Skip to main content

Tintoretto


"Chaos, a rough and unordered mass."- Ovid, Metamorphoses

The art of Tintoretto aims to draw an unlikely equivalence between chaos and beauty. There seems always a commotion going on in his paintings. Robust bodies are confusedly tangled, insofar as one is usually convinced that the depictions are about wars, even when most of them are not. A sense of fieriness and ferocity is instantly felt, but that of airiness, which is a quality almost reserved for monumental paintings like Tintoretto’s, is glaringly absent. It is curious of how the painter had maintained, throughout his career, a predilection of conscientiously filling up every corner of the canvas, leaving barely any spaces void.

Such complexity of composition, however, does not render Tintoretto’s painting a frustrating imbroglio. There is an internal equilibrium within the constant motion. The crowdedness of the scene of The Last Supper (1592-94) is relieved somewhat by the ball of blaze above the table, and the halos that encircle the heads of Christ and the disciples, so that there is a marked contrast between light and shade (here the painter presents a very crude example of chiaroscuro). Tintoretto’s version is far removed from any typical depiction of the last supper. Besides the stock characters, the painter also included in the feast a handful of peasants, who are too preoccupied with their own affairs to notice anything amiss. Hovering on the top of the scene are the ghosts, bearing down on Jesus Christ as they are ready to summon his departing spirit. The people, the saints, the spirits- they are all present.



To be a viewer of Tintoretto’s work one is expected to happen on very few let-ups of the tumultuous dramas. The painter did not need to generate chaos to excite intense emotions. Even with a relatively sparsely populated painting like The Stealing of the Dead Body of St. Mark (1562-66), Tintoretto can still manage to build the tension towards boiling point. Again, there is this frenetic clutter of people in the foreground- three men struggling to smuggle away a dead body, the heaviness of which is telling. This is not the inert dead body one normally encounters; it retains a renewed vigour as if the soul is still holding tenaciously on the dying flesh. A storm is brewing- either Heavens is complicit with this ignoble affair, or the leaden sky is the portent of an imminent retribution.


Some said Tintoretto pioneered the most original style of Mannerism, others considered him a baroque artist ahead of his time. The unanimous opinion, however, is that there exists a perceptible gulf between Tintoretto’s art and that of the other Renaissance heavyweights. The painter eschewed sensuous beauty that is common with Renaissance paintings. Instead he exhibited with his paintings energy, force, violence, viciousness, and so forth in the most emphatic manner. Invariably, the subject matters are about wars, contests, the fall of the hero and the rise of the insidious. The victory is not always equivalent to a glorious feat. In St. Louis, St. George and the Princess (c. 1553), the princess effortlessly subdued the dragon, and is now sitting astride the beast and glancing at the saints, her eye speaks of unmitigated pride. The saints are noticeably mortified, with one of them throwing up his hands- why! You just killed a dragon! One can expect very soon the princess being severely admonished.



After surveying Tintoretto’s oeuvre I confess I derive from it no pleasant feelings. But I do not dismiss the truth that from time to time I find myself perversely drawn towards the sort of beauty that is almost the antithesis of the conventional type. This is evidenced by my abiding love for Caravaggio, most of whose paintings, however, prompted me to avert my glance on the first sight. But do I really take into consideration the importance of beauty when I’m looking at paintings by Tintoretto or Caravaggio? I ask myself. Maybe not so much as subscribing to what really matters, namely that some painters were not shy from revealing the least savoury details of a given event. For them art is virtually the exposure of the unvarnished truth.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke...
2 comments
Read more

Felix Vallotton

"He was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him."- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw One sees immediately from Felix Vallotton’s paintings that he must had been a gifted raconteur. The painter was possessed of the natural aptitude of unfolding and withholding the narrative flow at the most propitious timing. Mysteriousness emerges. The viewers are bound to be tantalised. Whilst most of Vallotton’s paintings are about the quotidian, the domestic, beneath them their pent-up energy seethes and trembles, threatening to explode at any moment. It isn’t just the quotidian that he depicted, but the interior dramas. Any reader of Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s plays will know that interior drama can be the most frenetic. A woman leans towards a man, her hand entwines his body in show of sensuousness. She whispers into his ears something that the viewers are forbidden the right to privy to. But one has the eye to deduce, from the slightly wrinkled of the man’s nose and t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are ...
Post a Comment
Read more