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The years of apprenticeship |
Tintoretto was born in Venice in 1518. His father, Battista, was a dyer – tintore in Italian and tintor in Venetian; hence the son got the nickname of Tintoretto, "little dyer", or "dyer's boy". Tintoretto is known to have had at least one sibling, a brother named Domenico, although an unreliable 17th-century account s... |
Little is known of Tintoretto's childhood or training. According to his early biographers Carlo Ridolfi (1642) and Marco Boschini (1660), his only formal apprenticeship was in the studio of Titian, who angrily dismissed him after only a few days—either out of jealousy of so promising a student (in Ridolfi's account) or... |
Tintoretto sought no further teaching but studied on his own account with laborious zeal. According to Ridolfi, he gained some experience by working alongside artisans who decorated furniture with paintings of mythological scenes, and studied anatomy by drawing live models and dissecting cadavers. He lived poorly, coll... |
Early works |
The young painter Andrea Schiavone, four years Tintoretto's junior, was much in his company. Tintoretto helped Schiavone at no charge with wall paintings, and in many subsequent instances, he also worked for nothing, and thus succeeded in obtaining commissions. The two earliest mural paintings of Tintoretto—done, like ... |
One of Tintoretto's early pictures still extant is in the church of the Carmine in Venice, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (c. 1542); also in S. Benedetto are the Annunciation and Christ with the Woman of Samaria. For the Scuola della Trinità (the scuole or schools of Venice were confraternities, more in the na... |
Saint Mark paintings |
In 1548 Tintoretto was commissioned to paint a large decoration for the Scuola di S. Marco: the Miracle of the Slave. Realizing that the commission presented him with a singular opportunity to establish himself as a major artist, he took extraordinary care in arranging the composition for maximum effect. The painting r... |
The painting was a triumphant success, despite some detractors. Tintoretto's friend Pietro Aretino praised the work, calling particular attention to the figure of the slave, but warned Tintoretto against hasty execution. As a result of the painting's success, Tintoretto received numerous commissions. For the church of ... |
Around 1555 he painted the Assumption of the Virgin, an oil-on-canvas painting for the church of Santa Maria dei Crociferi. |
In 1551, Paolo Veronese arrived in Venice and quickly began receiving the prestigious commissions that Tintoretto coveted. Unwilling to be overshadowed by his new rival, Tintoretto approached the leaders of his neighbourhood church, the Madonna dell'Orto, with a proposal to paint for them two colossal canvases on a cos... |
Depicting the Worship of the Golden Calf and the Last Judgment, the 14.5 metres (47.6 feet) tall paintings (both c. 1559–60) were widely admired, and Tintoretto gained a reputation for his ability to complete the most massive projects on a limited budget. Thereafter, Tintoretto habitually competed against rival painter... |
About 1560, Tintoretto married his second wife, Faustina de Vescovi, daughter of a Venetian nobleman who was the guardian grande of the Scuola Grande di San Marco. |
Scuola di San Rocco |
Between 1565 and 1567, and again from 1575 to 1588, Tintoretto produced a large number of paintings for the walls and ceilings of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. The subterfuge by which he won the commission has been called "the most notorious incident of Tintoretto's career". In 1564, four finalists—Tintoretto, Federi... |
In 1565, he resumed work at the scuola, painting the Crucifixion, for which a sum of 250 ducats was paid. In 1576 he presented gratis another centre-piece—that for the ceiling of the great hall, representing the Plague of Serpents; and in the following year he completed this ceiling with pictures of the Paschal Feast a... |
The development of fast painting techniques called prestezza allowed him to produce many works while engaged on large projects and to respond to growing demands from clients. This, and his use of assistants, enabled Tintoretto ultimately to produce a greater number of paintings for the Venetian state than any of his co... |
Tintoretto next launched out into the painting of the entire scuola and of the adjacent church of San Rocco. In November 1577, he offered to execute the works at the rate of 100 ducats per annum, with three pictures being due each year. This proposal was accepted and was punctually fulfilled, the painter's death alone ... |
It was probably in 1560, the year in which he began working in the Scuola di S. Rocco, that Tintoretto commenced his numerous paintings in the Doge's Palace; he then executed there a portrait of the Doge, Girolamo Priuli. Other works (destroyed by a fire in the palace in 1577) succeeded—the Excommunication of Frederick... |
After the fire, Tintoretto started afresh, Paolo Veronese being his colleague. In the Sala dell Anticollegio, Tintoretto painted four masterpieces—Bacchus, with Ariadne crowned by Venus, the Three Graces and Mercury, Minerva discarding Mars, and the Forge of Vulcan, which were painted for fifty ducats each, excluding m... |
Paradise |
The crowning production of Tintoretto's life was the vast Paradise painted for the Doge's Palace, in size 9.1 by 22.6 metres (29.9 by 74.1 feet), reputed to be the largest painting ever done upon canvas. While the commission for this huge work was yet pending and unassigned Tintoretto was wont to tell the senators that... |
Tintoretto competed with several other artists for the prestigious commission. A large sketch of the composition he submitted in 1577 is now in the Louvre, Paris. In 1583, he painted a second sketch with a different composition, which is in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. |
The commission was given jointly to Paolo Veronese and Francesco Bassano, but Veronese died in 1588 before starting the work, and the commission was reassigned to Tintoretto. He set up his canvas in the Scuola vecchia della Misericordia and worked indefatigably at the task, making many alterations and doing various hea... |
When the painting had been nearly completed he took it to its proper place, where it was completed largely by assistants, his son Domenico foremost among them. All Venice applauded the finished work; Ridolfi wrote that "it seemed to everyone that heavenly beatitude had been disclosed to mortal eyes." Modern art histori... |
Tintoretto was asked to name his own price, but this he left to the authorities. They tendered a handsome amount; he is said to have abated something from it, an incident perhaps more telling of his lack of greed than earlier cases where he worked for nothing at all. |
Pupils |
Tintoretto had very few pupils; his daughter, Marietta, his two sons, and Maerten de Vos of Antwerp were among them. Marietta had been a frequent companion with Tintoretto in her childhood and became an accomplished artist. His son Domenico Tintoretto frequently assisted his father in the preliminary work for great pic... |
Influence |
There are reflections of Tintoretto to be found in the Greek painter of the Spanish Renaissance El Greco, who likely saw his works during a stay in Venice, and studied them well enough that they influenced his painting style. |
Personality |
Tintoretto scarcely ever travelled away from Venice. His early biographers write of his intelligence and fierce ambition; according to Carlo Ridolfi, "he was always thinking of ways to make himself known as the most daring painter in the world." |
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 well versed in mechanics and mechanical devices also. |
While being a very agreeable companion, for the sake of his work he lived in a mostly retired fashion; even when not painting he habitually stayed in his working room surrounded by casts. Here he hardly admitted anyone, even intimate friends, and he kept his work methods secret, shared only with his assistants. He was ... |
Tintoretto maintained friendships with many writers and publishers, including Pietro Aretino, who became an important early patron. |
Marriages and children |
In about 1560, Tintoretto married his second wife, Faustina de Vescovi, daughter of a Venetian nobleman who was the guardian grande of the Scuola Grande di San Marco. Faustina and he had many children, of whom three sons (Domenico, Marco, and Zuan Battista) and four daughters (Gierolima, Lucrezia, Ottavia, and Laura) s... |
Before his marriage to Faustina, Tintoretto had a daughter, Marietta Robusti, whose mother is not known. She became highly regarded as a painter, having been trained as an artist by Tintoretto, as he would later with her half-brothers Domenico and Marco. Marietta was a portrait painter of considerable skill, as well as... |
Death |
After the completion of the Paradise Tintoretto rested for a while, and he never undertook any other work of importance, although there is no reason to suppose that his energies were exhausted if he had lived a little longer. In 1592, he became a member of the Scuola dei Mercanti. |
In 1594, he was seized with severe stomach pains, complicated with fever, that prevented him from sleeping and almost from eating for a fortnight. He died on 31 May 1594. He was buried in the church of the Madonna dell'Orto by the side of his favourite daughter Marietta, who had died in 1590 at the age of thirty. |
In 1866, the grave of the Vescovi—his wife's family—and Tintoretto was opened, and the remains of nine members of the joint families were found in it. The grave was then moved to a new location, to the right of the choir. |
Style |
Tintoretto's style of painting is characterized by bold brushwork and the use of long strokes to define contours and highlights. His paintings emphasize the energy of human bodies in motion and often exploit extreme foreshortening and perspective effects to heighten the drama. Narrative content is conveyed by the gestu... |
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. 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 of his pictu... |
A comparison of Tintoretto's final The Last Supper—one of his nine known paintings on the subject— with Leonardo da Vinci's treatment of the same subject provides an instructive demonstration of how artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance. Leonardo's is all classical repose. The disciples radiate awa... |
Tintoretto was Venice's most prolific painter of portraits during his career. Modern critics have often described his portraits as routine works, although his skill in depicting elderly men, such as Alvise Cornaro (1560/1565), has been widely admired. According to art historians Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, the... |
He painted two self-portraits. In the first (c. 1546–47; Philadelphia Museum of Art), he presents himself without the trappings of status that were customary in self-portraits that came before. The image's informality, the directness of the subject's gaze, and the bold brushwork visible throughout were innovative—it ha... |
Legacy |
In 2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum announced that the painting The Embarkation of St Helena in the Holy Land had been painted by Tintoretto (and not by his contemporary Andrea Schiavone, as previously thought) as part of a series of three paintings depicting the legend of St Helena and the Holy Cross. |
In 2019, honouring the anniversary of the birth of Tintoretto, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in cooperation with the Gallerie dell'Accademia organized a travelling exhibit, the first in the United States. The exhibition features nearly 50 paintings and more than a dozen works on paper spanning the artist's e... |
Gallery |
Notes |
References |
Sources |
Bernari, Carlo, and Pierluigi de Vecchi (1970). L'opera completa del Tintoretto. Milano: Rizzoli. OCLC 478839728 (Italian language) |
Butterfield, Andrew (26 April 2007). "Brush with Genius". New York Review of Books. 54 (7). NYREV, Inc. Retrieved 18 April 2007. |
Echols, Robert (2018). Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300230406. |
Nichols, Tom (2015) [1999]. Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, revised and expanded second edition. London: Reaktion Books ISBN 978 1 78023 450 2. |
Ridolfi, Carlo (1642). La Vita di Giacopo Robusti (A Life of Tintoretto) |
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rossetti, William Michael (1911). "Tintoretto, Jacopo Robusti". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 1001–1003. |
External links |
52 artworks by or after Tintoretto at the Art UK site |
Works at Web Gallery of Art, the most complete gallery of the web |
JacopoTintoretto.org 257 works by Tintoretto |
Artcyclopedia – Tintoretto's paintings |
Works and literature on PubHist |
Jacopo Tintoretto. Pictures and Biography |
Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, exhibition at National Gallery of Art, March 4 – July 7, 2019 |
Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka born Mihály Tivadar Kosztka (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈtivɒdɒr ˈt͡ʃontvaːri ˈkostkɒ]; 5 July 1853 – 20 June 1919) was a Hungarian painter who was part of the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century. Working mostly in Budapest, he was one of the first Hungarian painters to become k... |
His works are held by the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest and the Csontváry Museum in Pécs, among other institutions and private collectors. |
Biography |
Csontváry was born on 5 July 1853 in Kisszeben, Sáros County, Kingdom of Hungary (today Sabinov, Slovakia), and died 20 June 1919 in Budapest. His father, Dr. László Kosztka, was a physician and pharmacist, his mother was Franciska Hajczelmajer of Darócz (now Šarišské Dravce, Slovakia). His ancestors on his father's si... |
On the hot sunny afternoon of 13 October 1880, when he was 27 years old, he had a mystic vision. He heard a voice saying, "You are going to be the greatest painter of the world, greater than Raphael." He took journeys around Europe, visited the galleries of the Vatican, and returned to Hungary to earn money for his jou... |
He painted his major works between 1903 and 1909. He had some exhibitions in Paris (1907) and Western Europe. Most of the critics in Western Europe recognized his abilities, art and congeniality, but in the Kingdom of Hungary during his life, he was considered to be an eccentric crank for several reasons, e. g. for his... |
After his death, 42 of Csontváry's paintings lay rolled up, and his heirs almost sold them to be used as cart tarp. They might have been lost forever, if an architect named Gedeon Gerlóczy had not been searching for a studio at the very time and in the very place, stumbling upon the paintings and buying them. For fifty... |
He painted more than one hundred pictures, the most famous and emblematic of which is probably The Lonely Cedar (Magányos cédrus). His art connects with post-impressionism and expressionism, but he was an autodidact and cannot be classified into one style. He identified as a "sunway"-painter, a term which he created. |
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