TINTORETTO
Self-Portrait
Museum of Art, Philadelphia
From WEB GALLERY OF ART at wga.hu
TINTORETTO
Self-Portrait
Musée du Louvre, Paris
From WEB GALLERY OF ART at wga.hu
As a trading metropolis and a great power, Venice attracted the rich, powerful, and famous in great numbers. Princes both sacred and secular, scholars, musicians, and men of letters visited Tintoretto when they were in the city, or summoned him to them at short notice for sittings. Tintoretto accepted many commissions for private portraits, particularly in his youth, since they brought him into contact with people of importance, and enabled him to extend his social network. Official state portraits were of particular importance to Tintoretto. Such work consolidated personal contacts with powerful officers of state, men who might give profitable and prestigious commissions for the decoration of the Doge's Palace and the library of San Marco. He painted portraits also out of the need to earn a living. His extensive oeuvre as a portraitist betrays a considerable amount of routine work. As a portraitist, Tintoretto clearly shows the influence of the most important Venetian portraitist of the High Renaissance, Titian.
(WEB GALLERY OF ART AT wga.hu)
Tintoretto (Italian pronunciation: [tintoretto]; September 29, 1518 – May 31, 1594), real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso. His work is characterized by its muscular figures, dramatic gestures and bold use of perspective in the Mannerist style, while maintaining color and light typical of the Venetian School. In his youth, Tintoretto was also known as Jacopo Robusti as his father had defended the gates of Padua in a rather robust way against the imperial troops during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509–1516). His real name "Comin" has only recently been discovered by Miguel Falomir, the curator of the Museo del Prado, Madrid, and was made public on the occasion of the retrospective of Tintoretto at the Prado in 2007. Comin translates to the spice cumin in the local language.
Tintoretto was born in Venice, as the eldest of 21 children. His father, Giovanni, was a dyer, or tintore; hence the son got the nickname of Tintoretto, little dyer, or dyer's boy, which is anglicized as Tintoret. The family originated from Brescia, in Lombardy, then part of the Republic of Venice. Older studies gave the Tuscan town of Lucca as the origin of the family. In childhood Jacopo, a born painter, began daubing on the dyer's walls; his father, noticing his bent, took him to the studio of Titian to see how far he could be trained as an artist. This was supposedly towards 1533, when Titian was already (according to the ordinary accounts) fifty-six years of age. Tintoretto had only been ten days in the studio when Titian sent him home once and for all, the reason being that the great master observed some very spirited drawings, which he learned to be the production of Tintoretto; and it is inferred that he became at once jealous of so promising a scholar. This, however, is mere conjecture.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Figure drawing and anatomy By Tintoretto
From towsonfigure.blogspot.com
Portrait of a Genoese Nobleman
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
From WEB GALLERY OF ART AT wga.hu
The paintings of Jacopo Tintoretto come as a revelation. According to standard opinion Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael were the supreme artists of the sixteenth century; yet often during the last four hundred years, viewers have gazed in awe and surprise at works by Tintoretto, and wondered if he might be the greatest painter of all. Thus John Ruskin during his first visit to Venice wrote: “I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today before Tintoretto. Just be so good as to take my list of painters, and put him in the School of Art at the top, top, top of everything, with a great big black line to stop him off from everybody…. As for painting, I think I didn’t know what it meant till today.”
(Brush with Genius by Andrew Butterfield at nybooks.com)
Portrait of Jacopo Sansovino
From wikipaintings.org
Portrait of Procurator Nicolò Priuli
From wikipaintings.org
Sebastiano Venier
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Gemäldegalerie, Vienna
From pubhist.com
As well as religious works, Tintoretto painted mythological scenes and he was also a fine portraitist, particularly of old men (a self-portrait in old age is in the Louvre). Some of the weaker portraits that go under his name may be the product of his large workshop.
(WEB GALLERY OF ART AT wga.hu)
Portrait of a Man
Current Loc Budapest
Museum of Fine Arts
Source Web Gallery of Art
From commons.wikimedia.org
Tintoretto scarcely ever travelled out of Venice. He loved all the arts and as a youth played the lute and various instruments, some of them of his own invention, and designed theatrical costumes and properties. He was also versed in mechanics and mechanical devices. While being a very agreeable companion, for the sake of his work he lived in a mostly retired fashion, and even when not painting was wont to remain in his working room surrounded by casts. Here he hardly admitted any, even intimate friends, and he kept his mode of work secret, with the exception of his assistants. He abounded in pleasant witty sayings, whether to great personages or to others, but he himself seldom smiled. Out of doors, his wife made him wear the robe of a Venetian citizen; if it rained she tried to induce him with an outer garment which he resisted. When he left the house, she would also wrap money up for him in a handkerchief, expecting a strict accounting on his return. Tintoretto's customary reply was that he had spent it on alms to the poor or to prisoners.
An agreement is extant showing a plan to finish two historical paintings, each containing twenty figures, seven being portraits in a two month period of time. The number of his portraits is enormous; their merit is unequaled, but the really fine ones cannot be surpassed. Sebastiano del Piombo remarked that Tintoretto could paint in two days as much as himself in two years; Annibale Carracci that Tintoretto was in many pictures equal to Titian, in others inferior to Tintoretto. This was the general opinion of the Venetians, who said that he had three pencils—one of gold, the second of silver and the third of iron.
(Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Portrait of a Lady
From starlightmasquerade.com
Seven Members of the Soranzo Family
Castello Sforzesco, Milan, Italy
From bjws.blogspot.com
Seven Members of the Soranzo Family
Castello Sforzesco, Milan, Italy
From starlightmasquerade.com
After the completion of the "Paradise" Tintoretto rested for a while, and he never undertook any other work of importance, though there is no reason to suppose that his energies were exhausted had his days been a little prolonged. He was seized with an attack in the stomach, complicated with fever, which prevented him from sleeping and almost from eating for a fortnight, and on the 31st of May 1594 he died. A contemporary record states his age to have been seventy-five years and fifteen days. If this is accurate, the 16th of May 1519 must have been the day of his birth; but we prefer the authority of the register of deaths in S. Marciliano, which states that Tintoretto died of fever, aged seventy-five years, eight months and fifteen days - thus bringing us to the 16th of September 1518 as the true date of his birth.
(1911encyclopedia.org)
