After avoiding marriage for nearly forty years, Tintoretto took to wife Faustina de’ Vescovi, who found him so disorderly and helpless that she achieved happiness in mothering him. She gave him eight children, three of whom became pardonable painters. They lived in a modest house not far from the church of Madonna dell’ Orto; and the artist seldom wandered from that vicinity except to paint in a Venetian church, palace, or fraternity; consequently he can be appreciated in his variety and power only in the city of his birth. The Duke of Mantua offered him a place at his court; he refused. He was happy only in his studio, where he worked literally night and day. He was a good husband and father, but cared nothing for the social pleasures. He was almost as solitary, independent, moody, melancholy, nervous, vehement, and proud as the Michelangelo whom he ever worshiped and ever strove to surpass. There was no peace in his soul or his works. Like Angelo, he honored strength of body and mind and spirit above surface beauty; his Virgins are often as unprepossessing as the Doni Madonna. He has left us his own portrait (now in the Louvre), painted when he was seventy-two; it could have been the head and face of Angelo himself—a strong and somber face, profound and wondering, and bearing the marks of a hundred storms.
His own was his best portrait, but he painted some others that attest the depth of his insight and the integrity of his art. For there too he remained a realist, and no man dared sit for him who hoped to deceive posterity. Many a Venetian worthy has come down to us through Tintoretto’s brush: doges, senators, procurators, three proveditori of the mint, six treasurers; above all, in this group, Iacopo Soranzo—one of the great portraits in Venetian art; here too, are Sansovino the architect and Cornaro the centenarian. Surpassed in Tintoretto’s gallery of portraits only by the Soranzo are anonymous pictures of The Man in a Cuirass (Prado), the Portrait of an Old Man (Brescia), the Portrait of a Man (Hermitage, Leningrad) and A Moor in the Morgan Library in New York. In 1574 Tintoretto disguised himself as an attendant of Doge Alvise Mocenigo, secured entry to the Venetian flagship Bucentaur, and clandestinely made a pastel sketch of Henry III of France; later, in the corner of a chamber where Henry gave audience to notables, Tintoretto perfected the portrait. Henry liked it so much that he offered a knighthood to the artist, who begged to be excused.32
His acquaintance with the Venetian aristocracy had begun about 1556, when, with Veronese, he received a commission to paint canvases in the Ducal Palace. In the Sala del Maggior Consiglio he pictured The Coronation of Frederick Barbarossa and Barbarossa Excommunicated by Alexander III; in the Sala del Scrutinio he covered an entire wall with a Last Judgment. These so pleased the Senate that it chose him in 1572 to commemorate the great victory at Lepanto. All four of these paintings were destroyed in the fire of 1577. In 1574 the Senate engaged Tintoretto to decorate the Anticollegio (or antechamber); here the artist inspired the solons with Mercury and the Graces, Ariadne and Bacchus, the Forge of Vulcan, and Mars Pursued by Minerva. In the Sala de’ Pregadi or Senate Hall Tintoretto painted (1574–85) a series of spacious panels celebrating the doges of his time, pictured against the background of the majestic Square: St. Mark’s and its sparkling cupolas, or the Clock Tower, or the Campanile, or the stately façade of the Libreria Vecchia, or the radiant arcades of the Doges’ Palace, or the misty or sunny vistas of the Grand Canal. Then, crowning this sequence to the taste of the proud government, he painted on the ceiling a triumphal picture of Venice Queen of the Seas, robed in splendor as a dogaressa, surrounded by circles of admiring divinities, and receiving from Tritons and Nereids the gifts of the waters—corals, shells, and pearls.
After the great fire the undiscourageable Senate called upon Tintoretto to redeem the ruined walls with pictures that would drown all memory of the loss. In the Hall of Scrutiny he painted a tremendous battle scene, The Capture of Zara. On a wall of the Great Council chamber he pictured the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa Receiving Envoys from the Pope and the Doge, and on the ceiling a masterpiece, The Doge Niccolò da Ponte Receiving the Homage of Conquered Cities.
When (1586) the Senate decided to cover the old fresco by Guariento on the east wall of the Council Chamber, they judged Tintoretto, then sixty-eight, to be too old for the task. They divided the assignment and the space between Paolo Veronese, then fifty-eight, and Francesco Bassano, thirty-seven. But Veronese died (1588) before the work was actually begun. Tintoretto offered to take his place, and proposed to cover the entire wall with one picture, The Glory of Paradise. The Senate agreed, and the old man, aided by his son Domenico and his daughter Marietta, laid out in the near-by Scuola della Misericordia the canvas sections that were to compose the picture. Many preliminary sketches were made; one, itself a chef-d’oeuvre, is in the Louvre. When all was set in place (1590) and Domenico had painted and concealed the seams, it constituted the largest oil painting that had yet been seen—seventy-two feet long by twenty-three feet high. The crowds that flocked to see it agreed with Ruskin that it was the culminating achievement of Venetian painting—“the most wonderful piece of pure, manly, and masterly oil painting in the world.”33 The Senate offered Tintoretto so great a fee that he returned part of it, again to the scandal of his fellow artists.
Time has had its way with this Paradise, and today, when one enters the Hall of the Great Council, and turns back to the wall behind the doges’ throne, he does not find the picture that Tintoretto left there, but a painting so darkened by the smoke and damp of centuries that of the five hundred figures that filled it only a minority can now be made out distinctly by the eye. Circle within circle the figures vibrate—the simple blessed, the virgins, the confessors of the faith, the martyrs, the evangelists, the Apostles, the angels, the archangels—all concentered about Mary and her Son, as if these two, in some fitting recognition of woman as well as man, had become the real deities of Latin Christendom. And beyond the hundred figures that can be seen, Tintoretto makes us feel countless hundreds more. After all, even if only a few are chosen of the many called, there must have come to paradise, in sixteen Christian centuries, quite a happy host; and Tintoretto set himself to show their goodly number and their bliss. He did not deaden heaven with Dantesque solemnity; it was conceived as a place of joy, and only the radiantly happy were admitted there. It was the old artist’s exorcism of his own misanthropy.
He had reason to be sad, for in the very year of the great picture’s unveiling his beloved daughter Marietta had died. Her skill in painting and music had been among the chief delights of his old age; and now that she was gone he seemed to think of nothing so much as of seeing her in another life. He went more frequently than before to Madonna dell’ Orto—Our Lady of the Garden—and there spent hours in meditation and prayer, at last a humble man. He still painted, and produced in these concluding years a series on St. Catherine for the church of her name. But in his seventy-seventh year a stomach ailment gave him such pain that he could no longer sleep. He made his will, bade good-bye to his wife and children and friends, and died on May 31, 1594. Madonna dell’ Orto received his remains.