1512-1594.
"It might almost be said that vice is the virtue of the Venetian school,
because it rests its prerogative on despatch in execution, and
therefore is proud of Tintoretto, who had no other merit."[148] Such, in
speaking of the great genius before us, is the equally rash, ignorant,
unphilosophic verdict of a man exclusively dubbed "The Philosophic
Painter."
G. Robusti of Venice was the son of a dyer, who left him that byname as
an heir-loom.[149] He entered the school of Tiziano when yet a boy; but
he, soon discovering in the daring spirit of his nursling the symptoms
of a genius which threatened future rivalship to his own powers, with
that suspicious meanness which marks his character as an artist, after a
short interval, ordered his head pupil, Girolamo Dante, to dismiss the
boy; but as envy generally defeats its own designs, the uncourteous
dismissal, instead of dispiriting, roused the energies of the heroic
stripling, who, after some meditation on his future course, and
comparing his master's superiority in _colour_ with his defects in
_form_, resolved to surpass him by an union of both: the method best
suited to accomplish this he fancied to find in an intense study of
Michael Angelo's style, and boldly announced his plan by writing on the
door of his study, THE DESIGN OF M. ANGELO, AND THE COLOUR OF TIZIAN.
But neither form nor colour alone could satisfy his eye; the
uninterrupted habit of nocturnal study discovered to him what Venice had
not yet seen, not even in Giorgione, if we may form an opinion from what
remains of him--the powers of that ideal chiaroscuro which gave motion
to action, raised the charms of light, and balanced or invigorated
effect by dark and lucid masses opposed to each other.
The first essays of this complicated system, in single figures, are
probably the frescoes of the palace Gussoni;[150] and in numerous
composition, the Last Judgement, and its counterpart, the Adoration of
the Golden Calf, in the church of Sta. Maria dell' Orfo.
It is evident that the spirit of Michael Angelo domineered over the
fancy of Tintoretto in the arrangement of the Last Judgement, though not
over its design; but grant some indulgence to that, and the storm in
which the whole fluctuates, the awful division of light and darkness
into enormous masses, the living motion of the agents, notwithstanding
their frequent aberrations from their centre of gravity,[151] and the
harmony that rules the whirlwind of that tremendous moment, must for
ever place it among the most astonishing productions of art. Its
sublimity as a whole triumphs even over the hypercriticisms of Vasari,
who thus describes it:--"Tintoretto has painted the Last Judgement with
an extravagant invention, which, indeed, has something awful and
terrible, inasmuch as he has united in groups a multitudinous assemblage
of figures of each sex and every age, interspersed with distant views of
the blessed and condemned souls. You see likewise the boat of Charon,
but in a manner as novel and uncommon as highly interesting. Had this
fantastic conception been executed with a correct and regular design,
had the painter estimated its individual parts with the attention which
he bestowed on the whole, so expressive of the confusion and the tumult
of that day, it would be the most admirable of pictures. Hence he who
casts his eye only on the whole, remains astonished, whilst to him who
examines the parts it appears to have been painted in jest."
In the Adoration of the Golden Calf, the counterpart in size of the Last
Judgement, Tintoretto has given full reins to his invention; and here,
as in the former, though their scanty width does not very amicably
correspond with their height, which is fifty feet, he has filled the
whole so dexterously that the dimension appears to be the result of the
composition. Here too, as in the Transfiguration of Raffaelle, some
short-sighted sophist may pretend to discover two separate subjects and
a double action; for Moses receives the tables of the decalogue in the
upper part, whilst the idolatrous ceremony occupies the lower; but the
unity of the subject may be proved by the same argument which defended
and justified the choice of Sanzio. Both actions are not only the
offspring of the same moment, but so essentially relate to each other
that, by omitting either, neither could with sufficient evidence have
told the story. Who can pretend to assert, that the artist who has found
the secret of representing together two inseparable moments of an event
divided only by place, has impaired the unity of the subject?
Nowhere, however, does the genius of Tintoretto flash more irresistibly
than in the Schools of S. Marco and S. Rocco, where the greater part of
the former and almost the whole of the latter are his work, and exhibit
in numerous specimens, and on the largest scale, every excellence and
every fault that exalts or debases his pencil: equal sublimity and
extravagance of conception; purity of style and ruthless manner;
bravura of hand with mental dereliction; celestial or palpitating hues
tacked to clayey, raw, or frigid masses; a despotism of chiaroscuro
which sometimes exalts, sometimes eclipses, often absorbs subject and
actors. Such is the catalogue of beauties and defects which characterize
the Slave delivered by St. Marc; the Body of the Saint landed; the
Visitation of the Virgin; the Massacre of the Innocents; Christ tempted
in the Desert; the Miraculous Feeding of the Crowd; the Resurrection of
the Saviour; and though last, first, that prodigy which in itself sums
up the whole of Tintoretto, and by its anomaly equals or surpasses the
most legitimate offsprings of art, the Crucifixion.[152]
It is singular that the most finished and best preserved work of
Tintoretto should be one which he had least time allowed him to
terminate--the Apotheosis of S. Rocco in the principal ceiling-piece of
the Schola, conceived, executed, and presented, instead of the sketch
which he had been commissioned with the rest of the concurrent artists
to produce for the examination of the fraternity: a work which equally
strikes by loftiness of conception, a style of design as correct as
bold, and a suavity of colour which entrances the eye. Though
constructed on the principles of that _sotto in su_, then ruling the
platfonds and cupolas of upper Italy, unknown to or rejected by M.
Angelo, its figures recede more gradually, yet with more evidence, than
the groups of Correggio, whose ostentatious foreshortenings generally
sacrifice the actor to his posture.
That Tintoretto acquired, during his stay with or after his dismissal
from the study of Tiziano's principles, the power of representing the
surface and the texture of bodily substance with a truth bordering on
illusion, is proved with more irresistible because more copious
evidence, in the picture of the Angelic Salutation; though it cannot be
denied that the admiration due to the magic touch of the paraphernalia
is extorted at the expense of the essential parts: Gabriel and Maria are
little more than foils of her husband's tools; for their display, the
artist's caprice has turned the solemn approach of the awful messenger
into boisterous irruption, the silent recess of the mysterious mother
into a public dismantled shed, and herself into a vulgar female. Nowhere
would the superiority of refined over vulgar art, of taste and judgment
over unbridled fancy, have appeared more irresistibly than in the
sopraporta by Tiziano on the same subject and in the same place, had
that exquisite master been inspired more by the sanctity of the subject
than the lures of courtly or the ostentatious bigotry of monastic
devotion. If Maria was to be rescued from the brutal hand that had
travestied her to the mate of a common labourer, it was not to be
transformed to a young abbess, elegantly devout, submitting to
canonization, amongst her delicate lambs; if the angel was not to rush
through a shattered casement on a timid female with a whirlwind's blast,
the waving grace and calm dignity of his gesture and attitude, ought to
have been above the assistance of theatrical ornament; nor should
Palladio have been consulted to construct classic avenues for the humble
abode of pious meditation. It must however be owned that we become
reconciled to this mass of factitious embellishments by a tone which
seems to have been inspired by Piety itself; the message whispers in a
celestial atmosphere,
Θειη ἀμφεχυτ' ὀμφη----
and so forcibly appears its magic effect to have influenced Tintoretto
himself, ever ready to rush from one extreme to another, that he
imitated it in the Annunciata of the Arimani Palace:[153] not without
success, but far below the mannerless unambitious purity of tone that
pervades the effusion of his master, and of which he himself gave a
blazing proof in the Resurrection of the Saviour,--a work in which
sublimity of conception, beauty and dignity of form, velocity and
propriety of motion, irresistible flash, mellowness and freshness of
colour, tones inspired by the subject, and magic chiaroscuro, less for
"mastery strive," than relieve each other and entrance the absorbed eye.