Tintoretto's Work On Display After 70 Years

Visitors to European museums last had the chance to see Tintoretto's work in Venice 70 years ago.

Miguel Falomir, Madrid Prado museum curator and director of the painter's current exhibition, is spreading the news with much pomp and success. For the occasion, the interior of the famous museum is painted blue, the reflection of which restores full splendour to the murals and portraits of the famous 16^th century Venetian.

Tintoretto's huge canvases were not easy to move because they are located in churches, and Sccuola San Rocco cannot lend any of the 64 paintings that show Christ's life. Venice officials had to be talked into sending the movable masterpieces, but also to get the canvases scattered in various museums and galleries across the globe: "Susanna and the Elders from Vienna," "Saint George and the Dragon," and "The Birth of the Milky Way," which are located in London. "Tarquin and Lucretia" arrived from Chicago and "The Martyr of Saint Laurent" travelled to Madrid under protection from a church in Oxford. Several smaller, often unknown canvases were also exhibited. The success has been huge and unexpected: 49 paintings and 13 drawings were united at the opening demonstration and the works are joined together by the appearance of monumental canvases from Venice. The few portraits, chosen because of the powerful presence of the subjects and an extraordinarily piercing nature, fit perfectly into the journey through time, like the open windows that reveal Tintoretto's contemporaries. Jacopo Robusti, as the painter's real name was, is present in two self-portraits, one of which was borrowed to the Paris Louvre and shows the painter with the head of a wise man from ancient times.

Even in his early work, Tintoretto showed the courage and ease of creation, which is characteristic of beginners. Even before the age of 30, the artist was ready to create religious content, large formats, and mythological themes, without leaving out a strong visual expression, adapted to contradictory situations and circumstances.

In the year 1545, his "Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars" unites the eroticism of the nude goddess and the leisurely heroics of the angered husband with the pitiful grotesqueness of Mars, hidden under a table and given away by the barking of a little dog. Everything was painted with a pronounced feeling for movement that causes the body, clothes, and light to vibrate. A decade later, the artist was able to turn the canvas "Esther Before Ahasuerus" into an effigy of the tragedy of antisemitism by multiplying background figures and contorted faces that reflected pain or surprise.

The continuation is not easy when ambition and one's own demands take priority. Inspiration should never be allowed to weaken and the best ways to paint old subjects should always be sought, as it was the case with the famous "Supper." Tintoretto compares it to the 1547 painting ordered by San Marcuolo and to the 1564 canvas made for San Trovaso. Everything is replaced: frontal composition with spatial one, immovability with movability, divine gratitude with human folly. Both versions have an unusual power, even though their tonalities are completely different.

Tintoretto always strived to renew and discover new ways to paint and to apply new techniques because of his legendary rivalry with Tizian, who was two decades his senior and an undeniable master of Venetian paining. The canvas "Lucretia and Tarquin" (1578 – 1580) corresponds to Tizian's work from 1571. "Danae," made between 1583 and 1585, reflects a painting by the older artist, made 30 years earlier. The conflict between the two talents is a violent but also beautiful one. The contents are also linked by the colour expression: all the nuances of red, but also sketches: gesticulation is too fast, clothes spread in the wind, and with these, Tintoretto renovates the dramaturgy of painting. He exalts the art to heroic heights, almost to a fantasy, and he does not need allegories and complicated allusions. With one move, he elevates himself from the profane to the sacred, but he does not lose himself in the details. He is not excited by the habits of his peers, who slowly discovered his eminence. Today, it is the only thing that is noticeable.

The exhibition will remain open until May 13, 2007.