The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

San Polo and Santa Croce
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From the Frari to the Tolentini
against the disease. In 1515 the Scuola, previously based in a room within the
Frari, had commissioned a prestigious new headquarters from Bartolomeo Bon
the Younger, but for various reasons the work had ground to a halt within a
decade; the fattened coffers prompted another phase of building, and from 1527
to 1549 the scheme was taken over by Scarpagnino.
When the scaffolding came down in 1560, the end product was somewhat incoherent
and lopsided. Not that the members of the Scuola would have been bothered
for long; within a few years the decoration of the interior was under way,
and it was this decoration – Tintoretto’s cycle of more than fifty major paintings
– that secured the confraternity’s social standing. An opportunistic little trick won
the first contract for Tintoretto. In 1564 the Scuola held a competition to decide
who should paint the inaugural picture for the recently completed building. The
subject was to be The Glorification of St Roch, and four artists were approached for
proposals: Salviati, Zuccari, Veronese and Tintoretto, who had already painted a
number of pictures for the neighbouring church of San Rocco. On the day for
submissions the first three duly presented their sketches; Tintoretto, though, had
painted a finished panel and persuaded a sidekick to rig it up, hidden by a veil, in
the very place in which the winning picture was to be installed – the centre of
the ceiling in the Sala dell’Albergo. A rope was pulled, the picture revealed, and
Tintoretto promptly offered the picture as a gift to the Scuola. Despite his rivals’
fury, the crucial first commission was his.
The paintings
The narrative sequence of the cycle begins with the first picture in the lower
room – the Annunciation. But to appreciate Tintoretto’s development you have
to begin in the smaller room on the upper storey – the Sala dell’Albergo. This
is dominated by the stupendous Crucifixion (1565), the most compendious image
of the event ever painted. Henry James made even greater claims for it: “Surely
no single picture in the world contains more of human life; there is everything
in it.” Ruskin was reduced to a state of dumbfounded wonder – his loquacious
commentary on the San Rocco cycle concludes with the entry: “I must leave this
picture to work its will on the spectator; for it is beyond all analysis, and above all
praise.” Tintoretto’s other works in this room – aside from the contract-winning
Glorification of St Roch in the middle of the ceiling – are on the entrance wall: The
Way to Calvary, Christ Crowned with Thorns and Christ before Pilate.
Tintoretto finished his contribution to the Sala dell’Albergo in 1567. Eight years
later, when the Scuola decided to proceed with the embellishment of the main
upper hall – the chapterhouse – he undertook to do the work in return for nothing
more than his expenses. In the event he was awarded a lifetime annuity, and
then commenced the three large panels of the ceiling, beginning with The Miracle
of the Bronze Serpent. With their references to the alleviation of physical suffering,
this colossal picture and its companions – Moses Striking Water from the Rock and The
Miraculous Fall of Manna – constitute a coded declaration of the Scuola’s charitable
programme, and the Scuola’s governors were so satisfied with Tintoretto’s conception
that he was given the task of completing the decoration of the entire interior.
It was a project to which he would give precedence over all his other commissions
in the city; thereafter, on every St Roch’s day until 1581, Tintoretto presented
the Scuola with three new pictures, a sequence that extended at a slower rate of
production until 1588, when he painted the altarpiece of the chapterhouse, with
the help of his son, Domenico.
The New Testament scenes around the walls defy every convention of perspective,
lighting, colour and even anatomy, an amazing feat of sustained inventiveness
from a mind that was never content with inherited ideas, and rarely content