[MUSIC]
Narrator: Jacopo Tintoretto
in his 20s--
a self-portrait
by a complex character,
determined,
ambitious, and forceful.
Reader: His brush was
a thunderbolt that terrified
everyone with its lightning.
Narrator: His direct gaze,
framed by a scruffy
beard and tousled hair,
confronts the viewer.
It was a first in artist's
self-portraits.
Generations of painters--
Velazquez, Rembrandt, Courbet,
Cezanne all took note.
Tintoretto was announcing
the arrival
of an undeniable force
in the history of European art,
an arrival that astonished
his contemporary, Giorgio
Vasari.
Reader: Swift, resolute,
fantastic, and extravagant,
and the most extraordinary brain
that the art of painting
has ever produced.
Frederick Ilchman: Tintoretto
was a great film director
or orchestra conductor.
He can marshal all sorts
of forces to make these pictures
that are both very
expansive and energetic,
but also have
beautiful little details.
He could really turn it on when
he needed to.
Narrator: His life began
in Venice.
Venetians believed they lived
under the protection of Mark
the Evangelist, founder
of the Christian church
in Egypt.
His remains were spirited away
from Alexandria by two Venetian
merchants and taken to Venice
in the ninth century.
The relics eventually came
to rest in the Basilica of San
Marco.
At the time of Tintoretto's
birth in 1518 or 19, the city
had enjoyed sovereignty for 700
years.
Ilchman: Venice is not just
a city where many of the streets
are canals.
Venice is also a place where you
have striking juxtapositions
of light and dark.
Tintoretto seems to have
absorbed these lessons of being
of a Venetian.
And in many of his pictures
there are great contrasts
of lighting and pools
of darkness
right next to each other
in the same composition.
Narrator: Tintoretto first
encountered the pigments used
in Venetian painting
in his childhood.
Born Jacopo Robusti,
he was the son of a cloth-dyer
and gained an early exposure
to the nature and value
of pigments.
Tintore means "dyer" in Italian,
and Jacopo adopted Tintoretto,
"little dyer" as his name.
He probably began his career
at the age of 12
in the studio of Titian,
the city's dominant artist
in the first half
of the 16th century.
Titian had painted
a major altarpiece
for the Frari,
the great Franciscan church
of Venice.
In The Assumption of the Virgin,
Mary rises up to heaven,
a masterpiece of glowing color
that would have impressed
the young Tintoretto.
But the chemistry
between the two proud artists
was most likely volatile.
Titian dismissed Tintoretto
from his studio.
Robert Echols: Tintoretto was
a young and ambitious newcomer.
It's really inevitable that they
would have clashed,
given Tintoretto's particularly
aggressive personality.
He set himself up
as a challenger,
as the kind of anti-Titian,
the representative
of Michelangelo in Venice
who was bringing a new kind
of painting to the city.
Narrator: Titian would hinder
Tintoretto for years,
blocking commissions
and admissions to organizations
that could have offered him work
until the older painter died
in 1576.
But Tintoretto's
grudging admiration for Titian
survived.
The young artist wrote
his lifelong ambition
on the wall of his studio--
the drawing of Michelangelo
and the coloring of Titian.
In his own works, Jacopo would
combine the muscular drawing
of human figures
he found in Michelangelo
with the sensuous and colorful
effects of Titian.
He expressively heightened
gestures and poses to create
dramas on canvas.
And in the 16th century,
religion would provide more
than enough drama
to drive Tintoretto's career.
Beginning in 1517, Catholicism
was under attack
from the Protestant Reformation
begun by the German priest
Martin Luther.
He railed at the church's
corruption and extravagance,
and questioned
core Catholic beliefs.
The Catholic church responded
vigorously, launching
the Counter-Reformation,
commissioning narrative
paintings that would fortify
their views.
The Vatican insisted
that the bread and wine served
at the Last Supper
were not symbolic, as Luther
claimed, but miraculously became
the body and blood of Christ.
The church also defended
the veneration of saints
and good works as paths
to salvation.
Tintoretto complied,
but his works reveal a sympathy
for reformist trends
within the church.
They emphasize the poverty
and humility of Christ
and his followers,
their simple garments
and humble surroundings.
Maria Agnese Chiari Moretto
Wiel: Tintoretto was undoubtedly
the most religious,
in the strict sense,
of all Venetian painters
of the 16th century.
His religiousness was not only
formal, but he was a painter who
really sensed the spirit
in himself.
Narrator: In the 1540s,
the young artist reimagined
the chaotic scene
of the apostle Paul blinded
by his vision of the divine
on the road to Damascus.
The miracle turned Paul
from an enemy of Christianity
into a true believer.
The scene is framed by mountain
peaks, a windswept landscape,
and a raging river.
The figures occupy pockets
of space, separated
from each other
and adding to the sense
of overwhelming confusion.
It astounded his contemporaries,
who expected spatial coherence
in their paintings.
Tintoretto ordered things
differently.
Painting an oil on canvas
rather than tempera
on wooden panel
was widespread in Venice
by the early 1500s.
Dragging a loaded brush
across the canvas, artists could
exploit its rough surface.
Oil-based paints dry slowly
and could be blended together.
Layers could be built up
or pigments applied thinly
with opaque or translucent
glazes.
Intense colors and luminosity
were possible.
Tintoretto pushed
these expressive possibilities
to the edge and sometimes
crossed a line that worried
critics, including Vasari.
Reader: This master at times
has left as finished works,
sketches so rough
that the brushstrokes may be
seen done more by chance
and vehemence
than with judgment and design.
Echols: From the beginning
his brushwork is very loose.
He learned to paint from fresco
painters and furniture painters
who had to operate very rapidly.
Jorge Pombo: Tintoretto is
the first artist, or one
of the first,
to shout with his technique,
that the brush stroke is not
enslaved to what it's
representing.
Tintoretto's brushwork
is a gesture, it's a movement.
It's not born from copying
reality.
Narrator: In the Renaissance,
confraternities were
lay religious organizations that
served the poor and sick.
Called Scuole in Italian,
they accumulated great wealth
through membership dues,
bequests, and donations.
The Scuola Grande di San Marco
hired Tintoretto to create
paintings for its chapter hall
where members of the brotherhood
convened for meetings
and masses.
The room is much changed
from its appearance in Jacopo's
day.
Its grandeur was
daunting in the mid-16th
century.
The Miracle of the Slave,
his first masterpiece, completed
in 1548, recounts a legend,
St. Mark's rescue
of a Christian slave
condemned to torture
by his pagan master
for making a pilgrimage
to Venice to venerate
the Saint's relics.
Tintoretto composed the scene
like a stage play crowded
with actors.
Saint Mark dives headfirst
into the scene,
shattering the instruments
of torture.
The turbaned executioner holds
up the fragments of a mallet
toward the master.
Astounded by the miracle,
he converted to Christianity.
The painting is all Tintoretto,
electrified
by the strenuous dramatic
poses and vivid contrasts
of light and shadow.
The success of The Miracle
of the Slave opened up a flood
of commissions, among them,
The Washing of the Feet.
At the Last Supper, Jesus poured
water into a basin
and, in an act
of profound humility,
cleansed the feet
of his disciples.
After a decade of struggle,
Tintoretto must have felt
that he had arrived, poised
to become the dominant painter
in Venice.
And then an incredibly talented
and, worse yet, younger rival
from Verona appeared in Venice.
Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese
made his debut in 1551
with an impressive altarpiece
for the Church of San Francesco
de La Vigna.
Veronese's sumptuous elegance
gave patrons a clear alternative
to Tintoretto.
The two painters became
the reigning rivals of Venetian
painting until Veronese's death
in 1588.
Partly to outdo Veronese,
Tintoretto began to make large
paintings for his neighborhood
church of the Madonna dell'Orto.
In The Presentation
of the Virgin-- an apocryphal
story--
Mary, aged three,
ascends the stairs
to the high priest of the temple
in Jerusalem unassisted.
Titian had treated the subject
with stately grandeur 20 years
earlier.
But Tintoretto made the steps
appear dramatically
steep and precarious, as they
would seem to a small child.
Tintoretto had been looking
for a long-term relationship
with a powerful patron.
He found one
in the confraternity of San
Rocco, painting his first work
for the brotherhood
for its church in 1549.
It shows the patron saint
of plague victims, San Rocco,
ministering to the sick.
The plague was an ongoing threat
to the port city.
The stricken Venetians are
arrayed across the canvas
in varying states of agony.
Ilchman: He was proving
to the Venetian public
and to other artists
that he had complete mastery
of the human body,
the muscular body seen
from all angles.
Narrator: After completing
the painting, Tintoretto applied
for membership
in the confraternity,
but his request was ignored,
perhaps because of Titian's
hostility.
A decade later,
the brotherhood's newly
constructed meeting house
was completed, lacking
only paintings.
In 1564, several painters were
invited to submit
preliminary designs
for a painting at the center
of the ceiling
in the upper floor boardroom.
In one of the most
notorious episodes
in the history of art,
Tintoretto tricked his rivals.
Instead of providing a drawing,
he secretly installed
a finished painting
on the ceiling.
When the judges convened,
he unveiled, San Rocco in Glory,
and offered it as a donation,
knowing that the Scuola's rules
prevented them from refusing
charitable gifts.
The brothers admitted Tintoretto
to the confraternity
the following year.
Tintoretto's Crucifixion
for the boardroom
unfolds in cinematic fashion.
A viewer entering the room
first sees the Virgin Mary
and other mourners swooning
at the base of the cross,
and then the figure
of the crucified Christ,
and finally
the extraordinary range
of activities surrounding
the central theme.
In 1577, Tintoretto managed
to persuade the Scuola to grant
him a stipend of 100 ducats
annually, effectively enabling
him to shut out his competitors
and decorate
the entire vast building
himself.
On the ground floor, Tintoretto
painted scenes from the life
of the Virgin,
starting
with the archangel Gabriel
delivering
the extraordinary news that Mary
will bear the Son of God.
Ilchman: In this scene
she's not a small and demure
figure like you typically see
in religious art.
No, she's large, heroic,
muscular.
She's up to the magnitude
of her task.
But at the same time
the setting's very humble.
Notice, for example,
the broken chair.
This is very
typical of Tintoretto, this idea
that humble settings have
a certain validity, spiritually
in terms of piety.
Narrator: Two paintings,
likely images of the Virgin
Mary, flank the altar.
These enigmatic canvases,
typical of Tintoretto's
late style, are the capstone
of four decades of his work
for the Scuola Grande di San
Rocco.
The Venetian Republic was headed
by a doge, a ruler elected
by an assembly of noblemen.
His official residence,
the Palazzo Ducale formed
the heart of the government.
In 1577 fire broke out, damaging
much of the palace.
Venetian artists mobilized
to rebuild and decorate it.
Tintoretto's most beautiful
contributions are
mythological scenes.
The wedding of the god Bacchus
to Ariadne, crowned with stars
by an airborne Venus,
alludes to Venice's
symbolic marriage to the sea.
The artist and his workshop
created major works
for the great council hall.
Paradise, designed
by Tintoretto, by then 70,
was completed by his assistants.
It's considered the largest
Old Master painting on canvas.
The work depicts
the second coming of Christ
as savior and the bringer
of justice,
the model for the doge
and his counselor seated
directly below.
Tintoretto's final Last Supper
hangs in the Church of San
Giorgio Maggiore, designed
by Andrea Palladio.
He transformed the last meal
of Christ on Earth
into a transcendent
and otherworldly phenomenon.
Tintoretto died in May of 1594.
In his final self-portrait,
he created
an unflinching likeness
of himself
as a tired, elderly man.
He confronts us and eternity
head on with a transfixing gaze.
The paintings Tintoretto created
for the Scuola Grande di San
Rocco and the masterpieces
he painted for the churches
and palaces of Venice
won him his reputation
as an artist for the ages.
[MUSIC]
This film was made possible
by the HRH Foundation.
