The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

CONTEXTS
|
Venetian painting and sculpture
404
metaphysical Portrait of a Young Man. The rivalries of other painters eventually
drove Lotto from Venice, and it’s not too fanciful to see a reflection of the artist’s
anxieties in his restless, wistful paintings.
Born three years after Bellini’s death and nine years after that of Giorgione,
Tintoretto (1519–94) grew up during the period in which the ascendancy of
Titian became established. Princes were sending agents to Venice to buy the latest
Titian, no matter what the subject, and every visiting dignitary would want to be
painted by him. Titian’s exploratory attitude to paint and the increasing Venetian
receptivity to individual style were both exploited by the energetic and competitive
younger artist. The painting that made his reputation, the Miracle of the Slave
(Accademia; 1548), shows how he learned from Titian’s experiments and distanced
himself from them. Tintoretto’s palette is as rich as Titian’s, but is aggressively
vivid rather than sensuous, and uses far stronger lighting. And while Titian is
concerned with the inner drama of an event, Tintoretto’s attention is given to the
drama of gesture.
Tintoretto’s dynamic style was not universally acclaimed. Pietro Aretino,
Titian’s close friend and most vociferous champion, disparaged the speed and
relative carelessness of Tintoretto’s technique, and one member of the Scuola di
San Rocco said he would give his money towards the decoration of the scuola’s
building as long as Tintoretto was not commissioned. He didn’t get his way, and
San Rocco’s cycle is the most comprehensive collection of paintings by the artist.
Dramatic perspectival effects, bizarre juxtapositions of images and extraordinarily
fluid brushwork here make the substantial world seem otherworldly – the converse
of the earlier istorie cycles.
In contrast, the art of Paolo Veronese (1528–88), who moved to Venice from
Verona in his twenties, conveys worldly harmony rather than spiritual turbulence.
This is particularly evident in his work for architectural settings (San Sebastiano
in Venice and the Villa Barbaro at Masèr), where he constructed logical spaces
that complement the form of the buildings. More urbane than Tintoretto, he
nonetheless attracted controversy; in his Christ in the House of Levi (Accademia) the
naturalistic representation of German soldiers was interpreted as a gesture of support
for Protestantism. Veronese’s response to his accusers revealed a lot about the
changing attitude towards the status of the artist; claiming licence to depict what
he wanted, he simply changed the title of the work from The Last Supper to the
title by which it’s now known.
Renaissance sculpture
Venetian sculpture in the Renaissance was conditioned by the society’s ingrained
aversion to the over-glorification of the individual and by the specific restrictions
of the city’s landscape. Freestanding monumental work of the sort that was being
commissioned all over Italy is conspicuous by its absence. The exception to prove
the rule, the monument to Colleoni, was made by the Florentine artist Verrocchio.
Venetian sculptors worked mainly to decorate tombs or the walls of
churches, and up to the late Renaissance no clear distinction was made between
sculptors, masons and architects. Beyond the Renaissance, sculpture was generally
commissioned as part of an architectural project, and it’s usually futile to try to
disentangle the sculpture from its architectural function.
Pietro Lombardo (c.1438–1515) was born in Cremona and went to Rome
before arriving in Venice around 1460. His development can be charted in the
church of San Zanipolo; his first major monument, the tomb of Doge Pasquale