[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 <i>The Assumption of the Virgin,</i> 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. <i>The Miracle of the Slave,</i> 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 <i>The Miracle</i> <i>of the Slave</i> opened up a flood of commissions, among them, <i>The Washing of the Feet.</i> 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 <i>The Presentation</i> <i>of the Virgin--</i> 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, <i>San Rocco in Glory,</i> 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 <i>Crucifixion</i> 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. <i>Paradise,</i> 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 <i>Last Supper</i> 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.
