Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto: The Renaissance Artist Of Modernity?
Death in Venice: Plague and Quarantine.
‘‘I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today before Tintoretto. Just be so good as to take my list of painters, and put him in the school of Art at the top, top, top of everything, with a great big black line to stop him off from everybody…. As for painting, I think I didn’t know what it meant till today.’’
— John Ruskin
According to standard opinion Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael were the supreme artists of the sixteenth century; yet often during the last four hundred years, viewers have gazed in awe and surprise at works by Tintoretto and wondered if he might be the greatest painter of all. I am one such person. The paintings of Jacopo Tintoretto come as a revelation, not a divinely sponsored act for me, but a purely humanistic and artistic one.
Tintoretto was a painter of daring originality and dazzling technical command. Yet the full measure of Tintoretto’s colossal achievement can only be grasped in Venice, the city of his birth where he worked for his entire career.
It is only here that he created on such an epic scale, the likes of which had never been seen before. The Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco is more…
