We have no authentic biography of Tintoret. The men of his epoch
hungered for fame, but it was by the splendor of their genius, and not
by the details of their personal lives, that they hoped to be known to
posterity. The days of judicious Boswells and injudicious Froudes had
not then come to pass; so that we are now as ignorant of the lives of
the painters of the great school which flourished at Venice during the
sixteenth century as of the lives of that group of poets who flourished
in England during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Nevertheless,
Providence sees to it that nothing essential be lost; and, in the
absence of memoirs, the masterpiece itself becomes a memoir for those
who have insight. In art, works which proceed from the soul, and not
from the skill, are truthful witnesses to the character of the artist.
“For by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionably the
maker of them is seen.” It is not wholly to be regretted, therefore,
that the meagreness of our information concerning Tintoret compels us
to study his paintings the more earnestly. The lives of artists are
generally scanty in those adventures and dramatic incidents which make
entertaining biographies. Men of action express their character in
deeds: poems, statues, paintings, are the deeds of artists. Blot out a
few pages of history, and what remains of Hannibal or Scipio? But we
should know much about Michael Angelo or Raphael from their paintings,
had no written word about either come down to us.
The year of Tintoret’s birth is variously stated as 1512 and 1518.
Even his name has been a cause of dispute to antiquaries; but since he
was content to call and sign himself Jacopo (or Giacomo) Robusti, we
may accept this as correct. His father was a dyer of silk (_tintore_),
and as the boy early helped at that trade he got the nickname _il
tintoretto_, “the little dyer.” Vasari, also born in 1512, is the only
contemporary who furnishes an account of Tintoret. Unsatisfactory
and well-nigh ridiculous it is, if we remember that by 1574, when
Vasari died, Tintoret had already produced many of his masterpieces.
Yet the Florentine painter-historian did not accord to him so much
as a separate chapter in his “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,”
but inserted his few pages of criticism and gossip, as if by an
afterthought, in the sketch of the forgotten Battista Franco. Since
much that has been subsequently written about Tintoret is merely a
repetition of Vasari’s shallow opinions, which created a mythical
Tintoret, just as English reviewers created a mythical “Johnny Keats,”
long believed to be the real Keats, I quote a few sentences from Vasari.
“There still lives in Venice,” he says, “a painter called Jacopo
Tintoretto, who has amused himself with all accomplishments, and
particularly with playing music and several instruments, and is,
besides, pleasing in all his actions; but in matters of painting he
is extravagant, full of caprice, dashing, and resolute, the most
terrible brain that painting ever had, as you may see in all his works,
and in his compositions of fantastic subjects, done by him diversely
and contrary to the custom of other painters. Nay, he has capped
extravagance with the novel and whimsical inventions and odd devices of
his intellect, which he has used haphazard and without design, as if to
show that this art is a trifle.... And because in his youth he showed
himself in many fair works of great judgment, if he had recognized the
great endowment which he received from nature, and had fortified it
with study and judgment, as those have done who have followed the fine
manner of his elders, and if he had not (as he has done) cut loose
from practiced rules, he would have been one of the greatest painters
that ever Venice had; yet, for all this, we would not deny that he
is a proud and good painter, with an alert, capricious, and refined
spirit.”[6]
[6] Vasari’s condescending estimate of Tintoret may remind some readers
of Voltaire’s patronizing estimate of Shakespeare: “It seems as though
nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest conceivable
strength and grandeur with whatever witless vulgarity can devise
that is lowest and most detestable;” and much more of the same kind
about the “intoxicated barbarian,” which will seem pitiful or amusing
according to the humor of the reader.
Evidently, the originality of this “terrible” Tintoret could not be
understood by Vasari, who imagined that he followed successfully the
fine manner of his elders in the academic proprieties. But there is no
hint that Tintoret heeded this generous advice. Perhaps it came too
late,--at threescore years one’s character and methods are no longer
plastic; perhaps it had been too often reiterated, for Tintoret had
been assured from his youth up that, if he would only be instructed
by his fellow-artists, he might hope to become a great painter like
them. But, from the first glimpse we get of this perverse Tintoret
to the last, one characteristic dominates all,--obedience to his own
genius. Censure, coaxing, fashion, envy, popularity, seem never to
have swerved him. Like every consummate genius, he drew his inspiration
directly from within. “Conform! conform! or be written down a fool!”
has always been the greeting of the world to the self-centred,
spirit-guided few. “Right or wrong, I cannot otherwise,” has been their
invariable reply.
By the time that Tintoret made his first essays in painting, the
Venetian school was the foremost in the world. The great Leonardo had
died in France, leaving behind him in Lombardy a company of pupils who
were rapidly enslaved by a graceless mannerism. Even earlier than this,
the best talents of Umbria had wandered into feeble eccentricities,
or had been absorbed by Raphael’s large humanism. Raphael himself was
dead, at the height of his popularity and in the prime of his powers,
and his disciples were hurrying along the road of imitation into the
desert of formalism. Michael Angelo alone survived in central Italy,
a Titan too colossal, too individual, to be a schoolmaster, although
there were many of the younger brood (Vasari among them) who called
him _Maestro_, and fancied that the grimaces and contortions they drew
sprang from force and grandeur such as his. But in Venice painting
was flourishing; there it had the exuberance and the strength, the
joyousness and the splendor, of an art approaching its meridian. John
Bellini, the eldest of the great Venetians, had died; but not before
there had issued from his studio a wonderful band of disciples, some of
whom were destined to surpass him. Giorgione, one of these, had been
cut off in his thirty-fourth year, having barely had time to give to
the world a few handsels of his genius. The fame of Titian had risen
to that height where it has ever since held its station. A troop of
lesser men--lesser in comparison with him--were embellishing Venice, or
carrying the magic of her art to other parts of Italy.
The tradition runs that the boy Tintoret amused himself by drawing
charcoal figures on the wall, then coloring them with his father’s
dyes: whence his parents were persuaded that he was born to be a
painter. Accordingly, his father got permission for him to work in
Titian’s studio, the privilege most coveted by every apprentice of the
time. His stay there was brief, however; hardly above ten days, if the
legend be true which tells how Titian returned one day and saw some
strange sketches, and how, learning that Tintoret had made them, he
bade another pupil send him away. Some say that Titian already foresaw
a rival in the youthful draughtsman; others, that the figures were
in a style so contrary to the master’s that he discerned no good in
them, and judged that it would be useless for Tintoret to pursue an
art in which he could never excel. Let the dyer’s son go back to his
vats: there he could at least earn a livelihood. We are loth to believe
that Titian, whose reputation was established, could have been moved
by jealousy of a mere novice: we must remember, nevertheless, that
even when Tintoret had come to maturity, and was reckoned among the
leading painters of Venice, Titian treated him coldly, and apparently
thwarted and disparaged him. Few artists, indeed, have risen quite
above the marsh-mists of jealousy. Their ambition regards fame as
a fixed quantity, and, like Goldsmith, they look upon any one who
acquires a part of this treasure as having diminished the amount they
can appropriate for themselves. But in Tintoret’s great soul envy could
find no place. “Enmities he has none,” as Emerson says of Goethe.
“Enemy of him you may be: if so, you shall teach him aught which your
good-will cannot, were it only what experience will accrue from your
ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He cannot hate
anybody; his time is worth too much.”
Under whom Tintoret studied, after being thrust off by Titian, we are
not told. Probably he had no acknowledged preceptor except himself.
Already his aim was at the highest. On the wall of his studio he
blazoned the motto, “_The drawing of Michael Angelo and the coloring
of Titian_.” To blend the excellence of each in a supreme unity,--that
was his ambition. Titian might shut him out from personal instruction,
but Titian’s works in the churches and palaces were within reach.
Tintoret studied them, copied them, and conjured from them the secret
their master wished to hide. Having procured casts of Michael Angelo’s
statues in the Medicean Chapel at Florence, he made drawings of them
in every position. Far into the night he worked by lamplight, watching
the play of light and shade, the outlines and the relief. He drew also
from living models, and learned anatomy by dissecting corpses. He
invented “little figures of wax and of clay, clothing them with bits of
cloth, examining accurately, by the folds of the dresses, the position
of the limbs; and these models he distributed among little houses and
perspectives composed of planks and cardboard, and he put lights in the
windows.” From the rafters he suspended other manikins, and thereby
learned the foreshortening proper to figures painted on ceilings and
on high places. So indefatigable, so careful, was this man, who is
known to posterity as “the thunderbolt of painters”! In his prime, he
astonished all by his power of elaborating his ideas at a speed at
which few masters can even sketch; but that power was nourished by his
infinite painstaking in those years of obscurity.
Wherever Tintoret might learn, thither he went. Now we hear of him
working with the masons at Cittadella; now taking his seat on the bench
of the journeymen painters in St. Mark’s Place; now watching some
illustrious master decorating the façade of a palace. No commission was
too humble for him: who knows how many signboards he may have furnished
in his ’prentice days? His first recorded works were two portraits,--of
himself holding a bas-relief in his hand, and of his brother playing a
cithern. As the custom then was, he exhibited these in the Merceria,
that narrow lane of shops which leads from St. Mark’s to the Rialto.
What the latest novel or yesterday’s political speech is to us, that
was a new picture to the Venetians. Their innate sense of color and
beauty and their familiarity with the best works of art made them ready
critics. They knew whether the colors on a canvas were in harmony, as
the average Italian of to-day can tell whether a singer keeps the key,
and doubtless they were vivacious in their discussions. Tintoret’s
portraits attracted attention. They were painted with nocturnal lights
and shadows, “in so terrible a manner that they amazed every one,” even
to the degree of suggesting to one beholder the following epigram:
“Si Tinctorectus noctis sic lucet in umbris,
Exorto faciet quid radiante die?”[7]
[7] If Tintoret shines thus in the shades of night, what will he do
when radiant day has risen?
Soon after, he displayed on the Rialto bridge another picture, by
which the surprise already excited was increased, and he began
thenceforward to get employment in the smaller churches and convents.
Important commissions which brought wealth and honors were reserved
for Titian and a few favorites; but Tintoret rejected no offer. Only
let him express those ideas swarming in his imagination: he asked no
further recompense. He seems to have been early noted for the practice
of taking no pay at all, or only enough to provide his paints and
canvas,--a practice which brought upon him the abuse of his fellows,
who cried out that he would ruin their profession. But there was then
no law to prohibit artist or artisan from working for any price he
chose, and Tintoret, as usual, took his own course.
At last a great opportunity offered. On each side of the high altar of
the Church of Sta. Maria dell’ Orto was a bare space, nearly fifty feet
high and fifteen or twenty feet broad. “Let me paint you two pictures,”
said Tintoret to the friars, who laughed at the extravagant proposal.
“A whole year’s income would not suffice for such an undertaking,”
they replied. “You shall have no expense but for the canvas and
colors,” said Tintoret. “I shall charge nothing for my work.” And on
these terms he executed “The Last Judgment” and “The Worship of the
Golden Calf.” The creator of those masterpieces could no longer be
ignored. Here was a power, a variety, which hostility and envy could
not gainsay: they must note, though they refused to admire. It was in
1546, or thereabouts, that Tintoret uttered this challenge. In a little
while he had orders for four pictures for the School of St. Mark; one
of which, “St. Mark Freeing a Fugitive Slave,” soon became popular, and
has continued so. “Here is coloring as rich as Titian’s, and energy as
daring as Michael Angelo’s!” visitors still exclaim. Other commissions
followed, until there came that which the Venetian prized above all
others,--an order to paint for the Ducal Palace.
As the patriotic Briton aspires to a monument in Westminster Abbey, as
the Florentine covets a memorial in Santa Croce, so the Venetian artist
coveted for his works a place in the Palace of the Doges. That was his
Temple of Fame. His dream, however, soared beyond the gratification of
personal ambition: he desired that through him the glory and beauty of
Venice might be enhanced and immortalized. This devotion to the ideal
of a city, this true patriotism, has unfortunately almost disappeared
from the earth. The very conception of it is now unintelligible to
most persons. The city where you live--New York, Boston, London--you
value in proportion as it affords advantages for your business, objects
for your comfort and amusement; but you quit it without compunction
if taxes be lower and trade brisker elsewhere. You are interested in
its affairs just in so far as they affect your own. When you build
a dwelling or a factory, you do not inquire whether it will improve
or injure your neighbor’s property, much less whether it will be
an ornament to the city; you need not even abate a nuisance until
compelled to do so by the law.
But to the noble-minded Venetian, his city was not merely a
convenience: it was a personality. Venezia was a spiritual patroness,
a goddess who presided over the destiny of the State; he and every one
of his fellow-citizens shared the honor and blessing of her protection.
She had crowned with prosperity the energy and piety, the rectitude
and justice, of his ancestors through many centuries. Every act of his
had more than a personal, more even than a human, bearing. _How would
it affect her?_--that was his test. He could do nothing unto himself
alone; for good or for ill, what he did reacted upon the community,
upon the ideal Venezia. The outward city--the churches, palaces, and
dwellings--was but the garment and visible expression of that ideal
city. Venezia had blessed him, and he was grateful; she was beautiful,
and he loved her. His gratitude impelled him to deeds worthy of her
protection; his love blossomed in gifts that should increase her beauty.
This reverence and devotion have, as I remarked, vanished from among
men; yet in this ideal beams the conception of the true commonwealth.
Observe that those three cities which held such an ideal before them
have bequeathed to us the most precious works of beauty. Athens,
Florence, Venice,--these are the Graces among the cities. At Karnak,
at Constantinople, at Rome, at Paris, you will behold stupendous ruins
or imposing monuments commemorating the pride and power of individual
Pharaohs, Sultans, Cæsars, Popes, and Napoleons, but you will not find
the spirit which was worshiped by the beautifying of the Acropolis, and
of republican Florence, and of Venice. In which modern city will the
most diligent search discover it?
Tintoret, then, had at last earned the privilege of consecrating
his genius to Venezia. His first work for her seems to have been a
portrait of the reigning Doge.[8] Then he painted two historical
subjects,--“Frederick Barbarossa being crowned by Pope Adrian,” and
“Pope Alexander III excommunicating Frederick Barbarossa;” and “The
Last Judgment,” destroyed by the fire of 1557. Not long thereafter
began his employment by the brothers of the confraternity of San Rocco.
For their church, about 1560, he painted two scenes in the life of St.
Roch, and then he joined in competition for a ceiling painting for
the Salla dell’ Albergo in the School itself. The brothers called for
designs, and upon the appointed day Paul Veronese, Andrea Schiavone,
Giuseppe Salviati, and Federigo Zuccaro submitted theirs. But Tintoret
had outsped them, and when his design was asked for he caused a screen
to be removed from the ceiling, and lo! there was a finished picture
of the specified subject. Brothers and competitors were astonished,
and not greatly pleased. “We asked for sketches,” said the former.
“That is the way I make my sketches,” replied Tintoret. They demurred;
but Tintoret presented the picture to the School, one of whose rules
made it obligatory that all gifts should be accepted. The displeasure
of the confraternity soon passed away, and Tintoret was commissioned
to furnish whatever paintings should be required in future. An annual
salary of one hundred ducats was bestowed upon him, in return for which
he was to give at least one painting a year. Generously did he fulfil
the contract; for at his death the School possessed more than sixty
of his works, for which he had been paid but twenty-four hundred and
forty-seven ducats.
[8] It is interesting to know that the price regularly paid to Titian
and Tintoret for state portraits was twenty-five ducats (about
thirty-one dollars). Painters who have not a hundredth part of the
genius of either Titian or Tintoret now receive one hundred times that
sum.
In 1577 a fire in the Ducal Palace destroyed many of the paintings,
and when the edifice was restored the government looked for artists to
replace them. Titian being dead, his opposition had no longer to be
overcome; yet even now Tintoret had to compete with men of inferior
powers, but of stronger influence. Nevertheless, to him and Paul
Veronese was assigned the lion’s share of the undertaking, and for ten
years those two men labored side by side, in noble rivalry, to eternize
the beauty and the glory of Venice. In 1588, owing to the death of Paul
Veronese, who with Francesco Bassano had been commissioned to paint a
“Paradise” in the Hall of the Grand Council, the work was transferred
to Tintoret, who devoted to it the last six years of his life, and left
in it the highest expression not only of his genius, but of Italian
painting.[9] Old age robbed him of none of his energy, but added
sublimity to his imagination, and interfused serenity and mellowness
throughout his work. Still teeming with plans, he died of a gastric
trouble, after a fortnight’s illness, on the 31st of May, 1594.[10]
[9] Has any one remarked that when Tintoret was painting the
“Paradise,” Cervantes, Spain’s spokesman before the nations, Montaigne,
the largest figure in French literature, and Shakespeare, paragon not
of England only, but of the world, were his contemporaries? Those four
might have met in his studio; and Science might have furnished three
peerless representatives,--Bacon, Galileo, and Kepler.
[10] Tintoret is buried in the church of Santa Maria dell’ Orto.
With this clue, spun from the discursive records of Ridolfi (whose
_Meraviglie dell’ Arte_ was first published in 1648), we can pass
through the labyrinth of Tintoret’s career. There are, besides, several
anecdotes which help us to know the man’s personality better: if all
be not authentic, at least all agree in attributing to him certain
well-defined traits.
As a workman, as we have seen, Tintoret was indefatigable. His lifelong
yearning was not for praise, but for opportunity to work. Modesty he
had to a degree unrecorded of any other painter, although none seems
to have been more confident of his own powers.[11] Like Shakespeare,
he wrought his masterpieces swiftly, and left them to their fate,
because his imagination, like Shakespeare’s, was already on the
wing for higher quarry. There was in the man an inflexible dignity,
born of self-respect, which neither the allurements of popularity
nor the flattery of the great could bend. When invited by the Duke
of Mantua to go to that city and execute some paintings, Tintoret
replied that wherever he went his wife wished to accompany him; at
which the Duke bade him bring his wife and family, had them conveyed
to Mantua in a state barge, and entertained them at his palace “at
magnificent expense for many days.” He urged Tintoret to settle there;
but the Venetian could not be persuaded to renounce his allegiance
to Venice. He saw that titles would add nothing to his fame, and
refused an offer of knighthood from Henry III of France. Princes and
grandees and illustrious visitors to Venice went to his house; but
though he received them courteously, he sought no intimacy with them.
His time was too precious, his projects were too earnest, to allow
of aristocratic dissipation. He had a keen sense of humor, which
displayed itself now in some ready reply, now in genial conversation
with his familiars. Ridolfi relates that certain prelates and senators
who visited him whilst he was making sketches for the “Paradise” asked
him why he worked so hurriedly, whereas John Bellini and Titian had
been deliberate and painstaking. “The old masters,” said Tintoret, “had
not so many to bother them as I have.” At another time, at a gathering
of amateurs, a woman’s portrait by Titian was lauded. “That’s the way
to paint,” said one of the critics. Tintoret went home, took a sketch
by Titian and covered it with lampblack, painted a head in Titian’s
manner on the same canvas, and showed it at the next meeting of these
amateurs. “Ah, there’s a real Titian!” they all agreed. Tintoret rubbed
off the lampblack from the original sketch and said: “This, gentlemen,
is indeed by Titian; that which you have admired is mine. You see now
how authority and opinion prevail in criticism, and how few there are
who really understand painting.”
Pietro Aretino, that depraved adventurer and most successful
blackmailer in literature, was one of Titian’s intimates and partisans.
He wished, nevertheless, to have his portrait painted by Tintoret, who
was in no wise afraid of the scoundrel’s enmity, although most of the
prominent personages of the time quailed before it. Aretino being
posed, Tintoret furiously drew a hanger from under his coat. Aretino
was terrified lest he should be punished for his malicious tongue, and
cried out, “Jacopo, what are you about?” “I am only going to take your
measure,” said Tintoret complacently; and, measuring him from head to
foot, he added, “your height is just two and a half hangers.” Aretino’s
impudence returned. “You’re a great madman,” he said, “and always up to
your pranks.” But this grim hint sufficed; the rascal never after dared
to slander Tintoret, but, on the contrary, tried to ingratiate himself
into his friendship.
[11] Two instances are worthy of record. Having agreed to paint a large
historical picture for the Doges’ Palace, he said to the procurators,
“If any other shall, within the space of two years, paint a better
picture of this subject, you shall take his and reject Footnote: mine.”
At first his enemies spoke so censuringly of his “St. Mark Freeing
the Fugitive Slave” that the brethren hesitated whether to accept it;
whereupon Tintoret had it brought back to his studio. Afterwards the
brethren repented, begged for its return, and ordered three other
pictures.
In his home Tintoret enjoyed tranquillity. His wife, Faustina de’
Vescovi, was thrifty and dignified, and perhaps she was not a
little annoyed by the “unpracticalness” of her husband. According
to tradition, when he went out she tied up money for him in his
handkerchief, and bade him give an exact account of it on his return.
Having spent his afternoon and money with congenial spirits at some
rendezvous whose name, unlike that of the Mermaid, where Elizabethan
wits caroused, has been lost, he playfully assured Madonna Faustina
that her allowance had gone to help the poor. She was particular that
he should wear the dress of a Venetian citizen; but if he happened
to go abroad in rainy weather, she called out to him from an upper
window to come back and put on his old clothes. We have glimpses of him
passing to and fro in Venice with Marietta, his favorite daughter, a
painter of merit, whose early death saddened his later years.[12] Of
his other children, two daughters entered a nunnery; a third married
Casser, a German; his eldest son, Domenico, adopted his father’s
profession, and assisted him in his work; another son went to the bad,
and was cut off from an inheritance by his father’s will. In spite of
his habit of giving away pictures, or of charging a small price for
them, Tintoret bequeathed a comfortable fortune to his heirs.
[12] Marietta was born in 1560, and died in 1590.
A few of his precepts and suggestions concerning art have come down to
us through Ridolfi, who had them from Aliense, one of Tintoret’s pupils.
“The study of painting is arduous,” he used to say; “and to him who
advances farthest in it more difficulties appear, the sea grows ever
larger.”
“Students must never fail to profit by the example of the great
masters, Michael Angelo and Titian.”
“Nature is always the same; in painting, therefore, muscles must not be
varied by caprice.”
“In judging a picture, observe if, at the first examination, the eye
is satisfied, and if the author has obeyed the great principles of art;
as to the details, each will fall into error. Do not go immediately to
look at a new work, but wait till the darts of criticism have all been
shot, and men are accustomed to the sight.”
Being asked which are the most beautiful colors, he answered, “Black
and white; because the former gives force to figures by deepening the
shadows, the latter gives the relief.”
He insisted that only the experienced artist should draw from living
models, which lack, for the most part, grace and symmetrical forms.
“Fine colors,” he said, “are sold in the Rialto shops; but design is
got from the casket of genius, by hard study and long vigils, and is
therefore understood and practiced by but few.”
Odoardo Fialeti asked him what to study. “Drawing,” replied Tintoret.
Somewhat later, Fialeti sought further advice. “Drawing, and again
drawing,” Tintoret reiterated.
“Art must perfect nature,” was his guiding rule; and he instanced that
Greek artist who modeled an Aphrodite by selecting the best features of
the five most beautiful women he could find.
His studio was in the most retired part of his house. Few were admitted
to it, and they had to find their way thither up a dark staircase
and along dark passages, by the light of a candle. There he spent
most of his time,--a grave man ordinarily, as must ever be the case
with genius which ranges the utmost abysses and sublimities; at heart
a solitary man, so far as the absence of flesh-and-blood companions
constitutes solitude, but forever attended by the great associates of
his imagination. Laconic, too, in speech as with his brush; as when, in
reply to a long letter from his brother, he wrote simply, “Sir: no.”
But upon occasion--as that anecdote of Madonna Faustina’s allowance
shows--he indulged in conviviality; and he had the gift, peculiar to
a gentleman, of “being easy with persons of all ranks, and of putting
them at ease.” “With his friends he preserved great affability. He was
copious in fine sayings and witty hits, putting them forth with much
grace, but without sign of laughter; and when he deemed it opportune,
he knew also how to joke with the great.”
Tintoret’s genius was only partially acknowledged during his lifetime,
and his fame has suffered strange vicissitudes since his death. At
times he has been extolled with meaningless extravagance; oftener
condemned, after Vasari’s lukewarm fashion, or passed over without
mention. Not until Mr. Ruskin came and opened the eyes of the world
had Tintoret been adequately appreciated for those points of excellence
wherein he has neither rival nor second. He has suffered for the same
reasons that Shakespeare was long unesteemed in France: his works are
bold, very rapid, often unequal, not in the least to be measured by the
yardstick of conventionalism; he treats many new subjects, and the old
subjects he always treats in new fashion, thereby provoking formalists
to accuse him of wilful oddity or caprice; his reputation for swiftness
of execution was deemed by many presumptive evidence that he was
superficial; above all, his imagination was so rich and so powerful
that it required a cognate imagination to follow it.
Moreover, Tintoret was the last master of the great era of Italian
painting. After him came schools which did not rely upon originality,
but upon the inspiration of former masters. Pictures were but specimens
of technique, and the models chosen for imitation were naturally those
in which technique could be most easily reduced to rules. The public,
as well as the painters themselves, gradually lost the power of valuing
art as a _spiritual expression_. Word by word, sentence by sentence,
the great language of painting was forgotten, until at last it became
as a dead language. It was inevitable that Tintoret’s works, which had
not always been understood by his contemporaries, should baffle the
interpreters of art grammars and the pedagogues of technique.
Again, Tintoret’s pigments have suffered more than those of any other
master. The darker colors, in many cases, have become almost black; the
lighter have faded, and sometimes completely changed.[13] How far this
is due to an original defect in the paints, how far to exposure and
neglect, I cannot say. It must always be remembered that, as popular
canvases have been frequently varnished and restored, many Titians
and Raphaels are as fresh to-day as they were when they left the
easel. How much remains of the original painting is another question.
Directors of galleries aim at pleasing the public, not at respecting
the preferences of connoisseurs, and the public craves lively colors.
It would feel itself imposed upon if it traveled to Dresden only to
find the “Sixtine Madonna” as dark as would probably be the case if the
restorer had not interfered. In every gallery you will observe that the
crowds flock to the brightest pictures, irrespective of their merits.
The fact that they have been kept bright is an advertisement that they
are deemed precious; and besides, it requires less time to glance at a
clean canvas and pass on than to recover, after patient scrutiny and
an effort of the imagination, some of the beauty which time and dust
conceal. It is significant that the one painting by Tintoret which is
most commonly mentioned by all classes of tourists--“St. Mark Freeing
a Fugitive Slave”--is precisely that one which the directors of the
Venice Academy keep polished as good as new.
[13] In some of the paintings at San Giorgio the blues are now milky
splotches.
I cannot dismiss this subject without alluding to another cause for the
slight attention given to Tintoret: his pictures are almost invariably
condemned to oblivion by the position in which they have been hung. You
must look for them in dark corners near the ceiling, or in cross-lights
which render an examination impossible. Of those which still exist in
the churches for which they were painted, some have been injured by the
drippings from candles; others have been partly hidden by tabernacles,
reliquaries, and other objects of church ceremonial. Travelers in
Venice a generation ago record that rain leaked through the roof of the
School of San Rocco, and soaked some of the canvases; others, hung near
windows, have had to suffer from the strong sunlight for centuries.
In the Ducal Palace, one series of ceiling paintings have succumbed
to the daubing of restorers, and are now hardly recognizable as being
Tintoret’s; while the matchless “Paradise,” when I recently saw
it,[14] was falling rapidly to decay. The seams where the vast canvas
was originally joined had rotted in many places; the canvas itself was
warped and rumpled, forming little shelves and unevennesses on which
the dust had collected so as to hide the colors; and from the ceiling
dangled a ragged fringe of cobwebs, in some places two or three feet
long.
[14] In August, 1889.
A few generations hence, when these incomparable works have been
irretrievably damaged, posterity will wonder--with a wonder intensified
by indignation--that we allowed them to perish. Early Christians,
who mutilated pagan works of art because they believed them to be
pernicious, may be excused; but what excuse has our age to offer? We
pretend to cherish all manifestations of culture, and we have ample
means to preserve them; yet whilst our museums are daily adding to
their collections of half-barbarous antiquities, dug up in Arizona,
in Mexico, in Yucatan, in Peru, in Asia Minor, in Mesopotamia, there
are surely hastening to destruction scores of the works of the
mightiest genius who ever honored painting. During the past twenty
years, New York millionaires have paid more for the immoralities and
inanities of modern French painters than would be necessary to erect a
separate gallery in Venice for the proper preservation of Tintoret’s
masterpieces. If there were but a single manuscript of _Hamlet_ in
the world, and no printing-presses, what should we say to those who
allowed it to perish through neglect? Yet there are many of Tintoret’s
pictures, each of them as precious in its way as a page of _Hamlet_,
which we raise no voice to save. In our selfishness, we forget that
the treasures which we have inherited from the past are not ours to
dissipate and destroy; we hold them in trust for the future, and
woe unto us if, unmindful of our responsibility, we prove careless
stewards.[15]
[15] So long as the originals exist, copies of great paintings are as
unsatisfactory as a Beethoven symphony or a Wagner opera on the piano;
but when the originals have perished, copies may serve a worthy purpose
in perpetuating at least the concept and general treatment of the
painter. It is greatly to be desired that some capable student should
do for Tintoret what Toschi has done for Correggio at Parma. A series
of faithfully executed sketches would enable posterity to judge of
Tintoret’s range of imagination and inexhaustible powers of treatment,
although his coloring and drawing could not be reproduced. Many of his
paintings have never been engraved, and not one has been well engraved.