Authors: Peter Ackroyd
He was a controversial figure from his earliest youth. Another story places Tintoretto in confrontation with Titian. Tintoretto was for a short time apprentice to the older painter; it is said, according to family legend, that Titian came upon some figures drawn by him. Observing at once their facility, and fearing for his own reputation, Titian ordered the young man to leave his studio. It is an improbable account of jealousy, but one of Tintoretto’s sons spread it abroad after the death of his father. It may reflect the essential tension between Titian’s utterly expensive art, created largely for foreign patrons, and Tintoretto’s more local and artisanal genius.
There is no doubt that the artist’s talents became quickly known. He was born as Jacopo Robusti in the autumn of 1518, in Venice, and in that city he would live and die. It owned his being. He is a distinct example of the territorial imperative, whereby the ground itself helps to shape him. He is the most thoroughly Venetian of all painters. He was the son of a dyer of silks; hence the name he gave himself as an artist. He was happy to be known as “the little dyer” because it was a token of his relatively humble Venetian origins. He only left the city once in his life and then, on a journey to Mantua, he insisted that his wife accompany him. Like other Venetian artists, he was a fervent amateur musician. He painted stage sets and designed costumes for the theatres of the city. His art cannot be understood without Venice. His great works are still to be found in the city. His paintings were once to be seen in more than forty of the city’s churches. Only in Venice can his fieriness and extravagance be properly realised. His art
is
Venice in its purest and most spiritual form.
One contemporary reported that “in his gestures, expression, movement of the eyes and in his words he is alert and quick in argument.” So his art embodied his person. He had what Stendhal called “Venetian liveliness” to the utmost degree. Vasari called him “hot-headed.” His speed of execution was known to everyone. He could complete a painting in the same time as another artist might finish a sketch. His was a vivacious and exuberant and impetuous art. He was filled with divine fury, with all the rage and energy of creation. He was the lightning flash. When some young Flemish artists came to his studio, they showed him certain drawings over which they had laboured for weeks. He took up his brush and with three strokes of black paint created a figure. He put in some white highlights, and turned to his guests. “This,” he said, “is how we poor Venetians paint our pictures.” It was the Venetian way, known throughout Europe as
prestezza
. The Venetian painters, too, were known for the art of improvisation. They were also known for their speed. Tiepolo said that he could finish a painting while other artists were still mixing their colours. Two centuries earlier Vasari remarked that a work by Tintoretto was finished before others thought it begun.
Yet his was not entirely an improvised art. He fashioned little models out of wax, and placed them in tiny houses made out of wood and cardboard; then he would suspend lights above and around them. Out of this toy theatre came his great creations filled with radiance and majesty. Saints hurtle through the air at enormous speed. Then they come to a halt, suspended a few feet above the ground. Vistas of figures stretch into eternity. Light floods the dwelling place of mortals. His figures are always in energetic movement, quick and furious; they whirl around some central pillar of light, their limbs and muscles transfigured in centrifugal flight. In his later work light does not follow structure; it supersedes structure; it becomes structure. The world is dissolved in radiance. Drama was an essential element of Venetian art. Canaletto was trained as a designer of theatrical sets. Tiepolo worked as a costume designer. Veronese built up his canvases on the model of the sixteenth-century stage.
Tintoretto himself worked instinctively and naturally, caught up in the rush of inspiration which seems never to have flagged. Some have sensed in his pictures a certain anxiety—an unease, an insecurity, in the perpetually whirling forms. It is of a piece with his endless activity and
prolificity. He could never rest. If this is so, then it may coincide with the anxiety of Venice in the sea, and with its endless search for meaning in the wilderness of the world. Tintoretto once said that “the further you go in, the deeper is the sea.” In the late spring of 1594, at the age of seventy-five, he died of a fever.
In 1581 a Venetian collector wrote that there were more paintings in Venice than in all the rest of Italy. Painting, Ruskin said, is the way that the Venetians write. Can a graphologist of art, therefore, identify some salient characteristics in the wealth of Venetian painting? Are there certain harmonies between one artist and another that can be plausibly credited to the nature and position of the city itself? The way in which painting replaced painting, in the ducal palace and in the churches of the city, suggests that the art of Venice was deemed by the authorities to possess an identifiable history and an independent unity. It was capable of endless renewal without compromising its essential identity. For Venetians themselves there was such a thing as Venetian art. It was not the invention of art historians. In the mosaics and in the sacred paintings of the fifteenth century, for example, there is a mingling of Byzantine, Gothic and Tuscan art that is uniquely Venetian; the city drew on the traditions from East and West. Throughout Venetian history various styles and stylistic traits were mingled. It was a port at which many called.
The art of Venice, in the thirteenth century, was Byzantine in inspiration. The images of Christ Pantocrator, of the Virgin, and of all the saints, were painted on wooden panels burnished with gold. At least one workshop in the city specialised in copying, or faking, early Byzantine originals. Thus by imitation Venetian art acquired an identity. It had no other past. The looting of Constantinople in 1204 created the conditions for a Byzantine “revival” in the chief city of the looters. In previous centuries the art of Venice had been provincial and stiffly medieval. There was in fact no really important Venetian work until the middle of the fifteenth century. Yet there were frequent Byzantine “revivals” in the city, most notably in the latter half of the fifteenth century when hostility to the cities of the mainland led to the rejection of the Classical and the Gothic. Venice wished to create an historical and cultural identity with the region of the upper Adriatic, where the Byzantines had once held dominion.
The Byzantine influence had emerged earlier, in the first mosaics for the basilica of Saint Mark’s. The earliest of them, dated to the latter part of the eleventh century, were the work of Greek artists imported from Byzantium. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, there had emerged a distinctive Venetian school of mosaic art. The mosaic then became an essential element of Venetian cultural identity. It has been described as “painting for eternity”; the materials do not fade or decay in demonstrably historical time. Mosaics reflect the Venetians’ passion for surface and decorative pattern, as elaborate as the lace of Burano. They embody their love for rich and hard material. The smallest pieces or
tesserae
are cubes of gold or enamelled glass. They possess the sensual pleasure of jewels and other glittering merchandise, so dear to the imagination of a trading city. Mosaics fulfil the Venetian desire for colour and detail. Even the later work in Saint Mark’s betrays no interest in the linear perspective of fourteenth-century Italian art; perspective is a reminder of the fallen world. Pattern and colour are eternal. The lesson was not lost on Venetian painters, who seemed to compete with the mosaicists in creating a glowing and richly tinted world. The art of the mosaic was taught in Venice long after it had fallen into disuse in other Italian cities, and indeed a school or establishment of professional mosaicists was organised as late as 1520.
The shining glass and gold surfaces glow with the hieratic detail and brilliant colour of the icon, but they also set up a play of light and shadow that is intrinsic to the Venetian genius. The glass was to hand in Murano, where the workshops were well known for the
lucidezza
or lucidity of their product. When Commynes came to Venice in 1494 he noted on the walls of Saint Mark’s “the curious work called Musaique or Marquetry; the art also whereof they vaunt themselves to be authors of.…” This typically Venetian “vaunt” was of course without foundation, but his comment suggests how odd and exotic the mosaic seemed to a foreign eye. When Thomas Coryat came to Venice in the early seventeenth century he remarked that “I never saw any of this picturing before I came to Venice.” So Venice became associated with the art of mosaic.
The city was the focus. The city was the arena for competition and display. There is not a huge leap from the art of Tintoretto to the art of
Tiepolo, although they are separated by almost two centuries. They are both recognisably Venetian. The city absorbed them. The city gave them strength. Whereas the great artists of Florence—Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo—seem unyielding and separate from their home city, the artists of Venice are at home and at ease with their birthright. Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were not attracted to the patronage of other cities or other courts; they rarely, if ever, left the city on the lagoon. Giovanni Bellini spent his entire life in the neighbourhood of Castello. Titian hated leaving Venice. They seemed to be family men, whereas the artists of Florence tended to be single and of homosexual persuasion.
But there was also a larger continuity. Bellini is to be seen in the context of the work of his father, Jacopo Bellini; in turn Giorgione learned from Bellini, and Titian learned from Giorgione. Tiepolo was called
Veronese redivivio
. It is perhaps a familiar pattern of influence and inheritance, but one that takes place more fully and intensely in the small and relatively isolated city of Venice. The conservative bias of the citizens, in all matters of social and political policy, must also have had its effect upon the local artists. The importance of tradition and authority was asserted on all occasions of public discourse. If the mosaics in Saint Mark’s were faded, they were replaced by exact replicas. If the paintings in the ducal palace were damaged or destroyed, they were replaced with images of the same historical or mythological scene. All of the instincts of the Venetian painter were to maintain, or to learn from, the past.
Their methods of working were different from their respective contemporaries in other cities. In Venice artists were characteristically viewed as a particular kind of artisan. In a city noted for its pragmatic tendencies, theirs was a wholly practical training. They were concerned with craft skills. They were not considered heroic, with the possible exception of Titian; they were not filled with the divine afflatus. They were essentially servants of the state. The painters belonged to a guild that was supervised by three magistrates. Alongside Tintoretto and Titian were sign-painters and makers of playing cards. Painters were also expected to practise their expertise in other matters pertaining to the state; they were hired as cartographers or as designers of festive banners and of shields. They made their own tools, like any other craftsman. They considered their work in its
material rather than its aesthetic guise. They looked at a canvas as a carpenter might look at a wooden chest or a cobbler look at a pair of shoes.
In Venice, too, there was much greater specialisation of trade than in other cities. That, again, is part of the inheritance of the Venetian merchant tradition. The carvers of frames had their own guild, while the gilders formed a “column” of the painters’ guild. The goldsmiths often practised their art in consortium. There were painters of furniture panels, and painters of chests. There were the ivory carvers, their art first emanating from Byzantium. It was always a question of supply and demand. Painted organ shutters, for example, were a Venetian speciality. Painting, in any case, is bound to be different in a city so attentive to the appetite for luxury goods. Luxury represents the love of the material world. Is that not the quality present in the paintings of Bellini and of Titian?
The imperatives of trade are to be seen in the replacement of wood by canvas as the preferred support for oil painting. The supply of material was guaranteed by the presence of a thriving sail industry. In any case the sea air rotted wood. Canvas was also easier to transport in a city, and a lagoon, notoriously difficult to navigate. The line between aesthetic and economic preference is a fine one. In Venice, of all cities, it is hard to know which of them was predominant. It is also worth noticing that the painters of Venice turned to landscape at precisely the time of the city’s colonisation of the mainland.
So the studio or workshop (known as
bottega
) of the Venetian painters was created in response to the trading practices of the city. Tintoretto had one of the most efficient studios, for example, based upon the Venetian instinct for familial ties. His two sons were his assistants, and they continued to turn out replicas of their father’s work long after his death. In his will Tintoretto left all of his “property, as far as appertains to my profession” to the sons. His wife was responsible for the finances, and his daughter married a young man on the perfectly acceptable grounds that he had proved himself to be a good artist. As she explained in her will, “if the said Sebastian proved to be an able painter I should take him for my husband; in this way, by virtue of his talent, the Tintoretto name would be maintained.” Indeed the Tintoretto business lasted for more than a century and involved three generations. In a city that was established upon the primacy of family,
too, the artists followed precedent. The sons of Bellini were painters. The studios of Tiepolo and Bassano, Veronese and Zuccaro, were family businesses. They were clearly created on the pattern of the merchant families of the city, in which trade was passed from father to son. A man might become a painter for the simple reason that he was part of a painter’s family.