Tintoretto’s success was confirmed when (1564) the Scuola di San Rocco, or the Confraternity of St. Roch, named him to decorate their albergo or assembly rooms. To choose a painter for the vast wall surfaces, the directors invited artists to submit drawings for a picture to fit into a ceiling oval, showing St. Roch in glory. While Paolo Veronese, Andrea Schiavone, and others made sketches, Tintoretto painted a finished picture, flaming with color and alive with action; had the canvas secretly pasted in the assigned place and covered; and, on the day when the others presented their drawings, had this painting uncovered, to the consternation of judges and competitors. He excused this unorthodox strategy on the ground that he could work best in this impulsive way, instead of following a cartoon. The other artists cried foul; Tintoretto withdrew from the contest, but left the painting as a gift to the Fraternity. The Scuola finally accepted it, made Tintoretto a member, gave him a salary of a hundred ducats a year for life, and required of him, in return, to paint for them three pictures per year.
In the next eighteen years (1564–81) he placed fifty-six scenes upon the albergo walls. The rooms were poorly lighted; Tintoretto had to work in semidarkness; he worked rapidly, laying on his colors coarsely, as to be seen from twenty feet below. These paintings became the most famous one-man exhibition in Venetian history; and later artists came to study them almost as students in Florence went to study Masaccio. Rain and damp attacked the pictures through the years, but they are still impressive in their scope and power. “Twenty or thirty years ago,” wrote Ruskin a hundred years ago, “they were taken down to be restored; but the man to whom the task was committed providentially died, and only one of them was spoiled.”29
In this astonishing museum Tintoretto told the Christian story once more, but as it had never been painted before, with an audacious realism that took the episodes out of the world of ideal sentiment and placed them in such natural surroundings that legend seemed transformed into the most indubitable history. The capacity to see, to note every detail of a scene, to feel these details as giving life, to dash them on to the wall with a stroke or two of the brush—like the water visible through the laurel roots in the Magdalen—these were sparks of Tintoretto’s fire. He devoted the lower floor of the albergo to Mary: her humble surprise in the Annunciation, her modest grace in the Visitation, her simple awe at the precious Oriental gifts in the Adoration of the Magi, her slow procession on donkeyback across a peaceful landscape in The Flight into Egypt, safe from that “massacre of the innocents” which provides the most powerful picture in this group. On the walls of the main upper room Tintoretto recounted events in the life of Christ: the baptism by John, the temptation by Satan, the miracles, the Last Supper; this last was so unconventionally realistic that Ruskin called it “the worst I know of Tintoretto”:30 Christ at the farther end, the Apostles absorbed in eating or conversing, servants bustling about with food, a dog inquiring when he too may eat. In an inner room of the upper story Tintoretto painted two of his greatest paintings. Christ Before Pilate shows an unforgettable figure clad in a white robe as if in a shroud, standing quietly in weariness and resignation, and yet in dignity, before a Pilate trying to wash away the guilt of yielding to the bloodlust of a mob. And last of all—judged by Tintoretto to be his best work—The Crucifixion, challenging and surpassing Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in power and range of composition, in artistry of execution; forty feet of wall, and eighty figures, with horses, mountains, towers, trees, all with incredible fidelity to detail; Christ in visualized agony of body and soul; one robber being forced down upon a prostrate cross, and resisting to the last; another, a Titan of strength and desperation, being raised to his death by rough soldiers too angry at his weight to have a mind for pity; women huddled in terrified groups; spectators crowding eager to watch men suffer and die; and, in the distance, a lowering sky offering no answer to the human tragedy but thunder and lightning and an indifferent rain. Here Tintoretto has reached his zenith, and equaled the best.
To all these masterpieces in the albergo Tintoretto added eight pictures for the church of the same Fraternity, chiefly concerning St. Roch himself. One of these paintings stands out, if only through its terribilità—The Pool of Bethesda. The artist takes his text from the fifth chapter of the Fourth Gospeclass="underline" “a crowd of invalids used to lie” there, “the blind, the lame, and folk with shriveled limbs,” waiting for a chance to bathe in the healing pool. Tintoretto sees not the miraculous healing of the cripple, but the variously diseased or stricken multitude, and he draws them unflinchingly as he sees them, in their malformations, their rags and filth, their hope and despair. It is a scene as from Dante’s Inferno or Zola’s Lourdes.
The same man who could so rage, with his art, against the ills that flesh is heir to, responded eagerly to the splendors of the flesh in the beauty of its health, and almost rivaled Titian and Correggio in portraying nudes. Though we might have expected his turbulent spirit and swift brush to fail in conveying the ancient sense of beauty in repose, we find, scattered over Europe, such delectable figures as the Danaë of the Lyons Museum, dressed in jewelry, the Leda and Swan of the Uffizi, the Venus and Vulcan of the Munich Pinacothek, the Dresden Deliverance of Arsinoë, the Mercury and Graces and Bacchus and Ariadne of the Doges’ Palace…. Symonds thought this last “if not the greatest, at any rate the most beautiful, oil painting in existence.”31 And yet more perfect is the London Gallery’s Origin of the Milky Way from Cupid’s pressure upon Juno’s breasts—as good an explanation as any. The Louvre, the Prado, Vienna, and the Washington Gallery have Susanna and the Elders in four Tintoretto versions. The Prado has a roomful of sensuous Tintorettos: A Young Venetian Woman drawing her robe aside to reveal her bosom; even in the Battle of the Turks and Christians two abstracting breasts appear amid the gleam of arms. And in the Verona Museum is a Concert of nine women musicians, three of them bare to the waist—as if ears could hear when eyes had so much to see. These pictures are not the best of Tintoretto; his forte was in the massive representation of virile life and heroic death; but they show that he too, like Giorgione and Titian, could turn a perilous curve with a steady hand. And in all his nudes there is no immodesty; there is a healthy sensualism; these gods and goddesses take nudity as natural, and are not conscious of it; it is divine of them to greet the sun “all face,” whole-bodily, and not be harassed and jailed with buttons and laces and bows.