Renaissance master: Tintoretto's 500th spans 2 continents

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A Venetian cloth dyer’s son, Tintoretto, a pseudonym of Jacopo Robusti, spent his entire career in Venice, becoming widely considered the last great painter of the Renaissance.

The lagoon city's churches and palazzi essentially serve as a permanent retrospective of this native son's formidable talents in using dramatic color, bold brushstrokes and daringly innovative perspective on often enormous canvasses.

To mark the 500th anniversary of his birth, the main exhibition has been hosted at the landmark Palazzo Ducale (Doges' Palace), in Venice, in which Tintoretto's imaginative use of perspective and his dynamic, inventive interpretations of mythological and religious themes are on convincing display. The exhibition has drawn more than 100,000 visitors since opening in September.

When Venice last hosted a Tintoretto retrospective, in 1937, church paintings were cut out of their frames, rolled up and carted off to the exhibition. That method would be met with horror by today's art world.

A work by Italian painter Tintoretto on display at "From Rafael till Goya" exhibition at the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, in Moscow, Russia. /VCG Photo

“The churches generally felt, and we understood, it didn't make sense to move his masterpieces across the city,” said Robert Echols, a Boston-based art historian who is one of the curators.

Some of Tintoretto's greatest works can never travel, of course, and are being celebrated in Venice. For example, in the Chapter House in the Scuola di San Rocco, admirers can lay on their backs to see Tintoretto's work.

However, some of those church works will go to the U.S. exhibition. After it closes in Venice on January 6, the exhibition travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. for a four-month run starting March 10. That will be the first-ever Tintoretto retrospective outside of Europe.

The Venice show to honor Tintoretto's birth anniversary began in 2018. The companion Washington show starts in 2019. The different years are fitting, for, while the year of his death – 1594 – is undisputed, and his grave prominent in a Venice church decorated with some of his masterpieces, historians aren't sure just when he was born. The artist's birth year is often written as 1518/1519.

(Top image: "The Paradise" by Italian painter Tintoretto on display at the exhibition "Renaissance Venice" at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid, Spain. /VCG Photo)

Source(s): AP