“Nature is always the same; in painting, therefore, muscles must not be varied by caprice.”
“In judging a picture, observe if, at the first examination, the eye is satisfied, and if the author has obeyed the great principles of art; as to the details, each will fall into error. Do not go immediately to look at a new work, but wait till the darts of criticism have all been shot, and men are accustomed to the sight.”
Being asked which are the most beautiful colors, he answered, “Black and white; because the former gives force to figures by deepening the shadows, the latter gives the relief.”
He insisted that only the experienced artist should draw from living models, which lack, for the most part, grace and symmetrical forms.
“Fine colors,” he said, “are sold in the Rialto shops; but design is got from the casket of genius, by hard study and long vigils, and is therefore understood and practiced by but few.”
Odoardo Fialeti asked him what to study. “Drawing,” replied Tintoret. Somewhat later, Fialeti sought further advice. “Drawing, and again drawing,” Tintoret reiterated.
“Art must perfect nature,” was his guiding rule; and he instanced that Greek artist who modeled an Aphrodite by selecting the best features of the five most beautiful women he could find.
His studio was in the most retired part of his house. Few were admitted to it, and they had to find their way thither up a dark staircase and along dark passages, by the light of a candle. There he spent most of his time,—a grave man ordinarily, as must ever be the case with genius which ranges the utmost abysses and sublimities; at heart a solitary man, so far as the absence of flesh-and-blood companions constitutes solitude, but forever attended by the great associates of his imagination. Laconic, too, in speech as with his brush; as when, in reply to a long letter from his brother, he wrote simply, “Sir: no.” But upon occasion—as that anecdote of Madonna Faustina’s allowance shows—he indulged in conviviality; and he had the gift, peculiar to a gentleman, of “being easy with persons of all ranks, and of putting them at ease.” “With his friends he preserved great affability. He was copious in fine sayings and witty hits, putting them forth with much grace, but without sign of laughter; and when he deemed it opportune, he knew also how to joke with the great.”
Tintoret’s genius was only partially acknowledged during his lifetime, and his fame has suffered strange vicissitudes since his death. At times he has been extolled with meaningless extravagance; oftener condemned, after Vasari’s lukewarm fashion, or passed over without mention. Not until Mr. Ruskin came and opened the eyes of the world had Tintoret been adequately appreciated for those points of excellence wherein he has neither rival nor second. He has suffered for the same reasons that Shakespeare was long unesteemed in France: his works are bold, very rapid, often unequal, not in the least to be measured by the yardstick of conventionalism; he treats many new subjects, and the old subjects he always treats in new fashion, thereby provoking formalists to accuse him of wilful oddity or caprice; his reputation for swiftness of execution was deemed by many presumptive evidence that he was superficial; above all, his imagination was so rich and so powerful that it required a cognate imagination to follow it.
Moreover, Tintoret was the last master of the great era of Italian painting. After him came schools which did not rely upon originality, but upon the inspiration of former masters. Pictures were but specimens of technique, and the models chosen for imitation were naturally those in which technique could be most easily reduced to rules. The public, as well as the painters themselves, gradually lost the power of valuing art as a spiritual expression. Word by word, sentence by sentence, the great language of painting was forgotten, until at last it became as a dead language. It was inevitable that Tintoret’s works, which had not always been understood by his contemporaries, should baffle the interpreters of art grammars and the pedagogues of technique.