Works by Jacopo Tintoretto
115 works · 133 ms
Jacopo Tintoretto worked fast, in long bold strokes, with an energy that earned him the name il Furioso, and his muscular figures move through steeply foreshortened space.
The name means little dyer, after his father's trade. His early biographers say Titian sent him away from his studio after a few days, and he taught himself, drawing models of Michelangelo's statues from all angles and often working through the night. In Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet a tiled floor runs back past a white-clothed table to a colonnade and a canal, and Christ kneels over a tub at the far right.
His figures carry the story with their bodies more than their faces, often seen in sharp foreshortening. In The Origin of the Milky Way a man swoops from the sky to hold a baby to a reclining woman's breast, and her milk sprays upward as stars. Saint George and the Dragon puts a woman in blue and pink at the front, fleeing toward us, and pushes the fight back into the middle ground.
He painted more portraits than anyone in Venice in his day; two art historians call those by his own hand understated and sombre, unlike his stories. His two best-known self-portraits lie some forty years apart: the young man of about 1547 glances over his shoulder with no sign of rank, and the old man of about 1588 faces straight out of the dark, his beard gone white. Édouard Manet copied the later one. Bible stories and myths make up over half the works below, portraits most of the rest.
Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery, Louvre, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museo del Prado.
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