Jacopo Tintoretto
c. 1518 - 1594
Jacopo Tintoretto was, along with Titian (Venetian, 1488/1490 - 1576) and Veronese (Venetian, 1528 - 1588), one of the three giants of 16th-century Venetian painting. No one else came close to matching the sheer number of pictures he provided for Venice's churches, confraternities, government buildings, and private palaces. His paintings are notable for their free, painterly technique (sometimes described as "drawing in paint"), their dynamism, and their unconventional approaches to the depiction of narrative scenes, particularly biblical events. His bold brushwork, which emphasizes strong contours as it exploits and energizes the canvas surface, provided inspiration to later artists from El Greco (Greek, 1541 - 1614) and Sir Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577 - 1640) to French painters of the romantic period to our own day. A great painter of religious subjects-and a great storyteller-he depicted the timeless narratives of Christian art with verve, drama, and touches of the unexpected. His approach was visionary, sometimes even hallucinatory, yet always grounded in everyday experience. A strong sympathy for the poor and downtrodden pervades his work, anticipating the sensibilities of painters such as Caravaggio (Roman, 1571 - 1610) and Diego Velázquez (Spanish, 1599 - 1660).
Throughout his career, Tintoretto was the subject of controversy. While he was praised for his power and inventiveness, detractors often complained that his paintings looked unfinished. Typical is the grudging admiration accorded him by Giorgio Vasari (Florentine, 1511 - 1574), who recognized his extraordinary talent and creative imagination but fundamentally disapproved of his failure to follow the rules, and in particular of his rapid technique: "In the matter of painting [Tintoretto is] swift, resolute, fantastic, and extravagant, and the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced, as may be seen from all his works and from the fantastic compositions of his scenes, executed by him in a fashion of his own and contrary to the use of other painters. Indeed, he has surpassed even the limits of extravagance with the new and fanciful inventions and the strange vagaries of his intellect, working at haphazard and without design, as if to prove that art is but a jest."
Text © National Gallery of Art, 2024
