He grew old while painting, and lived a quarter century after the normal span of life. In his eighty-eighth year he traveled to Brescia, and accepted an arduous commission to paint a ceiling in the palace of the commune. Vasari, visiting him in his ninetieth year, found him at work, brush in hand. At ninety-one he painted a portrait of Iacopo da Strada (Vienna), brilliant with color, strong with character. But now at last his hand began to tremble, his eyes grew weak, and he felt that the time had come for piety. In 1576, aged ninety-nine, he agreed to paint a Burial of Christ for the church of the Frari, in exchange for a burial place there, where already two of his greatest works were hung. He did not finish it, and he fell a year short of living out a century. In that year plague broke out in Venice; on each day two hundred died; a fourth of the population succumbed to the pestilence. Titian himself died during the plague, probably not of it but from old age (August 26, 1576). The government set aside its prohibition of public gatherings in order to give him a state funeral. He was buried in Santa Maria Gloriosa de’ Frari, as he had wished. It was the end of a magnificent life, and a wondrous age.
IV. TINTORETTO: 1518–94
It was not quite the end; for a power and spirit almost as great had still eighteen years to live, and had still to paint his Paradise.
Iacopo Robusti was the son of a dyer; hence the diminutive nickname by which the whimsical Italians have sent him down to history. He became indeed a tintor as a great colorist; but his family name fitted him well enough, for only a robust soul could have survived the long struggle that Iacopo had to fight for recognition.
Almost the first notice we have of him is that he was apprenticed to Titian at an unknown age, and was dismissed after a few days. Carlo Ridolfi, writing a century later, recounts the incident from the point of view of Tintoretto’s descendants:
When Titian came home and entered the place where his students were, he saw some papers sticking out from a desk; and seeing certain figures drawn on them, he asked who had done them. Iacopo said timidly that they were by his hand. Thereupon Titian, foreseeing from such beginnings that the lad would become a very able man, and would bring him some trouble in art, impatiently, as soon as he had gone upstairs and laid aside his mantle, bade Girolamo Dante, his chief pupil, to immediately forbid Iacopo the house. So a little tinge of jealousy works in human hearts.25
We should like to reject this story, but Aretino, Titian’s bosom friend, alludes to the incident in a letter of 1549. The dismissal is a fact, the interpretation is problematic. It is hard to believe that Titian, who was already a painter to kings when Iacopo was only a lad of twelve, could be jealous of so hypothetical a competitor, or that he could see the future Tintoretto in the drawings of a student just admitted to his school. It is possible that the drawings offended Titian by their carelessness rather than by their excellence; careless drawing remained a fault in Tintoretto through many years. Iacopo throughout his life expressed great admiration for Titian, treasured a picture that Titian had given him, and put upon the wall of his studio a constant reminder of what he aspired to achieve in painting: “The design of Michelangelo and the color of Titian.”26
According to Ridolfi and tradition, Iacopo had no instruction after leaving Titian, but taught himself by assiduous copying and experiment. He dissected bodies to learn anatomy. He observed almost every object in his experience with predatory eagerness, resolved to capture it in full detail in one or another of his paintings. He made models in wax, wood, or cardboard, dressed them, and drew them from every angle to find ways of portraying three dimensions in two. He had casts made and sent to him of ancient marbles in Florence and Rome, and of Michelangelo’s statuary; he set up these casts in his studio, and painted images of them in divers shadows and lights. He was fascinated by the variations produced in the appearance of objects by changes in the quantity, character, and incidence of light; he made a hundred pictures by lamp or candle illumination; he grew too fond of dim backgrounds and heavy shadows; he became a specialist in picturing the play of light and shade upon hands and face and drapes, buildings and landscapes and clouds. He left no pebble unturned in his struggle for excellence.
Nevertheless there was an impatient haste, and lack of finish, in his work —possibly a penalty of self-instruction—which deferred the public recognition of his art. For years after reaching manhood he had to solicit opportunities. He painted furniture, frescoed house fronts, begged builders to get him decorative jobs at low fees, and tried to sell his pictures by displaying them in St. Mark’s Square.27 Everybody wanted Titian; and Titian and Aretino saw to it that nobody of extractable substance should get anyone but Titian, or, if Titian was busy, Bonifazio Veronese. Iacopo must have resented Aretino’s pictorial pandering, but later, when the great Scourge came to him for a portrait, the artist pulled an impressive pistol from his pocket, pretended to measure with it Aretino’s majestic dimensions, and enjoyed the mighty blackmailer’s fright;28 thereafter Pietro’s pen was polite to Tintoretto. When Iacopo noted the vast unpainted walls—fifty feet high—of the choir in the church of the Madonna dell’ Orto, he offered to cover their nakedness with frescoes for a total fee of 100 ducats ($1250?); whereupon the Venetian painters complained that he was “injuring the trade” by underselling art. But Tintoretto was resolved to paint.
He was thirty before his first triumph came. The Scuola di San Marco opened a competition for a painting of St. Mark delivering a slave. The story was in Iacopo de Voragine’s Golden Legend: a Provençal servant had promised St. Mark to make a pilgrimage to his grave in Alexandria; his master refused him permission to go, but he went nevertheless. When he returned the master ordered his eyes to be gouged out, but the iron points pressed upon them failed to penetrate their surface. The master ordered the slave’s limbs to be broken, but the iron rods failed to make any impression upon them. The master, recognizing the intervention of St. Mark, pardoned the slave. Tintoretto’s picture told the tale with magnificent color, convincing realism, and dramatic intensity: the evangelist, clinging to his gospel, descends from heaven to rescue his devotee, who is about to be beheaded by a Moor, while a score of diverse figures look excitedly on. Iacopo seized every opportunity the story gave him: to limn powerful male and graceful female figures; to study the action of light upon Oriental velvets, silks, and turbans; to bathe the scene in colors learned from Giorgione and Titian. The directors of the Scuola were a bit frightened by the fleshly realism of the painting; they debated whether to place it on their walls; the impetuous Tintoretto proudly snatched it from their hands and took it home. They came and begged him to return it; he let them wait a chastening while, then yielded it. Aretino sent him a word of praise, and career was now open to his talent.
Soon commissions came in multitude. A dozen churches solicited him, a dozen lords, half a dozen princes and states. For these he told again, in a hundred paintings, the mighty epic of the Christian cosmology, theology, and eschatology, from the Creation to the Last Judgment. He was not a religious man; few artists were in this sixteenth-century Venice—half molded in soul and dominions by the heretical or Islamic East; art was his religion, to which he sacrificed night and day. But what finer subjects could a painter fancy than the legends of Adam and Eve, and the story of Mary and her Babe, and the tragedy of the God-man crucified, and the sufferings and marvels of the saints, and the awful climax of all history in the summoning of the quick and the dead to the judgment seat of Christ?* The best of this long series is The Presentation (c. 1556), which Tintoretto painted for the church of Madonna dell’ Orto: the Temple of Jerusalem pictured in classic splendor; a timid little Mary welcomed by the high priest with outstretched arms and beard; a woman, drawn with the majesty of Pheidias, pointing Mary out to her daughter; other women and their children, vividly realized; a prophet preaching enigmatic prophecies; beggars and cripples half naked, crouching on the Temple steps; this is a picture rivaling the best of Titian, one of the grand paintings of the Renaissance.