the international dyeing industry? While the artist was content to sign himself as ‘TENTOR’ on the Miracle of the Slave, it was Pietro Aretino who possibly popularised the nickname’s teasing, diminutive form; a means of pigeonholing the artist as socially, professionally, and even physically, distinct from the mature, courtly Titian. In seeking to clarify the nickname’s origins, this essay will also consider whether the pictographic signature on Tintoretto’s Sacra Conversazione of 1540 was intended to denote the mangles and reels which feature in contemporary accounts and illustrations of dye making.

Tintoretto’s Self-Portraiture: Shaping a ‘Furious’ Artistic Identity in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Tom Nichols

Jacopo Tintoretto made powerfully expressive self-portraits towards the beginning and end of his long career, works which stand apart from the rest of his oeuvre in their quality of simplicity and directness, but which also seem to confirm his possession of a fiercely independent, unyielding and even angry or furious artistic persona. Although it is often assumed that Tintoretto merely depicted what he saw in the mirror in such works, this chapter explores the ways in which he more actively and self-consciously shaped a furioso identity within them, in order to express his difference from other artists and his unique professional position within the field of painting in Cinquecento Venice. The underlying implication of violent self-assertion in the examples from his early career might suggest his identity as an independent autodidact, as also his distance/difference from the leading painter of the city, Titian. It suggests his attachment to the wider populace of Venice, as also expressed in his adopted nickname. But in his late self-portraits, Tintoretto challenges more widely the materialistic values of his native city, and forcefully re-emphasises the supra-cultural origins of his artistic genius. The chapter ends with a further discussion of the difficulty this anti-worldly and quasi-sacred self-image presented for his followers and for those keen to make Tintoretto stand as the climactic father figure in a glorious Venetian tradition of painting.

Beyond Rivalry: Tintoretto and the Challenge of Composition
Giorgio Tagliaferro

Our knowledge of Tintoretto’s working procedures has greatly improved over the past twenty years. Nonetheless, the scholarly conversation on his artistic personality and painting technique centres on a set of common assumptions derived from literary sources whose reliability is not always clearly established. In particular, Tintoretto’s competitive market strategies as well as his energetic handling of the brush and frantic inventiveness have been increasingly associated with narratives of rivalry and antagonism with other Venetian painters, especially Titian. This chapter suggests alternative ways to frame Tintoretto’s artistic purposes by shifting focus towards artistic challenge. It is argued that Jacopo’s ceaseless search for original solutions was not dictated by a prescriptive model of perfection combining Michelangelo’s disegno and Titian’s colorito or by hostility against competitors, as often reiterated, but was boosted by an ambitious attempt to exert full control over the picture plane. The chapter seeks to demonstrate that Tintoretto’s operative modes and approach to painting tally in essence with fundamental ideas on which sixteenth-century theorists and practitioners built their perception of a modern manner of painting, whose cardinal principles are encapsulated by a novel interest in pictorial composition, which was based on a growing appreciation of the tension between the fictive pictorial space and the flat plane of the picture.

Problems in Tintoretto – mostly Graphic
Roland Krischel

Important aspects of Tintoretto’s working practice remain obscured by long-living legends. Recently, doubts have been formulated concerning his compositional use of box-like stages à la Poussin. Instead, his architectural models probably represented existing spaces to be decorated. According to Ridolfi, the grids in many of Tintoretto’s figure drawings not only served for enlarged transfer but also for establishing proportion and foreshortening. The close adherence of these grids to the drawn figures, though, can easily be explained by Jacopo’s practice to use partial squaring in his paintings. Marking the vertical axis and seating level of a figure or its extension from head to feet, his grids made the enlarged projection onto canvas easier – especially for assistants. New insight into Jacopo’s working fields and methods is gained from some little known marginal drawings. His highly individual graphic formula for conveying volume points to a knowledge of ship design based on ‘corbe’ (or frames).

Tintoretto and Drawing “dal vivo” in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Catherine Whistler

The long-held view that Tintoretto had little regard for drawing or disegno, reiterated in the literary discourse from the time of Giorgio Vasari, has been considerably revised in recent scholarship. The quantity of surviving material, albeit providing only a partial view of the range of Jacopo’s interests, testifies to the importance given to drawing in the Tintoretto studio in terms of observation, inventiveness, design processes and education. How can we evaluate the significance of studying the body through drawing in Tintoretto’s practice? This paper will focus in particular on drawing from the life and from sculptural models, importantly placing Jacopo’s interests in the wider context of artistic practice in sixteenth-century Venice, from Titian to Palma Giovane. It will raise questions on the hybrid character of drawing from life in this period, and will argue for Tintoretto’s pursuit of persuasive ‘dal vivo’ effects.

Bleeding Paper: The Use of Red Oil Paint in Drawings from Tintoretto’s Workshop
Maria Aresin

Amongst the drawings by Tintoretto and his workshop there are some twenty sheets showing figure studies on the recto and tracings made with reddish brown oil paint of the same figure on the verso. Sometimes these tracings appear again on the recto, covering the black chalk contour lines of the body shapes with pasty paint. Only the outlines are rendered or copied as if to create a plain stencil of the figures position without highlighting or adding also the inner body volumes or muscles. It seems that no other artist at the time in Venice used this particular technique. Until now, its function has been unclear, particularly because although these drawings are kept in famous drawing collections (Uffizi, Morgan Library, Museo Capodimonte), they have yet to be studied. This paper will shed light on Tintoretto’s use of oil paint on blue or buff brown paper as a method of mirroring the figure to create new possibilities and adapt the postures to many paintings at the same time, thus recycling his figure studies for different purposes. Understanding that process of tracing, reversing and adapting the figure helps to better understand the process of preparing a painting in the Tintoretto workshop.

Artistic Liberty and Its Limits: Tintoretto’s Temptation of Saint Anthony Abbot for Antonio Milledonne
Marie-Louise Lillywhite

Many of Tintoretto’s most memorable religious paintings were produced after the closure of the Council of Trent in 1563, in a period that theoretically heralded a new climate of artistic control and censorship. Although it is often unclear to what extent artists and patrons were aware of the Council’s decrees, Ridolfi tell us that Tintoretto produced a painting of the assembly, and he worked directly for patrons who had been present in Trent. One of these was Antonio Milledonne, whose little-studied Historia del concilio di trento provided an early Venetian account of the Council, and provided accurate information pertaining to the decrees on sacred images. Through an analysis of Tintoretto’s altarpiece of The Temptation of Saint Anthony in the church of San Trovaso that was produced for Milledonne in ca. 1577, this paper explores the tension between regulations and reality, censorship and creativity, to demonstrate how Venetian artists like Tintoretto shrewdly negotiated this climate. Rather than a narrow focus on the repression of artistic freedom in this period, I argue that visual reform was a more nuanced process than has usually been recognised, and that artists like Tintoretto forged highly original visual solutions that tested the boundaries of what was and was not acceptable in late sixteenth-century Venice.

Portrait of a Lady Revisited: Veronica Franco, Domenico Tintoretto, and the Reappropriation of Venus
Rose Z. King

This essay is the first study to focus solely on a late sixteenth-century Venetian painting, variously ascribed to Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto, respectively, of a lavishly attired and partially undressed woman. To date, this painting and its subject matter have been treated rather perfunctorily, yet its sitter’s equivocal presentation offers a stimulating opportunity to question whether or not it is a portrait in the conventional sense or something altogether more unorthodox. This essay will identify the subject as the poet-courtesan Veronica Franco, painted by a young Domenico Tintoretto in the early 1580s. To better understand and clarify aspects of the painting’s provenance, attribution, and connection to Franco, it will utilise Franco’s own writing as well as previously unpublished materials, including the painting’s X-radiograph and object file correspondences. To further substantiate this identification, particular attention will be paid to Franco’s pose and accessories, which allude to her self-constructed association with the goddess Venus.

The Allure of Flaws: Domenico Tintoretto, Venetian Academies, and the Crisis of the Cinquecento Tradition
Gabriele Matino

In the opening lines of Domenico Tintoretto’s biography, Carlo Ridolfi criticises the artist for having disdained ‘to continue on the true path, [and] strayed from his father’s manner.’To shed light on why Domenico embarked upon this new artistic path, this essay reassesses the artist’s late graphic oeuvre, the ingenuity of which, I argue, lies in its startlingly naturalistic investigations of non-canonical female forms. In considering Domenico’s visual renegotiation of traditional ideas about beauty, this essay suggests tracing the origins to the literary experiments taking place in Venice at the turn of the seventeenth century. I argue that Domenico’s attendance at literary gatherings and his association with some of the greatest intellectuals of the time, including Celio Magno, Guido Casoni, and Giambattista Marino, encouraged him to explore new modes of empirical naturalism that radically broke with Cinquecento artistic tradition.

Commemorating Tintoretto? On the Nature of Anniversaries and the Task of Scholarship
Kamini Vellodi

The 500th anniversary of Tintoretto’s birth has been an occasion for commemoration. What function does commemoration have for our thinking of Tintoretto and art history’s self-reflection and practice? Are we celebrating the birth of a canonical figure, affirming a discourse of ‘great masters’ and artist biographies? Are we demonstrating our veneration of age and historical continuity? How do scholarship’s acts of commemoration relate to and implicate the object commemorated? I explore such questions, starting with a consideration of the dual temporality of the anniversary – its character both as a singular occurrence (a 500th anniversary will never happen again) and recurrent (there will be future anniversaries). I draw upon the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the nature of thought, event and the ontology of the artwork to rethink the concept of the anniversary and the provocation posed by the versus (“again; turned”) of its name.

Bibliography

Abstracts

Contributors

Index of Names

Index of Places and Collections