[10] Tintoret is buried in the church of Santa Maria dell’ Orto.
With this clue, spun from the discursive records of Ridolfi (whose Meraviglie dell’ Arte was first published in 1648), we can pass through the labyrinth of Tintoret’s career. There are, besides, several anecdotes which help us to know the man’s personality better: if all be not authentic, at least all agree in attributing to him certain well-defined traits.
As a workman, as we have seen, Tintoret was indefatigable. His lifelong yearning was not for praise, but for opportunity to work. Modesty he had to a degree unrecorded of any other painter, although none seems to have been more confident of his own powers.[11] Like Shakespeare, he wrought his masterpieces swiftly, and left them to their fate, because his imagination, like Shakespeare’s, was already on the wing for higher quarry. There was in the man an inflexible dignity, born of self-respect, which neither the allurements of popularity nor the flattery of the great could bend. When invited by the Duke of Mantua to go to that city and execute some paintings, Tintoret replied that wherever he went his wife wished to accompany him; at which the Duke bade him bring his wife and family, had them conveyed to Mantua in a state barge, and entertained them at his palace “at magnificent expense for many days.” He urged Tintoret to settle there; but the Venetian could not be persuaded to renounce his allegiance to Venice. He saw that titles would add nothing to his fame, and refused an offer of knighthood from Henry III of France. Princes and grandees and illustrious visitors to Venice went to his house; but though he received them courteously, he sought no intimacy with them. His time was too precious, his projects were too earnest, to allow of aristocratic dissipation. He had a keen sense of humor, which displayed itself now in some ready reply, now in genial conversation with his familiars. Ridolfi relates that certain prelates and senators who visited him whilst he was making sketches for the “Paradise” asked him why he worked so hurriedly, whereas John Bellini and Titian had been deliberate and painstaking. “The old masters,” said Tintoret, “had not so many to bother them as I have.” At another time, at a gathering of amateurs, a woman’s portrait by Titian was lauded. “That’s the way to paint,” said one of the critics. Tintoret went home, took a sketch by Titian and covered it with lampblack, painted a head in Titian’s manner on the same canvas, and showed it at the next meeting of these amateurs. “Ah, there’s a real Titian!” they all agreed. Tintoret rubbed off the lampblack from the original sketch and said: “This, gentlemen, is indeed by Titian; that which you have admired is mine. You see now how authority and opinion prevail in criticism, and how few there are who really understand painting.”
Pietro Aretino, that depraved adventurer and most successful blackmailer in literature, was one of Titian’s intimates and partisans. He wished, nevertheless, to have his portrait painted by Tintoret, who was in no wise afraid of the scoundrel’s enmity, although most of the prominent personages of the time quailed before it. Aretino being posed, Tintoret furiously drew a hanger from under his coat. Aretino was terrified lest he should be punished for his malicious tongue, and cried out, “Jacopo, what are you about?” “I am only going to take your measure,” said Tintoret complacently; and, measuring him from head to foot, he added, “your height is just two and a half hangers.” Aretino’s impudence returned. “You’re a great madman,” he said, “and always up to your pranks.” But this grim hint sufficed; the rascal never after dared to slander Tintoret, but, on the contrary, tried to ingratiate himself into his friendship.
[11] Two instances are worthy of record. Having agreed to paint a large historical picture for the Doges’ Palace, he said to the procurators, “If any other shall, within the space of two years, paint a better picture of this subject, you shall take his and reject Footnote: mine.” At first his enemies spoke so censuringly of his “St. Mark Freeing the Fugitive Slave” that the brethren hesitated whether to accept it; whereupon Tintoret had it brought back to his studio. Afterwards the brethren repented, begged for its return, and ordered three other pictures.
In his home Tintoret enjoyed tranquillity. His wife, Faustina de’ Vescovi, was thrifty and dignified, and perhaps she was not a little annoyed by the “unpracticalness” of her husband. According to tradition, when he went out she tied up money for him in his handkerchief, and bade him give an exact account of it on his return. Having spent his afternoon and money with congenial spirits at some rendezvous whose name, unlike that of the Mermaid, where Elizabethan wits caroused, has been lost, he playfully assured Madonna Faustina that her allowance had gone to help the poor. She was particular that he should wear the dress of a Venetian citizen; but if he happened to go abroad in rainy weather, she called out to him from an upper window to come back and put on his old clothes. We have glimpses of him passing to and fro in Venice with Marietta, his favorite daughter, a painter of merit, whose early death saddened his later years.[12] Of his other children, two daughters entered a nunnery; a third married Casser, a German; his eldest son, Domenico, adopted his father’s profession, and assisted him in his work; another son went to the bad, and was cut off from an inheritance by his father’s will. In spite of his habit of giving away pictures, or of charging a small price for them, Tintoret bequeathed a comfortable fortune to his heirs.
[12] Marietta was born in 1560, and died in 1590.
A few of his precepts and suggestions concerning art have come down to us through Ridolfi, who had them from Aliense, one of Tintoret’s pupils.
“The study of painting is arduous,” he used to say; “and to him who advances farthest in it more difficulties appear, the sea grows ever larger.”
“Students must never fail to profit by the example of the great masters, Michael Angelo and Titian.”