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Updated: June 9, 2025
The landscape of the great figure painters is often majestic in the highest degree, and Tintoret's especially shows exactly the same power and feeling as Turner's.
This depends mainly upon Tintoret's handling of light and shade, and his foreshortenings: it enables him to compose entirely in huge masses, to divide or concentrate the interest, to throw into vague insignificance the less important parts of a situation in order to insist upon the more important; it gives him the power also of impressing us by the colossal and the ominous.
But at this moment, solemnized before the problems of life, he found these problems hinted in the mystic symbolism of the School of S. Rocco; with eyes now opened to pre-Reformation Christianity, he found its completed outcome in Tintoret's interpretation of the life of Christ and the types of the Old Testament; fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St.
By the discipline of five hundred years they had learned and inherited such power, that whereas all former painters could be right only by effort, they could be right with ease; and whereas all former painters could be right only under restraint, they could be right, free. Tintoret's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, Reynolds', and Velasquez's, are all as free as the air, and yet right.
This drawing, then the arabesque traced in the air by Tintoret's flying figures, by Titian's forest branches; this colouring the magic conditions of light and hue in the atmosphere of Titian's Lace-girl, or Rubens's Descent from the Cross these essential pictorial qualities must first of all delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment of Venetian glass; and through this delight only be the medium of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them, in the intention of the composer.
Yet even Tintoret's fascinated contemporaries said of him that he 'used three pencils: one gold, one silver, one lead. Naturally Tintoretto painted an immense number of pictures, to only three of which, however, he appended his name.
The uncertainty of Tintoret's inspirations, the uncertainty of result of these astonishing pictorial methods of attaining the dramatic, the occasional vapidness and vulgarity of the man, unrestrained by any stately tradition like the vapidness and vulgarity of so many earlier masters, comes out already at S. Rocco.
It was no listless dreamer that painted it, but one with a gorgeous imagination and yet a full knowledge of the world, enabling him to give substance to his visions. Tintoret's stormy landscapes are as beautiful in their way as Giorgione's dreamy ones, and each carries out the mood of the rest of the picture. This one is full of power, mystery, and romance.
Tintoret's power was native, and had received little training; it is a proof of the strength of that power that he could not quench it. His faults, as a painter, I have already had to chronicle in the sketch of the man.
Strange as the conception is it is hard to believe that in a mind so peculiarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could have been without a definite meaning. And if this be so, it is a meaning that one can hardly fail to read in the history of the time. The brief interval of peace and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had ceased to toil.
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