VENETIAN BRASS.(Tintoretto)

Tintoretto was too good an artist for his time's uses; he still clamors for a proper role, seeking affirmation, four centuries later. This thought came to me as whimsy, and stayed as conviction, at the Prado, in Madrid, which has just opened the second-ever retrospective (the first was in Venice, in 1937) of Jacopo Comin, who was also known as Robusti, and called Tintoretto, or "Little Dyer," after his father's profession. Tintoretto (1518-94) is the most mercurial of the five undisputed immortals of Venetian painting--the others being Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and Veronese--and I was eager to see the Prado show, because I have never managed to get a satisfying fix on him. How could someone so great, able to summon the world with a brushstroke, be so inconsistent in style, and, on occasion, so awful? Stupefyingly prolific, Tintoretto garnished the walls, ceilings, altars, exteriors, and even the furniture of Venice, performing commissions for free when that was what it took to edge out a rival. (He was not popular with his fellow-artists.) He brought off one of the world's largest paintings--"Paradise" (1588-92), in the Ducal Palace, which, at seventy-two feet long and twenty-three feet high, is so vast as to be essentially unseeable--and perhaps history's most sustained demonstration of sheer painterly talent, brimming the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, between 1564 and 1588, with pictures whose profusion and intensity burn the most concerted effort of looking to ashes. But he and his populous workshop also perpetrated some of the grimmest daubs--murky and slack--that you ever rushed past with a shudder. I realized, too late, that my puzzlement was a warning. Now I feel that I have acquired a brilliant, neurotic, exhausting friend who enjoins me to undertake on his behalf campaigns that he bungled when their conduct was up to him.

Nothing inferior taxes the eye at the Prado, which augments the cream of Tintorettos in European and American collections with a few loans from Venice, where hundreds of his paintings--including his greatest works, such as "The Miracle of the Slave" (1548)--reside immovably in churches, palaces, and galleries. The show more than overcomes doubts about presuming to assess the artist outside his home town, which he is known to have left just twice, briefly, in his life. The well-restored canvases, shown in good light, sparkle and blaze. Some make plungingly deep space with muscular figures of different sizes; your mind provides perspective that the artist didn't deign to chart. Others array action on intersecting diagonals, along which someone is apt to be arriving from somewhere at terrific speed. (There is an old line that Tintoretto invented the movies; his ways of enkindling routine scenarios, with thrilling visual rhythms that seem to unfurl in time, endorse it.) He drew with his brush, light over dark--so that shadings came first, imparting a sumptuous density to forms that are hit with highlights like spatters of sun. He is supposed to have said that his favorite colors were black and white, but he could be every bit the startling and seductive Venetian colorist when a commission required it. With abject competitive fury, he was not above imitating the grand dragon of the Venice art world, Titian, and his designated successor, Veronese.

"As a matter of fact, he almost never takes the liberty of being himself unless someone builds up his confidence and leaves him alone in an empty room," Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a 1957 essay, "The Venetian Pariah." For Sartre, Tintoretto is an avatar of existential anguish, who was both behind his time--as the last native-born master on a scene ruled by a cosmopolitan elite--and ahead of it, as the ideal artist for a rising bourgeoisie that was too intimidated by the pomp of the ducal republic to recognize itself in his demotic trashings of aristocratic decorum. Intellectuals of the era, while in awe of Tintoretto's gifts, scolded him for being too fast, careless, and insolent; when Vasari credited him with "the most extraordinary brain that the art of ...