A visual Journey into the Bible The Book of Genesis

A Visual Journey into the Bible Page: 32
marvellously to show the tragic scene, the rapidity, the violence and the flesh-to-flesh
intimacy of murder.
The crime takes place in a hidden place, behind rocks and trees, in a corner of Eden
that lies in the darkness of the sins of humans. All the colours in the painting are
browns and ochres. On the right Tintoretto’s picture opens to a landscape. Here we
see the calm waters of a lake or a sea. Here Cain wanders on the beaches, after the
crime, hence a small and lonely figure. Tintoretto showed the murder but also the
result of murder and sin: the remorse and the loneliness.
The scene is an early Bible theme, so Tintoretto has not given a knife to Cain, but a
piece of spiky wood that can be driven into Abel. The brothers might have been
hunting and the symbol of the crime, a decapitated head of a deer lies beneath a tree
down on the right.
Tintoretto applied a strong composition. Cain is painted along the right diagonal.
Abel’s arms are along the left diagonal. Cain’s bodyline leads down to the deer head,
to the crime again, whereas Abel’s bodyline brings the eye of the viewer to the
innocence of the blue lake. The tree marks about one third of the picture; Abel’s hand
on the ground is on another third part of the frame length. The masses of the two
bodies balance each other and the two bodies together balance the mass of the tree.
The two bodies of Cain and Abel are almost nude. They touch and the bodies flow
one around the other in intimate touching. Such a depiction is definitely not
Renaissance anymore. It is all showing of violent emotions of the flesh. Tintoretto’s
lines are all either oblique or curving directions. So much exposing of twisted, naked
bodies exclaims the tension of a Mannerist picture. Violence is too tense, too direct
for either Renaissance or Baroque depiction. Tintoretto’s ‘Cain and Abel’ is a
painting of the conflicts of the Mannerist period. This picture was made somewhat
forty to fifty years before Caravaggio made his first paintings of dramatic contrasts of
light and dark, but all Caravaggio’s main elements of style are present in Tintoretto’s
‘Cain and Abel’: strong composition, closeness of the theme to the viewer, powerful
depiction of bodies in a very realistic way, importance given to the main theme with
disregard for background decoration, and of course a new emphasis on the contrasts
between light and dark. But Tintoretto’s painting contains a direct contact of flesh that
Caravaggio, even in his own mains scenes of violence, avoided and that Caravaggio
always showed with more restraint and distance. Tintoretto was a precursor of
Caravaggio’s art and it took only some relaxing of the violence to come to Baroque.
The effects of light and dark that are so reminiscent of the Baroque period are already
entirely spectacular in this painting of Jacopo Tintoretto. The light comes from down
left and rises from Abel’s highlighted back to Cain’s shoulders. Tintoretto’s mastery
of light and shadow is total. We cannot but remember Caravaggio’s ‘Sacrifice of
Isaac’ in which the innovative, emphasised dramatic use of light and dark is similarly
impressive. The colours of ‘Cain and Abel’ are very dark. The two figures, even
though the light is thrown on them, are painted in shades of brown and ochre. The
trees on the left and the middle are very dark green. With Tintoretto’s pictures it is
often difficult to ascertain whether these colours were the original ones. Tintoretto’s
green paint became darkened over time to become brown. His blue colours became
grey, his yellows greenish and darker also, his reds paled to pink. We may suppose
Copyright ©: René Dewil Date: October, 24 2000