Tintoretto's Difference by Kamini Vellodi;

Author:Kamini Vellodi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350083080
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Figure 49 Jacopo Tintoretto, Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Unreal, the light shifts from pearly opalescence to sulphurous yellow to rose-gold to bluish glazes of diamantine brilliance. It illuminates with a fierce, almost electrical charge, casting iridescent highlights and mysterious shadows of great depth. Sometimes emanating from within figures and their glowing garments, sometimes falling from without, this is a material light with palpable physical substance of its own and visibly constituted by the feverish sweeps of the painter’s brush. At times gathering into dense clots of illumination, at times diffusing into wide swathes of incandescence, it bears many functions. It bathes objects, alters their nature, and serves to announce imminent occurrences. It designates the spiritual condition of individuals as well as the collective reality of a scene. It reflects, vitalizes, augments. We sometimes find different qualities of light within the same painting – in The Agony in the Garden (Figure 48), the burnished red-gold of the Angel’s halo contrasts sharply with the cool shades of the rest of the scene, producing a hot–cold effect that that belongs to no nature as we know it, unmoored from the lived specificities of time and place. It is a light that sometimes falls in haloes, rings, and ellipses, sometimes in bands and rays, sometimes as the tremulous outlines of thunderous clouds – the shimmering, ethereal sign of an eternal dusk.

One of six Scuola Grande in Venice – charitable confraternities for works of religious devotion that provided protection and care for the under-privileged – the Scuola Grande di San Ro cco, built in the 1540s, provided Tintoretto with the space to test his imaginative powers. In conversation with the Scuola Brothers, he implemented the basic idea of glorifying the welfare functions of the Confraternity through parallel passages in the Old and New Testaments.98 Whilst the iconography is complex and erudite, it seems that Tintoretto had much freedom in the conception and realization of his compositions, which build on compositional ideas explored in his earlier work and present copious idiosyncrasies. At the same time as he was painting the San Rocco cycle, Tintoretto was working on the paintings for the Palazzo Ducale, and when we compare the two sets of works, the artist’s evident investment in San Rocco is striking. Next to the exuberant invenzione here, the works in the Palazzo Ducale are conservative and leaden, many of them marred by workshop hands. But in San Rocco, both familiar historia such as the Adoration of the Shepherds (with the Virgin Mary seated above the rafters of a rustic hayloft) (Figure 41) and the Flight into Egypt (with Mary and Joseph bursting through the plane, and set against an enchanting supernatural landscape) (Figure 50) and rarely treated historia – the Old Testament stories of Moses, in particular – are realized with a startling vision and energy.

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