ART
Tintoretto in Venice
VENICE continues its series of exhibitions in the Ca Pesaro, which opened two years ago with Titian, by presenting this year a magnificent display of the works of Tintoretto. In the skill with which the paintings have been chosen and displayed this show is at least the equal- of itstpredecessor ; and it so far succeeds that it makes Tintoretto appear as an artist worthy to stand comparison with Titian.
Unlike most of his contemporaries in Venice, Tintoretto docs not derive primarily from the Giorgionesque tradition. His models were more painters of a less sensuous kind, standing apart from this dominant trend, such as Bonifazio. From them he learnt an interest in the characteristic rather than the physically beautiful, and in the picturesque rather than the reflective aspects of landscape. That is to say, Tintoretto did not start as a follower of the High Renaissance tradition in Venice, but sprang rather from a sideline in which many elements of Gothic and Northern influence survived. E'en in such an intensely Venetian work of the early period as the Miracle of St. Mark the emphasis is laid on the sur- prising quality of the incident, rather than on any beauty of pure _form or colour. With this approach it was not sur- prising that Tintoretto should have been easily attracted by the Mannerism which was then developing in central Italy, and which was in so many ways a return from Renaissance principles towards those of the Gothic. For a time we find Tintoretto engaged in experiments in a kind of Mannerism which seems to be derived from Florence, qualified always by a Venetian conception of colour. In his later paintings Tintoretto modifies this treatment. For his classical themes he adopts a more restrained but less affected manner, as in the four panels from the Ducal Palace, which are only Mannerist at all in that they defy every law of Renaissance composition. But it is in the field of religious painting that the great achievements of his later years lie. For a time, about the middle of his life, Tintoretto seems to come much more closely under the influence of Titian—in general not of the early Titian, but of the Titian of the 'forties. This is perhaps the most pedestrian period of Tintoretto's life, when he is neither amusingly affected nor grandly imaginative, as in the later works. But without the enriching of technique and palette which is due to the influence of Titian he could not have expressed so fully the vital discoveries which make of his last period one of the essential steps in the development of the Baroque.
• In these last paintings the artist is evidently affected by the disturbed atmosphere which accompanied the Counter-Reformation, and which is expressed in the religious intensity of the paintings. But Tintoretto's conception of religious painting is not like that of the Roman painters of the period, dry and _calculated to convey a doctrinal truth or to assert the power of the papacy. It is emotional and designed to express the dramatic intensity, not the symbolical significance, of an event. But this statement again needs qualification. For Titian, in his later paintings, also aims at rendering the dramatic value of the incidents which he depicts. But in his case the intention is different, for he is intent only on the human values involved. Tintoretto sees first and foremost the miracu- lous in what he shows. How nightmarishly intense is the Last Supper from San Giorgio, with its glowing clouds of swinging angels, its unreal colours, and its undefined space ! But something like this too had been done by other Mannerists. What was new appears most clearly in the Agony in the Garden, a painting which is half-way between the versions of the scene by Titian , and El Greco. The iconography is taken straight from the former, but Tintoretto has treated it with quite new emotion. Titian's Christ kneels in prayer to God ; Tintoretto's is shown swooning, with eyes closed, and with drops of blood dripping from His forehead. Even Greco hardly makes an advance on this in intensity, except by compositional devices and vividness of colour. Tintoretto has already dis- covered all the atmosphere of ecstasy which was to be the stock- in-trade of every Baroque artist. The Romans did much towards the evolution of the Baroque, but it had to be a northerner, a member of a school which had never known Raphael or Masaccio, who supplied just this element of the sensuous by which religious emotion could be made palatable
and accessible to a wide public. ANTHONY BLUNT.
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