Here under review is the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, exhibition and accompanying catalogue. First, an acknowledgement must be made of the protracted government shutdown, which delayed the installation schedule and resulted in considerable challenges, given that many large-scale works required the construction of floating baffles to span the galleries’ upper moldings. Some paintings were also hung high on the walls and angled toward the viewer to mimic their original locations. The show's opening was as heroic as many of the figures portrayed in the paintings. Richly saturated blue-green walls extracted visitors from the museum's beige palette and placed them in what seemed the color of water in a canal on a gorgeous cloudy day in Venice or in the dim rooms of San Rocco, where so many of Tintoretto's works live, two of which were lent. His narrow, exceedingly tall landscapes portraying The Virgin Mary Reading and The Virgin Mary in Meditation were hung in a wonderfully dizzying configuration bracketing the last room's entrance.
This monographic show could be charged with being old-fashioned, exploring just how masterful this old master was. Placing the artist's young and mature self-portraits at the entrance and exit confirms that it is all about the man here—the genius, or the prophet, as the curators call him in the catalogue. This approach leaves out many voices. It neglects lines of inquiry such as agency, identity, and the mobility of ideas and objects—and, in this case, the important aspect of environment that is the Venetian lagoon. But studying the hand of one artist's work is profoundly instructive. This is a moment to compare variations, tease out subtleties of Tintoretto's development, and weed out workshop intervention. Connoisseurship still matters, and the show did this fantastically well. A museum exhibition is the best place to inspect and compare paintings and drawings, and, of course, an occasion to initiate conservation of some works, as Save Venice did for five loans.
Hanging Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan together with its sketch aptly illustrated Tintoretto's idiosyncratic working method, told to us by Ridolfi, who wrote that Tintoretto staged small wax or clay figures in boxes, sometimes hanging them from tiny rafters to get the lighting and modeling just right. The installation also showed this by hanging from the gallery ceiling an airborne model (made by gallery designers) of Christ the Redeemer next to the painted figure in the bozzetto for Doge Alvise Mocenico Presented to the Redeemer. Sadly, Tintoretto's most important floating figure, Saint Mark in The Miracle of the Slave, was missing in the DC run of the show, but The Nine Muses from the Royal Collection was a thoughtful replacement, dating to the same time and having a similar figure in mid-flight.
His Madonna of the Treasurers was beautifully displayed, almost overwhelming in scale—an outsized portego painting both in its horizontal orientation (seventeen feet wide) and its subject. Meant for the center wall of the Camerlenghi di Comun, it shouts, not whispers, religious and political messaging. The magistracy's secretaries from the citizen class appear as shepherds bearing parcels at the Nativity, and the noble treasurers, posed conspicuously in the center foreground, mimic the Three Magi bowing to the Virgin and Child with saints. This huge group portrait dwarfed the easel portraits in the same room, configured in an L-shape on two walls. These might have been better presented in their own space, but a small room likely could not have hosted large crowds in a summer show at the National Gallery. Man with a Gold Chain stood out for the sitter's subtle movement, caught for a moment in engaged listening. Including a work recently attributed to Tintoretto's early years, Portrait of a Man with a Red Beard, invited meaningful comparison. The facial features’ tight brushwork and the sitter's hands, which breach the painting's outer edges, strongly suggest this canvas as the young artist's work.
The catalogue offers essays that address context, culture, and political imagination, though there is a notable absence of women contributors, not quite representative of the field. As one would expect with this monographic show, the articles, which nicely complement one another, are organized following Tintoretto's development: early, middle, and late. The section titled “The Young Tintoretto” features an informative article by Stefania Mason establishing Tintoretto as the consummate Venetian, born and raised in that city. The cocurators also situate Tintoretto's style within critical debate on Michelangelo's disegno and Titian's colorito, an important contribution, as Tintoretto's work was informed by the former and competed with the latter.
Susannah Rutherglen contributed an excellent essay on Tintoretto's facade, ceiling, and furniture paintings. It fills a gap in understanding regarding his early development, when he learned to rapidly execute large compositions by leaving some passages loosely composed, so he could focus his efforts on magnificently foreshortened figures. Filling facades taught Tintoretto to think big and compose dramatic space to grab the attention of people walking on a fondamenta or poling a boat down a canal. He later deployed this visual strategy for church interiors, as, for instance, in his San Trovaso Last Supper, in which a foreground figure dramatically twists to place a pilgrim's flask seemingly right in the viewer's space.
This visual rhetoric exploits spatial recession to carry narrative, something Mattia Biffi sensitively explores in his article in the “Mature Tintoretto” section. He calls attention to debates at mid-century regarding the role of the artist. Tintoretto's narration is sometimes time-based, as shown, for example, by the figures entering and exiting the composition in the Presentation in the Temple for the church of the Crociferi. Here, monumental figures circulate up and down a staircase and around a modest little barrel that is centrally placed on the stairs, a symbol for the patrons, the scuola of coopers. Originally hung on the chancel wall, it would have been approached from the righthand side; Tintoretto adjusted for this location with a horizontal orientation, giving viewers the impression of being next to ascend the stairs.
The traditional vertical orientation of altarpieces could be confining for him, something Peter Humfrey lucidly explores in his contribution, also in the “Mature Tintoretto” section. He compares the lively, zigzag arrangement of the nearly square composition in his Resurrection for San Rocco to the dry and formulaic treatment of the same subject in his altarpiece for San Cassiano. Telling a story and evoking empathy in the viewer appealed to the Counter-Reformation church's assertion that works of art, especially altarpieces, were central tools to instruct the faithful, as, for example, in Tintoretto's nearly square Deposition for Santa Maria dell'Umilità. Christ's foregrounded body serves well the central sacrament of the Eucharist, enacted below on the altar and crucial to Tridentine decrees.
The final section, on the late works, features an excellent treatment of his mythologies by Miguel Falomir, whose insights into the understanding of Tintoretto's work from the 2007 exhibition at the Prado is in the background and informs scholarship for this present show. Falomir outlines the early facade frescoes, a middle period associated the poligrafi, and late work serving European patrons, though he also convincingly points out that adhering too closely to these phases is unnecessarily confining. Instructive is Falomir's assessment of Titian's Tarquin and Lucretia with Tintoretto's, which is told through disarrayed bodies, a broken necklace, and a toppled statue. Titian's composition seems overly elegant in comparison. Tarquin's ruddy expression tells the story, whereas Tintoretto's nude energy of violation generates empathy for Lucretia. The same is true of Helen's tear-stained face, placed closest to the viewer in a deeply shadowed foreground in his Abduction of Helen. This composition builds space innovatively with its loosely painted battle scene in the background, privileging Helen's individual experience over the discord beyond.
Giorgio Tagliaferro writes of Tintoretto's works for the Republic in the ducal palace. With help from Ridolfi, he teases out double meanings in pieces such as The Wedding of Ariadne and Bacchus for the Sala dell'Anticollegio. Originating from the sea, the enthroned Ariadne can be understood as an allegory of Venice, queen of the Adriatic. The ring Bacchus gives to her references the doge's marriage to the sea upon his nomination. This article skillfully contextualizes Tintoretto's late work, often seen as diminished and given to the workshop. Tagliaferro presents these works as a matter less about the painter's hand and more about his skill as foreman directing skilled assistants to execute large-scale compositions in prominent spaces within the city.
This book is of immediate interest to early modern art historians, especially Venetian specialists, but will also appeal to the field in general, which too often privileges the study of Tuscan and Roman Renaissance art over Venetian. Michiaki Koshikawa's article on Tintoretto's draftsmanship succinctly foregrounds this bias, which originated in Vasari. And Koshikawa's treatment of Tintoretto's drawings from sculptural models provides an essential context to understanding this artist's virtuosic foreshortened figures. Echols and Illchman sought to remove workshop pieces from Tintoretto's oeuvre, and in so doing, they have successfully presented the artist in a new light. Bringing together works of the highest quality, this exhibition is a first in the “New World.”
