Tintoretto Study

Sometimes it's necessary to do some painting. But maybe you want to just do what it called a "study." So, you take a great painting and copy it, inevitably varying some things here and there.



Having just recently seen it in the flesh, Old Ken thought he'd have a go at Tintoretto's Saint George, Saint Louis and the Princess (Venice, ca. 1550). I was really blown away by this painting when I saw it in the Rivals in Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto show at the MFA in Boston; especially awesome is the reflection of said princess in the black, reflective armor of Saint George and the wonderful modulation of tones in her dress. Just awesome!



So, I took the catalogue, cut a piece of cardboard to the same dimensions as the reproduction of the painting and started sketching it in acrylic paint. Obviously working in acrylic is a disadvantage when trying to reckon with Tintoretto and friends who were masters of oil paint.

Putting aside the general crappiness of my picture, what I thought was really interesting was the strong graphic structure of image. To say it a little differently, a familiar story about Venetian painting is that it's all about color and that these guys like Titian, Tintoretto and so on couldn't draw. So, while drawing came to be associated with Florence and ideas of the supremacy of disegno in art, Venice became linked with a definition of art as a sensuous, colorful enterprise.



So, because I couldn't get the paint to do some of the smooth blending of the original, I found myself emphasizing the outlines. What I was doing was not bending the paint "around" the edges of forms (as it were) by blending it together—highlights of white dragged across dark to suggest the gleam of a highlight or smudging up a light-colored field to suggest shadow. Instead, as I think is particularly clear with my depiction of the princess, I had to exaggerate a complex range of tonal variations into a composition of blocky graphic chunks aggregated together.



What struck me about this is that it seemed to me that, if allowance can be made for his incredible painterly powers, we can see something like a continuity between the way that I was rendering Tintoretto and the work of eighteenth century master Tiepolo. Also a Venetian, Tiepolo would have painted an image like this almost two hundred years after Tintoretto and did so with this incredibly virtuosic graphic style that feels worlds away from the fast and loose manner of his sixteenth century predecessors. But, to make a long story short, what I found myself locating in painting after Tintoretto was how Tiepolo's manner seemed to follow from it. To paraphrase Nietzsche, we can see the birth of Tiepolo from the spirit of Tintoretto.