A Mannerist in Madrid

On September 24, 1845, John Ruskin wrote an unguardedly rapturous letter to his father from Venice, describing the momentous impact onhim of the paintings he had seen earlier that day by Jacopo Tintoretto, at the Scuola di San Rocco:

I have had a draught of pictures today enough to drown me. I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters, & put him in the school of Art at the top, top, top of everything, with a great big black line underneath him to stop him off from everybody--and put him in the school of Intellect, next after Michael Angelo. He took it so entirely out of me today that I could do nothing at last but lie on a bench & laugh.... M Angelo himself cannot hurl figures into space as he does, nor did M Angelo ever paint space itself which would not look like a nutshell beside Tintoret's.

Tintoretto is hardly a household name, and it certainly holds little of the aura that Ruskin's effusive language implies, especially not in comparison with that of Michelangelo. Part of the reason is that most of Tintoretto's work is permanently installed on the walls and ceilings of Venice, where the artist spent his entire life. That is why no one would have been able to form much of a picture of his staggering artistic achievement unless they had spent some time in Venice. "I had always thought him a good & clever & forcible painter," Ruskin wrote, "but I had not the smallest notion of his enormous powers.... It is marvelously lucky I came here, or I might have disgraced myself for ever by speaking slightly of Tintoret. I look upon him now, though as a less perfect painter, yet as a far greater man than Titian." But Titian and Michelangelo, along with Leonardo and Raphael, are widely considered the first-magnitude stars of Italian art. Who other than Ruskin would have placed Tintoretto among or even above them?

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.