Tintoretto and the Truths of Incoherence

By Hahn, Robert

WHEN CARLO RIDOLFI, his seventeenth-century biographer, wrote that Tintoretto wanted to be the world’s most venturesome painter, he touched in one word on both the magnitude and the eccentricity of an ambition: on Tintoretto’s longing to become renowned and his intention to be known less for canonical Renaissance virtues, such as mastery of color and representation, and more for imagination and originality. Having once conceived this image of himself, Tintoretto spent a lifetime projecting it, becoming in the process a self- invented man, a creation he achieved through a combination of audacity and relentlessness, and with the only means at his disposal. Over the course of a career spanning fifty years and five hundred paintings, he forged an identity through art, driving himself to become Venice’s most prolific painter, willing himself to be its most original. The keys to that originality were improvisational style and expressive design, both of which sprang from an idiosyncratic working method. As far as we can tell, Tintoretto did no preparatory studies (although he drew individual figures, employing variations on them repeatedly in his paintings), but, rather, he worked out his compositions in a cameo theater, a box where he set up a stage and deployed small figures made of clay and wax. His planning was thorough, up to a point-he considered where paintings would hang, how natural light would fall on them, and where a viewer would stand to see them-but once he set to work he attacked the canvas with a speed, gusto, and freedom that seem improvisational, engaging the viewer directly in the brushstroke, the interplay of pigment and canvas, the rhythms of a painter in action. The style is spontaneous, and the organization seems no less inspired. More intuitive than rational, more interested in motion and impact than order and logic, his designs aim to immerse us in their actions, involving us psychologically and viscerally. To do so, they rely on a repertoire of devices that strain coherence and risk distraction: asymmetrical staging, intensified by veering diagonals; figures caught in strenuous action, often among teeming crowds; mysterious light sources; shifting perspectives; and irrational distortions of space, from severely receding depth to claustrophobic compression.

Tintoretto’s intentions-when he thrusts us into the heart of an event, denying us the balance and proportion that a cooler, more classical distance might provide-are to challenge our preconceptions about familiar stories and to complicate their meanings. Such purposes are rooted in his personality. Ambivalent and conflicted by nature, he instinctively felt that because truth existed in multiple forms, it could be grasped only in juxtapositions of its disparate shapes and the orbits generated by their gravitational struggles. Thus he conceived of the picture plane as an arena of uncertainty and contention, and he proposed that our experience of a painting could be as complex, even as distracting and unfocused, as our experience of life.

In the following pages, I explore Tintoretto’s vision and strategy through a detailed discussion of four paintings: Si. Mark Saving a Saracen, the Crucifixion in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the Last Judgment, and the Slaughter of the Innocents. My interpretations are personal, based on intimate encounters with the paintings in Venice, where all of Tintoretto’s work was done, and where his greatest canvasses must be seen; at the same time, I am indebted to insights provided by David Rosand’s Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, Tim Nichols’s Tintoretto, and Patricia Fortini Brown’s Art and Life in Renaissance Venice.

St. Mark Saving a Saracen

Tintoretto’s originality is most striking in his largest and most elaborate productions, but it is also evident in works of more limited scope, such as Si. Mark Saving a Saracen (1562)-although at thirteen feet high and eleven feet wide the painting is hardly small. (Tintoretto was a small man physically, but the scale of his paintings, like his ambitions, inclined to immensity.) It was one of a series he did for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, where Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, among others, had already contributed scenes from the life of the saint. The Scuola is located in the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, a wide piazza that in Tintoretto’s time was one of the most important squares in Venice, although it hardly seems so today. When the Scuola closed (the building now houses part of the civic hospital), three of its Tintorettos-the Saracen, the Miracle of the Slave, and the Removal of the Body of St. Mark-went across the Grand Canal to the Accademia, while a fourth, the Recovery of the Body of St. Mark, ended up in Milan. The Saracen has suffered over the centuries, first from decay and deterioration and then from a nineteenthcentury restoration that played havoc with its colors, although more recent work, in 1959, undid much of the damage.

A ship has been wrecked in a violent storm off Alexandria, and some Venetian sailors in a dinghy are trying to save a handful of foundering survivors, or perhaps ignoring them (the scene appears confusing on this point), because they are from a Saracen (i.e., infidel) ship. But one of the Saracens happens to be a closet Christian, eliciting the miraculous appearance of St. Mark, who wings in from the upper right-hand corner to pluck the survivor from the waves. A handsome young man, nearly life-sized, naked aside from a remnant of gown wrapped around his hips, the Saracen dangles from the arms of the saint who is about to lower him into the dinghy. Although this small craft looks sturdy enough, it rides so low in the water that waves wash in from one side and pour across the gunwale on the other.

It has a crew of four. One of them, in the back, struggles with a pair of oars and looks down at a muscular Saracen hanging on the rim of the boat; another leans over and plunges one arm in the water, fishing for a figure nearly sunk from sight (we see a turbaned head), while with the other he points to the saint, perhaps to imply that a quick conversion would help the sinking infidel. Another crew member leans perilously over the side, staring up toward the flying saint-his imbalance is the product of shock and awe-and a fourth is so overwhelmed he is in fact falling overboard. The melodramatic responses of these figures relate to one of Tintoretto’s favorite themes, the stunning impact of miracle. When it explodes into our lives, he suggests, the miraculous can be overwhelming, and the salvation it offers may come at the cost of disruption and dismay (a paradoxical intuition shared by another anguished believer, Flannery O’Connor, who declaims, in one of her stories, “GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY”).

The rest of the scene is wave, cloud, and roaring wind: the digitalized effects of films like Master and Commander and A Perfect Storm are tame by comparison, and nature has seldom been depicted in painting with such ferocious menace (although Poussins Wmter and Winslow Homers fiercer seascapes come to mind). The sea is deep green but a green congealed, cloudy, ominous-a color gorgeous and frightening at once-and its shape is convulsively shapeless. There is no order or pattern to these waves, no sense of swell or sweep, but only a random folding and twisting and heaving. This is nature out of control, not a seascape but a vision of vastness, purged of sentimentality and prettiness, a sea whose beauty is one with its terrifying power.

Stories of tumult spoke strongly to Tintoretto, apparently for personal reasons, and when he dramatized them he sought to create a responsive, expressive anxiety, calling on some of his favorite compositional strategies to achieve this effect. Here he begins with a typical displacement, shifting the miraculous rescue off center, relegating St. Mark to an upper corner of the canvas, and moving the rescued Saracen slightly but emphatically to the right of the central axis; this opens up the foreground and transfers our focus from the rescue to the pitching dingy, which slants at a shallow angle and yaws toward us precariously. It is thrust aggressively to the front and bottom of the picture plane, leaving no space between us and the boat, a constriction Tintoretto intensifies by cropping the scene closely on both sides (the stern marks the left margin, where the rowers flowing robes vanish beyond the frame). In the tempestuous background, which seems to press toward us, depriving us of vista or escape, the left side is clogged with pieces of the wrecked ship (a huge sail has fallen, flapping uselessly as it settles onto the waves) while on the right the dark sea merges with a livid cloudscape. The effect is suffocating. (Tintoretto creates a similar claustrophobia in Christ at the Healing Pool in the church of San Rocco, and in the Last Supper at San Polo, where he also intensifies our involvement by tilting the scene toward us.)

Another painter of this scene might emphasize miracle and rescue more unequivocally, but Tintoretto, while giving us a painting about miraculous salvation, places equal stress on loss and peril, on the hapless victims and the forces that threaten them. This decision reflects not only his striving for originality but his apprehension of the world as complex, factious, and threatening, and his willingness, in order to embody that vision, to create discomfort and to frustrate our expectations of order and balance. These motives account for the unnerving strangeness of many of his paintings, and for their emotive and mythic amplitude. By dramatizing chaos with evocative energy, Tintoretto extends the range of his stories’ meanings, beyond their human and Biblical dimensions and into the realm of the cosmic and the primordial. He involves us both in the characters and events of his stories (represented with galvanizing realism) and the larger world enveloping them (evoked through unorthodox compositional and atmospheric strategies, more psychological than realistic, sometimes surreal): a universe of forces beyond our control and our understanding. The Crucifixion in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Tintoretto risks incoherence in his quest for imaginative amplitude and power; he disorients the audience in the hope of creating a fresh experience of a familiar event. His best-known painting, the immense and overwhelming Crucifixion in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, offers a compendium of the strategies he employs to achieve these ends: multiple points of visual entry; unnatural sources and behavior of light; a shifting mix of naturalism and symbolism; a derangement and complication of space, engineered for the most part by crossing and receding diagonals; an idiosyncratic focus on ancillary figures and events, expanding the story’s range at the risk of distraction; and an elastic sense of time, creating an intricate simultaneity. The Crucifixion is painting as total theater or as grand opera-above all as opera staged in the antic, postmodern, “Eurotrash” manner, where composer, director, stage manager, and choreographer (functions all filled by Tintoretto) cast about for new treatments of traditional material, making unabashed use of every resource at their disposal.

The Crucifixion is found on the second floor of the Scuola, in an inner room called the SaIa del Albergo, a meeting place for the governing board; there, above a long, elevated bench (where the board conducted its deliberations), the painting hangs, filling an entire wall. It is a breathtaking 40 feet wide and 17 1/2 feet high.

As we approach the inner room, the painting is framed in its doorway (we see the base of Christ’s cross and a ladder propped behind it), and when we enter the room it rises and spreads before us. The room is small enough that a single French tour can fill it to overflowing, but if you wait until the guide has completed her animated chatter and the tour disperses to gawk laboriously at the ceiling paintings in the Sala Grande, you will be rewarded by having the space to yourself (everyone else is apparently somewhere around San Marco). As you take your bearings, you become aware of three other paintings, high on the wall behind you, also by Tintoretto- Christ before Pilate, the Ecce Homo, and the Ascent to Calvary-and since the artist conceived of the room as a single experience, he expects you to bear these paintings in mind.

The central placement of Christ, a decision dictated by the door, is the Crucifixion’s sole concession to convention; nothing else fails to surprise or to speak of Tintoretto’s originality, not even the central cross, for that matter, since it seems preternaturally, expressionistically tall, accentuated by the ladder behind it, tall and narrow itself, propped at an anxiously tight angle (halfway up the ladder a man dangles precariously, reaching down to grab a stick with a sponge attached), and by the device of shielding the base from our view: the cross soars from behind the pyramidal cluster of mourners, with a sheer vertical lift that drives the top out of our sight. Above us hangs Christ, as high as the painting will allow, arms sharply outstretched, the top of his bowed head almost touching the upper frame.

This central group is placed on a platform, made of earth but with a foundation of cut stone, turned at an angle and placed slightly off center; Tintoretto often creates a stage for his performances, but his use of the strategy here is singularly inventive, since much of the action happens not on the stage but around it (or in front or behind). The platform thus plays a pivotal role in the paintings creative derangement of space. In front of this stage and to our left, a second crucifixion is under way, a vignette showcasing Tintoretto’s representational prowess: three men wrestle with a massive wooden cross, struggling to heave it into the air (they’ve managed to get it to a thirty degree angle) while below them another worker pulls mightily on a rope. Up on the platform, where they have gone to get leverage, two more men stand beneath the cross bars, pushing up. If we ever supposed that erecting a cross was simple, we will think differently after noting the strenuous toil of these workers and the requisite tools of their trade, the hammers, axes, saws, and planes, littering the ground around them.

If when we first entered the Albergo our attention was focused on Christ, it was quickly drawn to the left, to this scrupulously detailed, thrillingly realized sub-drama; now, or as soon as we can tear our eyes away, our gaze shifts to the right, sliding sideways and back along the angle of the raised platform. Such movement is a key element of Tintoretto s exploratory disorder, his freewheeling, expansive approach to composition, his preference for motion, with its power to draw us in, rather than order: repeatedly, distractingly, the eye is pulled from side to side, forward and back, to and fro along sliding diagonals, loosening the painting’s frontal order and undoing its symmetry.

The diagonal veer of our gaze is carried back by the third cross, lying flat on the ground-since this crucifixion is barely underwayits crosspiece toward us and its long shaft slanting away and to the right. Here we find the second thief, a foreshortened figure with his head and back to us, being forced to lie down although he remains for the moment propped up on one arm, resisting the exertions of two men who tug and twine the ropes that will bind his feet. Above him a dark figure coils the rope for his wrists while another worker, a study in rippling muscle and laborious torsion, turns the wooden handle of a long metal auger, drilling a hole in the crossbar; a rope will be threaded through it, since while Christ is crucified with nails -his hands are bleeding profusely-a different method is used to attach the thieves to their crosses.

But riveting as they are, these stories are only aspects of the epic spilling across forty feet of canvas, across a painting that, notwithstanding the dramatic heightening of its key scenes, in its entirety suggests a limitless, undifferentiated world, all of whose parts (with the exception of Christ), from the overwhelming and tragic to the ephemeral and quotidian, have, strangely, a similar weight. This egalitarian concept, embodied on a titanic scale and fleshed out in a proliferating, detail-laden composition, results in a painting we cannot take in from a single perspective. Looking at it, we are forced to move, literally, and seek out diverse vantage points.

If we try to consider the painting as a whole, we will find that its elements tend to shift in and out of focus and that its apparently stable composition does not stay still. The symmetry is strained by flaring diagonals, the horizontality dissipated by a complex background receding deeply into space, and by a foreground whose elements lift off the picture plane and float toward us-the group of mourners in front of the cross, and a large, handsome horse on the left, lifting its foreleg and preparing to prance out into space (a trick Tintoretto learned from Pordenone, next door at the church of San Rocco).

The more we look, the more the symmetrical order and horizontal design (elements that, in the many engravings made of the painting, seem to dominate) give way to digressive energies, and if we watch long enough, strange things start to happen. Christ and his cross, for all their central, frontal assertion, begin to dissolve or, more precisely, blur, as a movie foreground does when the camera lens shifts its focus.

Our attention, already fractured by disparate, jostling scenes, becomes even more dispersed, until even the crucifixions of the two thieves, gripping as they are, lose sharpness, an effect encouraged by the illogical lighting that falls from above while mysteriously managing to miss both Christ and the thieves (does this account for their yellow-tan pallor?), beaming on the platform (which has an unnatural glow), brightening the robes of the mourners, and spreading indiscriminately, all across the painting, over a cast-as ads for Hollywood epics used to boast-of thousands.

Perhaps not thousands-but if we can locate everyone and make out the tiny, lightly sketched figures in the distant background, we can count more than seventy-five people. Among them are a number of dignified witnesses privileged to have ringside seats, leaning their elbows on the platform and looking on with expressions of curiosity, attention, and occasionally grave concern, but without alarm, without horror. They have seen crucifixions before. Among the knot of observers on the left we find one man looking up with a shocked, aghast expression, but on the whole the witnesses vindicate Auden’s pronouncement: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

The observers on the far right are mounted on horses, handsome beasts with shifting haunches, bobbing heads, lifting forelegs, stamping hooves-we can almost hear them neigh and whinny. This subscene has a virtuoso realism, heightened by the suspicion that among the well-delineated riders there are covert portraits (the portly gent with the flowing beard reminds me of Pietro Aretino). Such embedding was a common Renaissance practice (Aretino, the powerful art critic and scurrilous libertine, makes a confirmed appearance in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment), although their subjects are often now lost to us. These elements are in accord with the painting’s naturalism and in counterpoint to its expressionist aspects, such as the illogical lighting, the shifting, dissolving perspectives, and that stone-and-earth stage, a form that resembles nothing in nature and is moreover unlike the Biblical Golgotha, usually taken to be a geological formation with a rounded, skull- like shape. Realism and expressionism stake out competing claims in the painting, as do coherence and fragmentation, balance and imbalance. The mass of horses and riders on the right, for example, has a framing function and is balanced by the group on the far left, but only partly so, since where the right-hand cluster has five horses and riders, the left has only two, crowded toward the margin to create the space for the second cross. This imbalance also opens up the left background, revealing a green hill with a cluster of distant watchers on its slope, and high behind them, bathed in shafts of light, implausible structures mingling elements of Renaissance villa, fortress, and church, and some tall leafy trees bending in the wind, worthy of Jacob Van Ruysdale.

But behind it all we see a sky whose symbolist strangeness would be out of place in a Dutch landscape, a livid weave of dark yellow and mahogany brown, streaked with purple, touched with black, and incised with wavy white lines, a cloudscape stretching across the upper reaches of the painting and turning stormily dark on the wings. At the dead center-behind and above Christ-it breaks to reveal a brightening sky, high purple mountains, and, scarcely discernible, a village and church, while in the far right distance we can just make out a sylvan idyll where two women stroll and another figure crosses a narrow trestle bridge. And on and on-it is difficult to know where to stop, since the potential for meandering here is endless, and there is always something else to see in a painting that aspires to be as interminable and various as the world itself. But at some point we need to draw back and ask what can usefully be said of this painting as a totality. What generalization does not oversimplify it? Bernard Berenson wrote that if Tolstoy were describing the Crucifixion, “his account would read as if it were a description of Tintoretto’s picture.” Henry James exclaimed that “surely no single picture in the world contains more of human life.” That prolix Tintoretto fanatic, John Ruskin, was struck dumb. “I must leave this picture,” he said, “to work its will on the spectator, for it is beyond all analysis, and above all praise.”

The painting’s world is larger than ours, larger than our singleviewpoint apprehension of reality, more inclusive, less orderly and structured, less distinct in its boundaries. It is recognizably our world, and the vibrant realism of its vignettes makes it appealingly so, like a lovingly mounted, well-financed period film; yet it is expanded, beyond what we normally perceive, and complicated, in ways that make it ambiguous. It is our world transformed. Space here is not what it usually is, or light, or time (which is stopped and then expanded, so that we can move about freely within a compound moment, or within an overlay of moments); they lose their familiar coherence and logic, having been reshaped, indeed distorted, to serve the aims of the artist.

When that artist is Tintoretto, the aims are never simple or singular. Here they include a public, devotional purpose-to provide Scuola members with a powerful experience of the Passion-and the careerist aim Ridolfi speaks of: to establish himself as the most venturesome of painters. (There is no more venturesome Crucifixion, although his version in the church of San Cassiano, a painting as bleak as King Lear, is more radically designed and emotionally draining.) And there are other motives at work here, more personal elements; whatever their public, devotional, and careerist intentions may have been, Tintoretto’s best paintings-which tend to be achingly sincere and probingly honest-are always, at some level, about himself and his experience of the world.

The personal elements in the Crucifixion include a strong social awareness, reflecting the struggle of a man to whom nothing came easily, and a deep compassion for his fellow human beings. One effect of the painting’s innovations-its constantly shifting focus, its dispersive inclusiveness-is to humanize and democratize the event; this is a Crucifixion about Christ and his redemptive agony, obviously and necessarily, but it is no less about the other two victims, about those who toil at the task of crucifying them (common laborers who work for their daily bread, and are not judged for so doing), about the witnesses (who are not condemned for their matter- of-fact reactions), and about the busy, distractible, often indifferent world that includes us all. Tintoretto has created a stunning theatrical experience, but more is at stake here than performance (even if he never allows us to forget that it is a performance). In artistic terms, the Crucifixion challenges our usual definition of coherence and our conception of what a painting on a wall can be and can achieve; in thematic terms, it alters our understanding of what the Crucifixion can mean, by broadening its human, social, and political framework.

The Last judgment

Completed in the 15605, the paintings in the SaIa del Albergo were the first phase of Tintoretto’s project in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which, twenty years later, would leave the upper ceiling and all the walls of the cavernous building covered with his work. But meanwhile he continued painting anywhere and everywhere in Venice, in other scuole, in churches of every sort and size, on the outer walls ofpalazzi, with that fabled willingness to take on any job and the driving ambition that spawned legends: one of them concerned the massive paintings in the apse of the Madonna dell’Orto, which, it was said, he offered to paint for the cost of materials alone.

However he obtained it, the Orto commission came at a pivotal time in Tintoretto’s career, when he was gaining a reputation and starting to raise a family (his daughter Marietta and his sons Domenico and Marco-all eventual members of his studio-had recently been born); and yet he could scarcely have guessed how important the church would be to him. A decade later, when he moved his family into a tall fifteenth-century house on the Rio della Sensa, he found himself one block away and one canal over from the Madonna dell’Orto, which was to become the site of his tomb.

It stood then at one of the liveliest spots in Venice. Goods made their way here along the wide, straight canals of Canareggio, from an unloading point near the present railway station, and the lanes were crowded with merchants and traders who established warehouses, offices, and homes in the neighborhood. The funnel-shaped square between the Rio della Sensa and the Rio della Madonna dellOrto (still marked by enigmatic sculptures of men in turbans) echoed every morning with a rapid, chattering cacophony of Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, and Yiddish (the gates of the nearby Ghetto, the first in Europe, were locked only at night). The area has long since devolved into a contemplative corner of Venice, a blissful reward for the visitor who wanders onto its wide embankments; although built in the first place to accommodate commerce, today they seem designed for meditative strolls, notably on warm afternoons when they are coated with sun and when cafes shift their tables and chairs out to the edge of the canals. The sole guidebook attraction in the environs is the church, now enjoying a spruced-up second life, ironically thanks to the great flood of 1966, in whose aftermath philanthropic organizations like Venice in Peril and Save Venice raised funds to repair flood damage and restore the city’s monuments. The appearance of Venice today is greatly indebted to this effort, one of whose early and model achievements was the renovation of the Madonna deirOrto.

Its altar is flanked by two Tintorettos, the Adoration of the Golden Calf and my subject here, the Last Judgment. Nineteen feet wide at its base, it soars to a height of 47 1/2 feet, in a frame that mimics the shape of a stained glass window: its sides are cut in, halfway up, after which they begin to narrow toward the center, culminating in a pointed arch. It has not moved since Tintoretto painted it, in situ (too large for his studio), working on a scaffold in front of curious onlookers (who occasionally included, one surmises, Titian and Veronese). Although most of Tintoretto s paintings are not easily datable, we know that the Last Judgment was completed by 1566, since Vasari visited Venice that year and described it in the next edition of Lives of the Painters. He immediately spotted its debt to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (copies of which had been circulating since its completion in 1541), although the paintings could hardly be more different. The differences are instructive.

Michelangelo’s scintillating Last Judgment announces itself, with the robust, I-have-arrived assurance of its maker, as a model of symmetry, rationality, and clarity. It is a radiant masterpiece, unshadowed by mystery. Beneath a pair of ceiling arches, two groups of flying angels are evenly disposed above masses of handsome nude figures divided by a seated Christ; below, the figures thin out and begin to float, fly, but mainly fall, in a sky that opens up widely and turns David Hockney-esque swimming-pool blue (no terror here, no claustrophobic nightmare, no appalling void). The airborne figures are regularly spaced (although the twists and stunts and varied flailing of their limbs mask the fact) within a zone distinctly horizontal, clustering more densely on the wings to enforce the symmetry of the plan. The lowest zone, resting solidly on its architecture, divides into two parts demarked by a cavelike earthwork in the center. The overall effect of the painting, notwithstanding the muscular antics and mannerist brio of the figures, is harmonious, as one would expect from this great exemplar of the High Renaissance, and even the downward descent into hell feels more orderly than not, a sense heightened by our sensation that the falling occurs in slow motion. Tintoretto’s treatment of figures in action, his mannerism, his stress on contour and line, were strongly indebted to Michelangelo, but his temperament, and the atmosphere of his paintings, could not have been more different. Where Michelangelo’s painting radiates confidence, Tintoretto’s Last Judgment projects anxiety and gloom; its maker was troubled by conflicts whose origins we can only guess at, although on the evidence of the paintings they were intense and deep rooted. His hope-a hope for deliverance, for a better world-was fervent and his faith profound, but that faith was battered by shock waves of doubt, and his own demons were often at odds with the orthodox assumptions prescribed by his devotional subjects. In his Last Judgment, a sense of dread-dread of danger, suffering, and perdition-courses like an undertow beneath the theme of redemption. The painting embodies his dark, conflicted vision only too well, since its swarm of frenetically crowded scenes, its deep shadows, and its inhuman height, as well as the dim lighting of Ortos nave, make it hard to see and comprehend (all the more so since we are forced to regard it from an angle-a projecting wooden platform prevents us from seeing it as the parishioners did, from the foot of the altar steps as they took Communion).

In the upper half of the painting, beginning where the frame is incised, we traverse a stretch of open sky, with a snatch of landscape in the background, to land on a cloud-clump, on the right, where several figures are seated; they include a haloed saint, a venerable elder drying off while he cranes his neck to look up at his destination, and a fully clad couple who seem suspiciously above the fray, probably members of a patrician family connected to the church. We rise through layers of cloud, diminishing in size (more resting places for souls at various stages of salvation), and an eddying river of light that brightens as it goes, leaving the topmost clouds backlit by an infinite luminosity, the realm Henry Vaughan evoked in his deathless line about the newly dead: “They are all gone into the light.” We note two large and authoritative archangels framing the upper zone, one with a sword and one with a long trumpet, and, above and between them, two men sitting with their backs to us, taking their ease on a bit of cloud, looking up, and, between them, in a timeless division of labor, two women, each carrying a pair of children, walking up the air to Christ. Enthroned on a cloud substantial as a rock outcropping, he turns his head downward.

From there the descent beckons, all down and all Tintoretto, a plunge into nightmare and chaos, although it begins harmlessly enough, on the benign note struck by a spray of rays descending from Christ’s cloud. On the next level more rays appear, emanating from another cloud-cushion, some radiating to the sides but most descending vertically, looking like distant rain seen from across a plain. By the time we come to the next range of clouds-darker and shaped like an overhanging balcony-the rays have unmistakably become shafts of hard rain, a downpour that will swell a flood, a flood that does not wash away our sins but dredges them up, unearthing bodies from graves and delivering them to summary judgment.

As we continue downward, negotiating ragged zones of shadow that act as intervals to relieve the paintings vertical pressure and that serve as transitional zones where hope and despair struggle, we encounter figures falling, floating, flying, often uncertainly circling and slanting in agitatedly shifting motions. Prominent among them are two resplendently nude women (below and to the left- the symmetry is slithering away as we descend); one is plummeting headfirst, her arm flailing, her eyes and mouth pried wide with terror, in a naturalistic rendering of free-fall in the seconds before unconsciousness cuts in. The other, neither falling nor rising but floating, is a paradigm of Tintoretto’s pervasive uncertainty, his uneasy intuition of a universe where salvation seems ever available but destruction always threatens to prevail. Just above these two and toward the center we find another mid-air woman, agreeably naked to the waist, floating on her back but in this case clearly floating up, aided by a man who bends and seems to nudge her along-although there is risk in assigning definite roles to such figures. They are often ambiguous, and, like members of supporting casts everywhere in Tintoretto, they have multiple, overlapping functions, which include their service to the design, enriching the pattern of a rippling tapestry.

But this woman’s salvation seems assured, since an angel (from above and to the right) zooms down toward her, on a mission whose urgency is declared by his oversized, extended wing, his legs kicking vigorously behind him, and his flaming orange robe, the brightest point of color in this dim painting, recalling the sunrise- orange of Titian’s Assunta in the Frari. While she drifts up, his flight path takes our gaze down, an instance of that crisscrossing dynamic-thwarting coherence, fomenting unrest, preventing the gaze from remaining still or progressing smoothly in one direction – which is as natural for Tintoretto as it is unthinkable for Michelangelo. What we see as we look down, following this angel’s lead, is a shape that slashes across the center, the painting’s most bizarre and distracting element: a form that looks like a slanting waterfall with figures desperately dangling from its lip. What is this? A schematic abstraction of the River Styx? A slippery slope at the boundary of hope and despair?

Water pours down, over, and through this curious, slanting sluice, which on closer inspection looks like a tilted river, its upper rim offering escape, its lower tipping to disaster. On the upper edge, where several desperate souls are being washed over and swept away, a group huddles on a small raft, trying to dock (that their bodies are illumined bodes well for their enterprise), while beneath the bottom lip we see some rough fellows heaving a naked, unconscious woman over their heads; these culprits are dark and hard to make out (although one is clearly a red-winged demon), since the light, falling mysteriously and capriciously through the painting, with a cosmic distance to traverse as it falls, misses this group entirely. They remain in inky shade, backlit by an infernal glow, as if from torches or from a fire meant not for illumination but torment.

This surreal river, which slants across the entire painting and disappears into illegibility on the right, functions structurally and symbolically: it slashes the composition in two and blasts our prospects. There is little to be found below it but doom and gloom, although the tangled scenes there are characteristically ambiguous, laced with wrangling impulses, larded with surprises. At the lowest level, we find a group of writhing figures, a dozen or more, whose torsos and limbs and heads are in constant motion, pointing in all directions, about to be submerged in a muddy darkness that looks like water and may be, given the deluge above, although it also suggests the murk of dissolution and nothingness. Among them we find surprisingly well-dressed ladies on missions of mercy (such figures show up frequently in Tintoretto), assigned to clutch at those falling, in a last-ditch effort to save them. One of them is apparently hoping to dredge someone up, since she is fishing with both arms in the lower gloom, while she turns her head sharply and dramatically to the right (responding to a typical Tintoretto stage direction), toward a muscular man whose figure offers a bravura display, also typical, of foreshortening.

We see him from behind-head, shoulders, back, and out-flung legs- as he dives down the shadowy air (one of those figures in flight whose aerodynamics Tintoretto tested in his cameo theater, with figurines wrapped in rags to simulate robes, swinging from strings under lantern and candle light). His arms form a firm hoop around a man tumbling from the lower right corner, falling with a velocity gauged by his shockingly upswept hair; this tableau enacts a microcosm of the painting’s tensions-the firm grip of the savior, intent on braking the plunge, and the dizzying speed of the fall- while it implies that salvation may always be possible, even at the last moment and in the most remote place. Yet many of the figures piled, twined, and strewn along the bottom of the canvas are hopelessly lost. One of them thrusts his arm up into the light in a gesture of pleading, but it is too late: his still-robust body has a head more than half decomposed, revealing a skull with blank gaping sockets.

The hectic feel of these scenes is intensified by a feverish chiaroscuro, a fitful light lending brightness here and there to a shoulder, an arm, a leg, but leaving most shapes in shade, and never penetrating the gloom that rises around them. From down in these lower depths, the brightness and symmetry above are so remote as to seem unbelievable. Although its vertical structure pays lip service to an ascending parable of redemption, the painting is convulsed by dread, shaken by anxiety; its dominant implication-that existence is a trapdoor set to spring and send us spinning into dark space-is made explicit by the array of bodies in every stage of health and beauty, decay and decomposition, reminders that in the midst of life we are in death. Much as the composition is fractured by the tilting river, the content is split between our hopes and our fears, between what we long to believe and what experience insists is true. Tintoretto conceived of truth in dialectical terms, a way of thinking that was rooted in his natural ambivalence and reinforced by his link to Venice, a city he perceived with a double vision. He knew Venice as a great economic power, a glittering site of cultural and artistic treasure, but he saw it also as a darkling plain where the horsemen of war, famine, pestilence, and plaeue clattered back and forth.

The experience of cinquecento Venice could be apocalyptic in fact, as we see in a plague-year account written by a notary and recorded in David Chambers and Brian Pullan’s recent Venice, a Documentary History, 1450-1630: “The plague continued, killing more people with every hour that passed, and every day inspiring greater terror. . . even more horrifying was the spectacle of so many boats plying back and forth. . . loaded up with the mortal remains of the wretched and luckless victims. . . [and] at all hours, clouds of smoke from the burning of corpses were seen to rise far into the air.” On a nearby lagoon island, when attendants lifted bodies from the boats and threw them into pits, the notary reported that “not infrequently a living soul, or one not quite dead, was inadvertently tossed on as well.”

Any artist working in Venice had access to such ready-made sources of infernal imagery, but Tintoretto was acutely responsive, in a symbiotic way, to the city’s darkest sides, its lurking threats, its anxieties. He knew that Venice, as a self-created, self- mythologizing city, risked being unmasked and returned to the empty, sandy islands it once had been (of which Torcello, having already begun its decline, would eventually be a haunting reminder). While he partook of its grandeur and contributed to its construction, he felt intuitively that La Serenissima was an insupportable hypothesis. Its palazzi were designed to appear massive, as part of their paradoxical trick of seeming to float on water, but behind their shallow stone facing they were brick, plaster, and wood. They stood on planks and pilings driven into the sand of their islands, and were protected by a shallow lagoon, but Tintoretto could see them as poised, with a precarious instability, above deeps whose monstrous waves could swallow up galleys, bringing ruin to those who waited for news on the Rialto. The pit might lie below, but it was also here in Venice, and if asked about the nature of hell, Tintoretto could answer with Marlowe’s Faust, “Why this is hell, nor are we out of it.”

Slaughter of the Innocents

Tintoretto may have shared the beliefs of his fellow Catholics – prayers are heard, miracles can save us, and Christ will redeem us- but in his case those beliefs wrestled, however intuitively or subconsciously, with contrary propositions: that the universe is made of contending energies and constant change (thus apparently indifferent) and that destruction and violence are in the nature of things (thus leaving the problem of evil unsolved). Such discordant possibilities are manifest in painting after painting, but they are nowhere more brilliantly and exhaustingly explored than in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco’s Slaughter of the Innocents, a late- career work, done in the 15805, a decade before his death.

We find it on the ground floor of the Scuola, on the long wall to our left, beneath a row of high windows; it is an intimidating painting, fourteen feet high and eighteen feet wide, whose centrifugal swoops and mysterious recessions make it seem even larger. The tragedy unfolds in a mise en scene (Tintoretto’s experience as a stage designer serves him well here) whose elements have both structural and suggestive roles. Among buildings implied by spare architectural details, we see a wide piazza paved with dark, reddish-brown marble, varied by horizontal strips of white; a prominent element of this geometric pattern, a wider band of white marble, slants from left to right and directs us toward the background. But our gaze barely starts in that direction before it is captured and wrenched to the left, to confront a swarming, struggling pile of humanity composed of mothers, as many as seven in the heap, and their infants. Most of the women are unbodiced, offering an abundant show of breasts, a convention that here does not eroticize the figures so much as stress the vulnerability of their flesh. This mass, which forms an asymmetrical pyramid filling the lower left third of the composition, is at once unabashedly spectacular and excruciatingly anguished, an eye-popping theatrical display and a fiercely naturalistic account of human catastrophe. We feel the churning of the women in the pile, we hear their cries, we smell their blood and sweat.

A woman at the bottom is already dead, although her child turns upward and tries to squirm free. Another woman reaches up and behind her, in a practiced mannerist twist-Tintoretto has been painting such figures for decades-trying to hold her baby with one hand while with the other, bathed in blood, she grips a sword she has wrested from her attacker, who is pulling the child away from her (the action everywhere is multiple, reciprocal, convoluted). Another wraps her child with arms that flash in the light, beautiful in their muscularity, pathetic in their fragility, while a murderous thug who has clambered on top of the heap snatches at the infant. A flamboyant, arresting figure (as in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, brutal violence has a distressing beauty here), this assassin wears a tunic of bright saffron orange that ripples with the fury of his action.

Above this group, along a wall supporting a parapet, the nightmare continues. The wall turns at a sharp angle-one side parallel to the picture plane, the other slanting inward and back- and at its corner a woman leans so far over we see the top of her head, the back of her shoulders, an arm stretched down, and clutching her outstretched hand, the two small hands of a baby, although a sword has already gashed the infants scalp, which pours blood. Above her another victim, grappling with another hired killer, is on the verge of losing her balance (her leg dangles over the parapet), while farther back, a woman is already tumbling toward the pavement, a baby still in her arms, its legs in the grips of a thug leaning over the platform.

While the wall continues receding into the central distance, our gaze is pulled back again, this time over to the far right foreground -each line of force in the painting is insistent and irresistible-to a man who is so huge (larger than life-sized), violent, and melodramatic that he steals the scene by force and tilts it out of balance: a handsome, mustachioed brute, he is all pivot and twist, exposing his muscular torso frontally while his head turns toward the center of the painting and his arms sweep the other direction, offstage, with the back-swing of a two-handed blow he has just delivered with his sword. Reeling from the force of this blow, his victim is caught in mid-fall, at a 45-degree angle, her child cradled in her arm. Beneath this sculptural cluster of figures, frozen in their dance of death, are more women and children, an almost unreadable group crowded into the lower right corner.

The killer’s red tunic, swept by the force of his athletic attack, billows toward the center of the painting and urges our gaze back in that direction (the to-and-fro motion is restless, relentless), where the savagery continues with variations, like Scarpia’s ominous motif in Tosca, incessantly repeated by mournful horns, by distressed woodwinds, by plangent strings, changes here rung by shifts in light and shade and color, in direction, in pose. At the composition’s axial point is an oddly quiet scene, easily overlooked in the cacophonous swirl, a paradoxically still center where a mother and child sit on the pavement. The mother bends maternally over the child lying naked on her lap; their tableau recalls a Madonna and child but also a Pieta, and indeed the bloodied, inert body tells us that the child is dead. The mother lifts an arm to her head and knots her fingers in her hair, in a gesture of wordless despair.

Behind her, in the central background-beyond a staircase with another clump of victims at its base-the piazza gives way to a swath of brownish-yellow paint suggesting the bank of a stream, and a stream it seems to be, however implausible its appearance in this urban setting, with a slippery bank on the other side. There we see a man in a green cloak pulling a mother to safety, and farther on, an otherworldly backdrop of tall Renaissance columns and arches. None of it coheres or makes much sense, as setting, architecture, or geography, but it works as metaphor, intimating a dim, fanciful realm where escape can at least be imagined.

Tintoretto is always ready to introduce irrational elements into naturalistic scenes if they serve an expressive or symbolic purpose. The mysterious stream is a case in point, but this painting’s great example, its most stunning, most outlandish and fecund invention, is a dark, slanting shadow that begins in the lower right corner and falls diagonally across the patterned piazza. Although it may seem realistic enough at first-presumably a wall and a light source offstage can account for it-the shadow quickly enters the realm of the unreal. It falls over the torso of the killer with the red cloak, casting his figure into yellow-brown gloom, except for a sculptural, out-thrust leg remaining in the light; it then passes behind his toppling victim, leaving her head and shoulders and breasts illumined, although to do so it must shift sideways and slip behind her, in patent violation of the laws of physics. As it continues on its course, angling across the piazza, the part of the pavement now covered in shade changes its colors: the slabs of dark marble turn a murky maroon, the white bands become blood red. Having engineered this metaphorically potent if optically impossible feat, the moving shadow moves on, crossing above the killer in the saffron robe and below the Pieta group (symbolically widening the gulf between them) to strike the wall of the parapet, where it ascends at a newly acute angle and then stops. As structure, the shadow functions like the tilted river in the Last Judgment, fracturing and deranging the composition. As chiaroscuro, it intensifies the drama, the way brooding double basses and rumbling kettledrums do in the score of an opera, and sharpens thematic contrasts: the victims seem brighter, the assassins darker, the scenes of escape in the background more poignant. As symbol, it wells up from Tintoretto’s subconscious to dye the scene with dread, evoking the primal fear of a solar eclipse, when the shadow of a dead moon crosses the live sun; the shadow of death in the Twentythird Psalm (“yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”); and, for a modern viewer, the Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man.

Velazquez, who saw the painting on both of his visits to Venice, looked deeply into this shadow and took its memory home, where he merged it with the background gloom of Las Meninas. John Singer Sargent, who learned the power of blackness in Venice, expropriated the shadow and used it in The Daughters of Edward Boit to suggest the encroachment of dark experience on bright childhood innocence.

This shadow-with its fusion of the visual and the metaphorical, the natural and the surreal-is the masterstroke of a masterpiece. The Slaughter of the Innocents is a work of terrible beauty, and Tintoretto’s life as an artist prepared him to paint it. Like Verdi’s Requiem, a work charged with spiritual despair and operatic exuberance in equal measure, it is harrowing in its terror and anguish, abundant in its provision of art’s excitement and satisfaction. There is no more horrific version of the Biblical story than this, thanks to its insistent, unstinting realism (although Brueghel’s rendition is more chilling), no version more plangent in its grief. Yet the painting revels in its identity as an artwork whose purpose is to give pleasure, its status as a creature of color and light and shadow, of contour and motion, of canvas, pigment, and brushwork (the quick, sketchy style, for which Tintoretto was reproached, here triumphs, with an improvisational energy and eloquence anticipating Rubens and Delacroix).

Tintoretto grants equal privilege to reality and imagination, without denying the divergent force of their truth claims, and, in the same spirit, he dramatizes the basic contradictions of existence without seeking to resolve them. Faith contends with despair, hope struggles with fear, while goodness and mercy (which we pray will follow us all of our days) confront fathomless evil.

If Tintoretto’s explorations in paint have the power to engage us deeply, it is not only an effect of his originality-his innovations in design and style, his experimental probing of the limits of coherence-but a consequence of his human compassion. Tintoretto sympathized deeply with life’s victims, with those in desperate straits, with the least fortunate and most needful, categories to which, he was sure, we all must eventually belong. His paintings enroll us among their witnesses, and eventually they will count us among their casualties, those in danger and distress, those for whom the miracle does not arrive. The strategies Tintoretto employs to disorient us, to immerse us precipitously and uncomfortably in events, are ways of denying us distance, and thus of forcing involvement, identification, and empathy.

Yet if empathy were the sole or even the overriding note of these paintings they would not be what they are, and Tintoretto would not be himself. The dominant quality of the paintings is a contrapuntal, dialectical complexity, and what made Tintoretto original was his lifelong quest for adequate ways of expressing that complexity. The originality he achieved is never more evident than when we can observe him adapting and transforming familiar sources, and the Slaughter of the Innocents provides such an opportunity because it calls explicitly on three models: Michelangelo (Tintoretto had copies of his paintings, and in his studio he kept small plaster replicas of the Medici tomb sculptures, making repeated drawings of Dawn and Dusk); Raphael, whose melodramatic Fire in the Borgo features a muscular mannerist nude dangling precariously from a wall; and Giambologna, whose sculpture group, Rape of the Sabine Women (less familiar now but well known in the sixteenth century), seems to provide a model for some of the killers and their victims. Yet these sources are subsumed in a painting that can only be by Tintoretto.

Only Tintoretto could orchestrate such an oceanic melange of realism and symbolism. Only he would risk such disorder, by denying the eye any rest or balance, wrenching his composition savagely in so many directions. Only he would let his masterfully evoked urban setting evaporate in a vague, mysterious fantasy, and would let his carefully composed scene be deformed by that ingenious, sanguinary shadow. And who but Tintoretto would make the story so monstrous and so irresistible at once, dressing his assassins in brilliant robes, turning their exertions into beautiful ballet? The painting asks if we can be devastated and delighted at once, horrified by what we see and enthralled by seeing it. In positing its affirmative answer, it does not claim mastery for the artist (as Titian usually does, and Veronese, always), but rather it testifies to the power of creativity more broadly-the power of art to create its own, alternate world, where conflicts are explored and embraced, where polarities are spanned.

The contradictions of Tintoretto’s work-the dark vision and the sensuous enthusiasm, the racking spirituality and the ebullient theatricality-reveal the man to us. His paintings are acts of selfexpression and self-creation; their anxiety comes from within, while their accomplishment comes from a lifetime of discipline and experiment. Their energy and passion, and their exploratory disorder, come from person and artist equally, or say from the place where they become one, where the projected persona is fully realized. Although in the sixteenth century these paintings had public and formal, ceremonial and devotional functions-and evidently succeeded in those terms for their original audiences-when we look at them now they seem personal. Their scope may be cosmic but their vision is intimate. Beyond their innovations in style and structure, and their creative adaptations of sources, the secret of their originality is that they come so immediately and so unmistakably out of Tintoretto.

ROBERT HAHN’S most recent books of poetry are No Messages and All Clear, and his essays and translations have appeared lately in Parnassus, TriQuarterly, Literary Review, and elsewhere. The essay in this issue is from a book in progress entitled Tintoretto, The Shadow of Venice.

Copyright Rutgers University Spring 2007

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