To Humberto Huergo Cardoso and Michael H. Miranda
This author has been a model of drawing, an example of art and an idea of whimsy and eccentricity; his style is unlike any other, and in fact he is such a courageous author that he keeps himself apart from everyone else, without any pact or truce, except for the absolute mastery of art.
Marco Boschini
Would there have been a Tintoretto without the direct and indirect influence of Titian? It is well known that the old master of color, landscape atmosphere, and light did not accept him as a pupil for a long time. More than being bothered by the young man’s talent, he noticed early on that the boy born Jacopo Comin and later named Jacopo Robusti or Giacomo Robusto in his youth was ambitious, mischievous, and had the capacity to work as hard as two artists combined. It was not without reason that the Venetians themselves attributed three brushes to Tintoretto: one of gold, one of silver, and one of iron.
He could paint in the style of Veronese and, among others, the now forgotten Andrea Schiavone. When he had his own workshop, his motto seemed to be: you can get a better copy than the original. He didn’t usually care if people talked behind his back. He found out about almost everything. Despite Titian’s contempt, he continued to admire him. For it was not envy that the established artist felt. It was more a case of opposing characters. They were two creative spirits too impetuous and stubborn for mutual tolerance. Titian was the king of painters. Tintoretto, in his early days and later, when he was better known, was spontaneous even in his prostitution and shamelessness.
One of the most famous examples? To make a name for himself at a time when artists were already signing their works and competing fiercely to be hired by great patrons, whether monarchs or the church itself, Tintoretto was capable of entering a sketch competition and submitting a finished work. When he sensed any doubt, he would give it away, thus securing the rest of the commission. He had done so with The Glorification of Saint Roch or Saint Roch in Glory (1564). He would use the same tactic again when he presented The Plague of the Serpents (1576) for the Sala dell’Albergo of the School or Hospital of Saint Roch in Venice. He was called back the following year to complete the ceiling of the Great Hall. Thus he painted Easter Feast and Moses Striking the Rock. He then asked for a monetary incentive. Whatever they could give him. According to Jean-Paul Sartre in Tintoretto[1], the kidnapped man of Venice, starting from a generality to arrive at the specific person who interests him, asserts:
What will remain clear is that passions are as diverse as people: there are devouring and meditative ones, reflective and disturbing ones, practical ones, abstract ones, futile ones, hasty ones, a hundred more. I would describe Tintoretto’s as practical, disturbing-reproachful, and devouring-hasty.
In short, he labels it opportunistic and distressing. But in some passages, he is more condescending: “we find prudence even in his presumption. His fellow citizens, alert, courageous, somewhat slow-witted, have taught him the price of things, the risks of life, what hopes are permissible and what are forbidden.”[3]
Tintoretto was ahead of his time in terms of what it took to succeed in a market as complicated as the art market. Skilled and competitive, as much a genius as Caravaggio, although less violent than the latter[4], he was admired by almost all his contemporaries and even by Titian on occasion. He was also celebrated by the difficult poet and playwright Pietro Aretino. Although it is said that it was in the 20th century that his work and figure were reevaluated, it should not be forgotten that the Baroque artist Annibale Carracci occasionally placed him above Titian.
Without any nationalist sentiment, although he was very clear about his origins, he was more Venetian than the ill-fated Giorgione, who was from Castiglione; than Titian, born in the province of Belluno; than Paolo Caliari, the Veronese, whose pseudonym says it all. Although each of them and others enriched the Venetian school, Tintoretto felt that he had to work harder than the other Italian painters who were not native to the city. And he did so not only by tackling religious and mythological subjects, but also by producing a large number of portraits of Venetians. Although, strictly speaking, he knew that his colleagues were not “superfluous,” in his eyes they were foreign invaders. “To tell the truth, this aristocratic republic is above all a technocracy; it has always had the audacity to recruit its specialists from everywhere and the wisdom to treat them as its own children,”[5] says Sartre of the Queen of the Adriatic. Tintoretto was the most Venetian of them all. From the cradle to the grave. He never left there.
But, setting aside his best-known paintings for the moment, what would be his first work? Perhaps it was one of those commissions for a mural that he did not want to charge for. To get a glimpse of the mannerism of his Bacchus and Ariadne (1578), where the dramatization of the scene is further emphasized by the large foreshortening of a female figure, we must first recognize the contrast of foreshortening he dares to execute when painting Saint Mark Freeing the Slave. Herein lies the Venetian painting of his time. The figures are reminiscent of Michelangelo, and he takes risks with perspective, but the work is a display of composition and the creation of a brutal atmosphere, where the chaos of the event does not disrupt any detail. No more, no less. Does it really have Michelangelo’s drawing and Titian’s color, as some have claimed? It seems to have solidified an action that is taking place in its fullness. He would insist on Saint Mark as a biblical character. He is also the patron saint of Venice. Some prefer The Discovery of the Body of Saint Mark (1962), but in The Transfer of the Body of Saint Mark (1562-1566) it is that other Tintoretto, more ochre and darker, who uses shadows to great aesthetic effect, but also to psychological effect: he does not show the viewer everything. There is room for the imagination. For the pictorial also encompasses what is not revealed, so that the viewer can reconstruct the image. It is said that many of his works have blackened over time[6]. But the symbolic mystery of The Last Supper (1592-1594), his last scene, is foreshadowed in Christ and the Adulteress (1547) and Christ on the Lake of Tiberias (1575-1580), from which El Greco drew inspiration to emphasize the sensuality of his elongated figures, at times muscular and beautiful men. Of the Venetians, Tintoretto is the most daring and interesting.
It was this creative rebelliousness that captivated Jean-Paul Sartre, who recognized, among other qualities in Tintoretto, the kidnapped of Venice, that the tactic of this surprising painter was “to astonish, strike hard, and impose himself by surprise.” Sartre manages to transport the reader to Venice. He introduces Tintoretto without the need for a strict chronology. In fact, the chapters of his story about the painter are conceived—it is noticeable—as independent pieces that he one day decided to put together like a puzzle, and the result is not so explanatory (it did not need to be), although it is more penetrating than Rauda Jamís’s Artemisia Gentileschi. La semana santa? How could Louis Aragon write such a tedious novel, in which a painter as seductive as Théodore Géricault reigns supreme? Sartre recalls José Martí’s great journalism on painters; Lezama Lima’s pages on Portocarrero, for example, a book as polished as The Pre-Raphaelite Dream by the Englishman William Gaunt…
It could sometimes be accepted that a historical book alludes more to the time in which it was written than to the events and characters it recounts. This is the case with Sartre’s Tintoretto in terms of the relationship the author establishes with modern professions and projections. Marguerite Duras says that “Sartre only gives himself intensely to the historical conditioning of this painting,” about which he says almost nothing until the end of his book; Duras speaks of a “dialectical novel of artistic creation.”[7] In his essayistic narrative, Sartre recalls:
Everything was fixed by contract: the subject, the quantity, the quality, sometimes even the attitude of the characters, the dimensions of the canvas; religious traditions and those of taste added other constraints. The clients had the quirks, the whims of our producers; they also had, alas, sudden inspirations: at a sign from them, everything was changed.
In speaking of Tintoretto as if meditating on his own condition as a creator, Sartre connects—more than one might expect—with the painter. This is not so apparent (or almost not at all) when Simone de Beauvoir’s husband speaks of geniuses. On the other hand, when he does so about the psychological behavior of the Italian artist, he exposes himself behind the skin of the latter: “This man,” says the author of The Roads to Freedom, “believes he has received from birth the privilege of turning his city into himself, and in a way, we can say he is right.”
Compared to other artists, he is one who, through his life and work, is preferable to sight and mystery. However, he has not been considered in cinematic fiction. Sartre, without realizing that his book would be the script for a documentary in Alain Jaurbert’s series Palettes on the Venetian[11], temptingly reveals:
The horror still lasts: faced with Venetian cinemascope, we, poor tourist folk, murmur: it is a realization by Titian, a production by Paolo Caliari, a performance by Pordenone, a staging by Vicentino. Jacobo Robusti shares the prejudices of his time, and our connoisseurs take offense. How many times have I heard people say: “Tintoretto, bah! It’s cinema”[12].
The first film director in history, the Frenchman asserts, in his own way.
If you want to see it too, Sartre not only sketches the profile of a disturbing citizen, but also traces the existential journey of a private life and a public figure. Tintoretto was a shamelessly exposed subject. When Sartre writes “Police State,” he continues to act as an observant stowaway. It seems to establish his status as a flâneur. Would that be a mistake? For one cannot be a flâneur if one shows a predilection for following someone’s footsteps. Does he have time to lose himself in the surprises that the City of the Doges has in store? Tintoretto amuses him much more than the Serenissima, about which he had already written in 1953 in his essay Venice from My Window[13]. But the Queen of the Seas can never be indifferent to him. Sartre compiles a report on man and the city, personified in the creator, and shares it. Here is an example of this detailed record:
Deep down, this man is asking for nothing more than what he would probably be granted, but his belligerent submission irritates the authorities: they consider him a rebel. Or at least a suspect. And, deep down, they are not entirely wrong. Just look at where his first outburst[14] leads him.
While there are books to consider, apart from the so-called passive literature on Mannerism, there are lines to be taken into account by Ruskin, Wilde, Cunqueiro, Marguerite Yourcenar, Régis Debray… Mary McCarthy talks about him in Venice Observed, which, as Michel H. Miranda[15] recalls, was the one who claimed that Tintoretto is the painter of the literati. Perhaps this is why the Spaniard Vicente Molina Foix wrote Tintoretto y los escritores (2007), an enjoyable book for many, but perhaps no more daring or comprehensive than Con tan grande furia. Escritos sobre Tintoretto (1545-1780), a 2021 anthology by the Cuban Humberto Huergo Cardoso. Here you can read many opinions about the shameless and immense painter, such as that of Marco Boschini, a 17th-century Venetian writer, painter, and engraver, who is one of those who has best described Tintoretto’s way of painting. Keep this excerpt in mind:
The main substance of his color was the nudes[16], in which he put flesh and blood, making particular use of half-tones and shadows, although with little light, always painting the figures with rapid brushstrokes, which from a distance seemed exquisitely finished, always depicting them bright, with lively and spirited movements, accompanied by the boldness conferred by fury. I have no doubt that those who see these works up close without knowing anything about art think that they have been painted in this way in order to save work, but they are certainly mistaken, because they are all strokes of learned and admirable artifice.
In The Kidnapped Man of Venice, the author manages to piece together a classic biography. He was more than just a great enthusiast of art history. And it is in this non-specialized exaltation that his magic lies, who can doubt it? Perhaps no one has written better about Tintoretto than Jean-Paul Sartre.
[1] In the Cuban edition, the painter’s name appears with only three t’s.
[2] Jean Paul Sartre: Tintoreto, el secuestrado de Venecia, translated by Virgilio Piñera, Cuadernos de Arte y sociedad, Instituto del libro, Havana, 1969, pp. 19-20.
[3] Jean Paul Sartre: op. cit., p. 27.
[4] Although he was called the Bravucón or the Furioso, the personification of anger, as Humberto Huergo Cardoso reminds me.
[5] Jean Paul Sartre: op.cit., p.22.
[6] Huergo Cardoso, in a footnote to Boschini’s “Extracts from the Rich Mines of Venetian Painting (1674),” writes: “Tintoretto’s painting deceives the eye in the sense that it makes us see forms—it makes us look beyond—where there are only smudges. It is not, therefore, a simple illusionist trompe l’oeil, but—as we would say today—a figural (Lyotard, 1979) or a chaoid (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997: 206-207), that is, an apparition without an apparition, the appearance of the figure in the midst of the blur that denies it.” (See Humberto Huergo Cardoso: Con tan grande furia. Escritos sobre Tintoretto (1545-1780), Editorial Casimiro, Spain, 2021, p.181).
[7] Marguerite Duras: El secuestrado de Venecia: Sartre, translated by Clara Janés in Outside, Barcelona, Ediciones Orbis, 1988, pp.163-165.
[8] Jean Paul Sartre: op.cit., p.15.
[9] In the editor’s note in the book printed in Cuba, based on Virgilio Piñera’s translation, we read some very eloquent lines:
It is a passionate essay in which apology and insult, tenderness and sarcasm are mixed together. It is possible that on a careful rereading, this frenzy may have made it ungrateful in the eyes of the author. But in trying to explain the “Tintoretto case” ab irato, Sartre not only used the instrument of passion, guided by his dark intimacy with the Venetian school: he also employed strong doses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, common sense and poetry. This ambitious eclecticism gives the essay its weakness and its strength. (Jean-Paul Sartre: op. cit., p. 71).
[10] Jean-Paul Sartre: op. cit., pp. 21-22.
[11] Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, in 2019, on the 500th anniversary of the Italian painter’s birth, the documentary Tintoretto: A Rebel in Venice (Giuseppe Domingo Romano) was released. It is based on a script by Melania Gaia Mazzucco and Marco Panichella. Gaia Mazzucco came up with the original idea. The film features the renowned filmmaker Peter Greenaway.
[12]Jean-Paul Sartre: op.cit., p.29.
[13] Both this book and the one on Tintoretto were published together in the volume Venecia, Tintoretto. Introduction by Francisco Calvo Serraller. Translation by Carlos Manzano, Editorial Gadir, Madrid, 2007.
[14] Jean-Paul Sartre: op.cit., p.27.
[15] Michael H. Miranda: Venecia inactual, Editorial Casa Vacía, Virginia, United States, 2022.
[16] Ana González Mozo, Doctor of Fine Arts and specialist in painting restoration, has demonstrated that Tintoretto painted nudes first and then covered the images.
[17] Humberto Huergo Cardoso: op. cit., pp. 177-178.
Cover image: Self-portrait as a young man, c. 1548, by Tintoretto. Victoria and Albert Museum.
