|
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
