Tintoretto

by S. L. Bensusan

In Florence the tendency was to treat art as one branch of the many-sided profession of life. The artist of the day was sculptor and architect as well; sometimes he was engineer and statesman, he took every field of activity for his labours, and certainly the success of the great men whose range of endeavour was so wide was quite remarkable. Happily the Venetians were less ambitious. Bellini, who is, in the colour sense, the father of Venetian art, had a comparatively restricted outlook. Titian, his pupil, went farther afield and divorced art from the church, doubtless Giorgione had he lived would have helped to make that divorce more effective. Tintoretto, who was Titian's pupil, just as Titian had been Bellini's, was content to give all his energies, his extraordinary industry, and his great gifts to the service of painting. He could not enlarge the boundaries because Titian had carried them already into the domain of mythology, allegory, and portrait painting, and the time had not yet come when landscape could stand by itself. But Tintoretto, though he could not develop the theme, managed to develop the treatment, and became in a sense to be discussed later on the "father" of impressionism. This was his special service to art, and must be regarded as a remarkable discovery when we see how firmly fixed were the ordinary painters' conventions in handling subjects. Titian had broken away from the restrictions on subject matter, it was left to Tintoretto to revolt against the conventional handling, but this revolt was of course the product of late years. He began where his masters were leaving off, and he ended by being a law to himself. It will be seen, judging by the statements of his biographers, and particularly that of Ridolfi to whom we have referred, that the young painter's gifts and his habit of thinking for himself and following his theories into the realm of practice were in the way of his advancement. He worked so rapidly that the people to whom he applied in the first instance for commissions were a little suspicious. They could not understand how a man who painted with lightning rapidity and was prepared to sell his labour for any price, however small, could claim to be taken seriously. His cleverness made them afraid. They do not seem to have understood the type of artist that works because work is the very first law of life, and is content with a small return, knowing that when once the proper chance has come it will be possible to command a better price.

PLATE III.—THE ORIGIN OF "THE MILKY WAY"

This extraordinary painting to be seen to-day at the National Gallery reveals not only the artist's vivid imagination but the wonderful skill with which he can present a flying figure and leave it as though supported in mid air. Students of Tintoretto will not fail to note the resemblance between the flying figure here and the one in "The Miracle of the Slave" in the Venetian Academy.

The general feeling about Jacopo Robusti is perhaps summed up by Giorgio Vasari in his "Lives." "He is a great lover of the arts," says our gossip; "he delights in playing on various musical instruments; he is a very agreeable person, but as far as painting is concerned he has the most capricious hand, and the boldest, most extravagant, and most obstinate brain that ever belonged to painter. Of this the proof lies in his works and in their fantastic composition so different from the usage of other painters. Indeed, Robusti becomes more than ever extravagant in his recent inventions, and the strange fancies that he has executed as it were almost without design, as though he aimed to show that art is but a jest. He will sometimes present as finished, sketches which are just such mere outlines that the spectator sees before him pencil marks made by chance, the result of a bold carelessness rather than the fruits of design and judgment."

These are significant words only when we consider that they were written at a time when Tintoretto was alive, and Vasari must have been moved to great excess of zeal to have gone so far in the painter's dispraise. Indeed he closes his little sketch by remarking that Tintoretto after all is a very clever man and a highly commendable painter. The special interest of the criticism lies in its revelation of the attitude of his contemporaries towards Tintoretto. For more than a century art had been moving, pictures had ceased to be flat, the difficulties of chiaroscuro were being faced rather than shirked. Atmosphere was growing, the problems of perspective were deemed worthy of careful study. Colour was not only brilliant, but the secret of mixing colours long since lost and apparently irrecoverable was known in the studios of the leading men. But the very earliest lessons of impressionism had yet to be taught, and realism had rendered dull and lifeless pictures that were hung rather beyond the reach of the spectator's close scrutiny. Tintoretto saw that work must be handled in such a fashion that the spectator who stood some distance away could get an impression of the whole of the subject treated. He knew that if objects were painted with equal values and the meticulous care of the miniaturist the canvas would only yield its fruit to those who could stare right into it. These facts were a pleasant revelation to him and an unpleasant one to his contemporaries. His work was destined to influence Velazquez—Velazquez influenced Goya, the mantle of Goya fell upon Edouard Manet, and Manet founded the great impressionist school of France that has been doing work of extraordinary merit and enduring interest while schoolmen of contemporary generations have been concerned with telling stories in terms of paint and harking back to the pre-Raphaelities.

The modern work suffers more from neglect and disregard than that of the great masters of old time, because nowadays it is possible to multiply the lowest and most popular class of picture and scatter it broadcast among those who have no knowledge of the aims and objects of art. They think that a picture is bound to be a good one if it should chance to appeal to them, forgetful that their lack of taste may have as much as anything to do with the appeal of the work. A picture may please an observer because the picture is great or because the observer is small, but the latter alternative is hardly popular with those who go conscientiously to galleries.

Vasari tells us many stories of Tintoretto's inexhaustible activity. Ridolfi does the same, and it is easy to understand why a man who could not keep his brush from his hand for any length of time, and would accept any price or any commission rather than remain idle, was rather a terror to his contemporaries, and earned the title of "Il Furioso" by which he was widely known. Few artists in the world's history have achieved so much, for although we know of countless frescoes and pictures that have perished utterly, we still have something like six hundred works left to stand for the seventy-five years of the painter's life, and some of these, such as the works in the Doges' Palace, are crowded with figures. Indeed the work in the Doges' Palace might well stand for the life's monument of any artist however long-lived and industrious.

It is no fault of Tintoretto that his work baffles the tired eye. He cannot be studied in a day, or two days, or even three; you cannot go to him from other painters. He demands the closest and most enduring attention together with some expert guidance on the occasion of the first visit in order that the countless points in crowded canvas may not be overlooked. He was a man of such breadth of vision, his conceptions were so magnificent that he must be approached with something akin to reverence. We cannot go to him as to Titian or Bellini and feel that we can bring to the merit of each canvas the necessary amount of appreciation. While the "Paradiso" took years to complete, some of Tintoretto's smaller canvases took many months in the making, although the painter has never been excelled in the rapidity of execution. He who hopes to digest in half-an-hour the work that took Tintoretto half a year imagines a vain thing. To read some of the criticism that has been meted out to Tintoretto is to realise that their own limitations have given serious trouble to some of his critics, because he is so vast and so splendid in his themes, and so extraordinarily brilliant in his treatment, he has baffled one generation after another. His theory of relative values has been misunderstood and misinterpreted, but to see him in his true light it is necessary to consider how many of his successors could paint a large figured picture on anything approaching the same scale with an equal measure of intelligence. Nowadays we do not look for heroic achievement; and it is perhaps as well, seeing that there is none to be had.