Art History 31.5 2008

Transcript

DEATH, HISTORY, AND THE MARVELLOUS
LIVES OF TINTORETTO
MARIA H. LOH
In 1674 Luigi Scaramuccia identified Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese as the
‘glorious triumvirate of Venice’ in his animated dialogue on painting, entitled Le
finezze de’ pennelli.1 By then, this trio of greatness had become a critical readymade
in early modern texts about art, and Tintoretto had attained a secure position
within the exclusive pantheon of Great and Old Masters. In his own lifetime,
however, he was perceived as a somewhat unformed and problematic figure, a
liminal figure standing between a glorious past and an unknown future.2 Even
though Michelangelo was the only living artist to be accorded his own biography
in the first edition of Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori
(1550), it is nevertheless surprising not to find a single reference to Tintoretto in
any of the lives described; his presence in the second edition (1568) is relegated to
a guest appearance at the end of Battista Franco’s biography. In Il diaologo di
pittura (1548) Paolo Pino acknowledges Tintoretto as a ‘worthy painter’, but only in
passing as a member of a larger group of thirty-four contemporary artists.3
Perhaps more astonishing is Tintoretto’s absence from Lodovico Dolce’s proVenetian response to Vasari, entitled Dialogo della pittura (1557), and his limited
visibility in Francesco Sansovino’s Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia (1561), where
the Venetian historian speaks disapprovingly of his speed and impatience.4
It has been suggested that while Dolce did not discuss Tintoretto in the
Dialogo, he invoked the painter disdainfully as one of the greedy and lazy young
painters of the new generation; Tintoretto, however, is never mentioned by
name.5 A tempting explanation for the attitude taken by Tintoretto’s contemporaries might be that the Venetian painter was too young at that particular
point in time to fit comfortably within the larger history that was being told; this,
however, is a highly problematic solution and points neatly to the way subjects
come to be represented through language. Tintoretto was already in his thirties
by the 1550s; by 1557 he was almost forty. This was beyond the cusp of respectable
artistic maturity. By the end of the 1540s Tintoretto had already produced
altarpieces and ceiling paintings for various Venetian patricians and confraternities. In 1548 he completed one of his most important public commissions – the
controversial Miracle of the Slave – ordered by the guardian grande of the Scuola
Grande di San Marco, Marco Episcopi, whose daughter the painter would later
marry. It has also been pointed out that Tintoretto’s prestezza (speed of execution)
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00636.x
ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141–6790 . VOL 31 NO 5 . NOVEMBER 2008 pp 665-690
& Association of Art Historians 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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D E AT H , H I S T O R Y, A N D T H E M A R V E L L O U S L I V E S O F T I N T O R E T T O
caused a pointed debate between three satirical poets, Pietro Aretino, Anton
Francesco Doni and Andrea Calmo, which revealed new anxieties about the
transformations taking place in emergent market practices.6 It seems unlikely,
then, that a well-informed gossipmonger like Vasari would not have known about
such a local personality in 1550. It is even more inconceivable that a prominent
Venetian author like Dolce would not have been aware of the cultural developments occurring in his own city; the main interlocutor in Dolce’s Dialogo, after all,
was Aretino, the same writer who had been an early patron and supporter and
subsequent critic of Tintoretto in the 1540s.7
Tintoretto would have to wait a decade after his death for a Northern author –
Karel van Mander – to grant him the honour of an individual biography in the
Schilder-boeck, published in Harlem in 1604. That Tintoretto, who was an elected
member of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, was demoted to a supporting
role in the second edition of Vasari’s Vite and was only vaguely alluded to by Pino,
Sansovino and Dolce are not insignificant omissions. As Elizabeth Pilliod has
demonstrated in a study on artists in the Medici court during the 1540s, the
ideological work at play in the ‘representation, misrepresentation, and nonrepresentation’ in Vasari’s Vite of this particular generation of Florentine artists
(including Pierfrancesco Foschi, Agnolo Bronzino, Jacone, Francesco Bachiaca,
Giovambattista del Tasso, Jacopo da Pontormo, Baccio Bandinelli and Tribolo)
held very real ramifications for their posthumous reputations and artistic
histories.8 As in the ancient tradition of the damnatio memoriae, where names on
monuments were physically struck out of history, the Vasarian ‘pseudo-vita’ and
‘non-vita’ contributed to the privileging of certain artists above others within the
version of art’s history that subsequent generations (including our own) inherited
from Vasari.
It would be incorrect, however, to portray Tintoretto merely as a victim of
Vasarian campanilismo, for much of Vasari’s characterization was based on extant
Venetian accounts.9 Instead, it could be suggested that writing in the midsixteenth century both Vasari and his Venetian contemporaries perceived
Tintoretto as a nebulous figure of things to come – a professional and commercial
system they neither particularly appreciated nor cared to promote – rather than
as an illustrious figure in a narrative that they were in the process of writing.
Instead of a non-vita, Vasari’s pseudo-vita fossilized a certain image of the artist as a
rash, impetuous, extravagant young man, a stereotype which proved resistant to
change throughout most of Tintoretto’s life (in spite of the few exceptions that
can be noted at the end of his life).10
Eleven years after Tintoretto’s death Federico Zuccaro would identify him in Il
lamento della Pittura sù l’onde venete (1605) as the unequivocal beginning of the end.
The treatise begins with a pitiful encounter with Pittura (the personification of
painting), who is discovered by the narrator abandoned on the murky shores of
Venice, dressed in dirty rags. When the speaker demands, ‘Who has done this to
you?’ Pittura responds: ‘I fell for a dyer [un Tentore] who promised me great things
when he was in the flower of youth. He gave me two bracelets as a token of his
love, but then his strangeness turned my world upside down.’11 In no uncertain
terms, Tintoretto was thus cast as the young rake who led Painting astray.
Many authors disagreed with Zuccaro’s representation. The Brescian author
Giulio Cesare Gigli, for one, reinvented Zuccaro’s villain as Pittura’s valiant and
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witty lover in La pittura trionfante (1615).12 Tintoretto was either praised or blamed
for the quickness of his mind and brush. Whether this was interpreted as a
positive or negative quality, the underlying characterization remained intact. The
paradox could be summarized in the following terms: while the historical
Tintoretto aged in life, he remained forever young in discourse. Even in the
century after his death, there was a tendency to represent Tintoretto as a modern
painter.13 For some, youth was a sign of immaturity and decadence; for others, it
pointed to the bold modernity of the future already visible in the present. For
both, Tintoretto became a useful rhetorical device.
The luminosity of Tintoretto’s posthumous reputation has, to a certain
degree, prevented us from looking more closely at Tintoretto’s lack of visibility in
the art writing of his own time. Strangely enough, this fold in the narrative was
first explored at length by Jean-Paul Sartre in ‘Le séquestré de Venise’ (1957), most
commonly translated as ‘The Prisoner of Venice’, the first of his three meditations
on Tintoretto. In this highly polemical text, Sartre portrayed the isolated
Tintoretto as a ‘renegade painter’ and a ‘lacerated heart’, the victimized local
hero against which the conservative powers of the Venetian State, with Titian as
its beloved adopted son, conspired to keep down.14 Despite its historical inaccuracies and rhetorical exaggeration, Sartre’s short essay is notable in its stubborn characterization of Tintoretto as the only authentic voice in a city overcome
by barbarian invaders: ‘The little dyer was a native, and Venice was his birthright.’15 Or again, ‘By a strange inversion, the native, one hundred percent
Venetian seemed an interloper, almost a pariah, in his own city.’16 Sartre
concludes the essay with this melodramatic paragraph:
Tintoretto was the chief mourner for Venice and a way of life, but when he died there was no
one to act as his chief mourner; then silence fell, and hypocritically pious hands hung crepe
over his canvases. When we remove this black veil, we find a portrait, started anew a hundred
times. The portrait of Jacopo? The portrait of the Queen of the Seas? As you will: the city and her
painter have one and the same face.17
To these hyperbolic proclamations, the historian must necessarily pause for
reflection: when the black veil of historical circumstance and discursive neglect
was pushed aside, what did this portrait – ‘started anew a hundred times’ – look
like? And who was the author of this ‘face’?
The afterlife of this particular Venetian painter stands as an interesting case
study for the processes of historical revision and the broader issue of historical
portraiture so crucial in the manipulation of artistic reputation and in the
narration of artists’ lives. The artist’s conflicted afterlife pushes us to rethink the
historical specificity of Tintoretto’s ‘author function’ c. 1640 – i.e., his shifting
position within an emergent history of Venetian art that was itself in the process
of coming into being.18 What values and standards were attributable to, and
understood through, the name Tintoretto? What did Tintoretto signify and
represent for readers of his own time, and how did this both change and remain
similar for subsequent generations? How did the artist’s death transform the
multiple representations of his life and how did such interventions revise the
larger master narrative that was being scripted? The critical implications at stake
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might be otherwise expressed as such: how does Tintoretto’s death and Tintoretto’s lives become history?
In response, let me state the two key points of my thesis in somewhat broad
terms. First, Tintoretto’s death in 1594 was the first step that enabled the
construction of a history for Venetian art; while Pino and Dolce wrote dialogues
about Venetian art, the seventeenth-century Venetian biographer, Carlo Ridolfi,
would be the architect of the luminous monument upon which the names of the
Venetian canon would be inscribed. Both Tintoretto and Ridolfi are linked by the
year 1594 in which the former passed away and in which the latter was born.
Second, the death of Tintoretto’s son Domenico in 1635 was the final event that
cleared the way and opened the possibility for a structured history of Venetian art
to come into being in the 1640s with the publication of Ridolfi’s biographies of
the Venetian artists, Le Maraviglie dell’arte (1648), of which the stand-alone Vita di
Giacopo Robusti (1642) was the first to appear. It is this irruption between the
beginning and the middle of the seventeenth century that will be the focus here.
The following discussion will examine this liminal moment through three
frames: the first part will outline the historical backdrop against which Ridolfi’s
biographies were staged; the second section will examine Tintoretto as dramatis
persona (Old Master, modern painter and Venetian citizen); and the final segment
will ask: how and at what point does obituary become history? History, as we shall
see, has a tendency to follow in death’s footsteps.
A D E AT H I N V E N I C E / A L I F E I N H I S T O R Y
Oddly enough, none of the Renaissance workshops managed to sustain activity
into the next century. In spite of documented efforts, they all died out. In 1635
biological discontinuity with the glorious Renaissance past precipitated the sense
of historical difference that some critics increasingly felt between the previous
and current generations of artists. In retrospect, with the advantages of hindsight, the historian can point to 1576 as the beginning of the ‘end’ that was to
come. Titian was the first of the grandi to go, followed immediately by his son
Orazio. In 1577 the Palazzo Ducale was ravaged by a fire that took with it the
accumulative achievements of the various Renaissance artists engaged to
decorate its majestic halls. Soon thereafter, the authors of those images would be
gone as well. Following Titian, Veronese was the next to pass away in the spring of
1588. Tintoretto would follow in 1594, with the deaths of his daughter Marietta
taking place in 1590 and his colleague Jacopo Bassano in 1592. The remaining
members of Veronese’s workshop – his son Carletto and his brother Benedetto –
died in 1596 and 1598 respectively. In 1628 Palma Giovane’s remains were laid to
rest in the tomb that he had prepared for himself in the church of Santi Giovanni
e Paolo. By 1631 Veronese’s other son, Gabriele, too, would be gone, closing yet
another chapter in the grand narrative of the Renaissance.
Tintoretto’s son Domenico, then, was the last active link to the illustrious
artistic inheritance of the Cinquecento. Domenico’s sister Ottavia married the
German painter Sebastian Casser in a last attempt to maintain the Robusti
workshop, but none of the Casser children carried on the family tradition.19
Domenico was buried in the same chapel in the Madonna dell’Orto, where his
father’s body had been laid just over a decade previously. Ridolfi was friends with
Domenico (who had painted the author’s portrait) and his sense of loss was
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articulated with great emotion in Le Maraviglie where he concluded Domenico’s
biography in stating that, with his death, the entire city commiserated and
looked on as ‘the last flame of the glorious Tintoretto family was extinguished.’20
With Domenico’s death some forty years after that of his father the past was
ready at last to become history, and the melancholic, revisionist process of
mythopoiesis could begin. The process of historical retroaction required the passage
of time so that the disjointed events of the past could be ordered into a plausible
narrative of causality. Imagine, for instance, the experience of the aged Domenico, as he drafted his last will and testament in a city overwhelmed by plague in
late October of 1630.21 Domenico’s eventual death would only become a historical
‘event’ when it was framed after the fact by discourse, and that singular moment
could be interpreted from multiple viewpoints depending on who was speaking
and to whom.
In Domenico’s will the author stipulates that his brother, Marco Robusti, was
to receive all the models in the workshop as well as all their father’s self-portraits
and all the copies made after it. This is somewhat moving since their father in his
own will prayed that the two brothers would manage ‘to live in peace’ together
and that Marco would occasionally help out his brother in the studio when
necessary.22 Domenico’s student, Bastiano (Sebastian Casser), was to be given four
models, a bust of Vitellius (a favourite object of the late Tintoretto), a statue and
two torsos, all the drawings he did as a student in Domenico’s workshop, as well
as 150 sketches of male figures and 50 of female figures, in addition to all the
pigments, brushes and a porphyry stone still in the studio. Beyond this detailed
list of inheritances, Domenico also makes careful arrangements regarding the
administration of his properties in Venice and Carpeneo, and the sustenance of
his two sisters Octavia and Laura. He further specifies that, at the time of his
death, Pietro Perazzo and Primaticio Fornagieri, the executors of his testament,
should be repaid with some paintings in his hand. From this relatively
conscientious document, it would seem that Domenico was concerned, above all,
with settling any outstanding accounts and with making sure that the doors to
the formidable Robusti workshop would close with great dignity after his death.
Ridolfi’s biography of Domenico, in contrast, relates a slightly different
sequence of events. In the final pages of his life, Domenico is said to have planned
to leave his house and all of his father’s belongings in order to establish an art
academy for the young painters of Venice; he changed his mind, however, because
of ‘the disgust’ they caused in him.23 There is strangely no mention of this in
Domenico’s will. Given the gaps in the archive, it is impossible to determine
whether Ridolfi’s claim is true or false; however, the effect of Ridolfi’s statement,
regardless of its authenticity, provides us with some interesting questions: what
does such a statement say about Domenico and what does Ridolfi want to say
through this anecdote about the last of Tintoretto’s artistic descendants?
According to the ‘Domenico’ that emerges from the pages of Ridolfi’s Le
Maraviglie in 1648, the glass was definitely half-empty. Ridolfi’s account of the
withdrawn donation reflected the author’s own depressive perspective on
contemporary culture and contributed to entrenching the perception amongst
certain men like Ridolfi (as well as Zuccaro) that something great had come to an
end: Domenico decided to keep his father’s things in the family, preserving them
as artefacts of a glorious past coming to a close, like his own life, rather than to
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render them unto what Domenico (dramatis persona) perceived to be the undeserving children of a hopeless future. But, perhaps, such backward-glancing
melancholia is an appropriate attitude in the representation of an artist at the
end of his career, especially when that story is being told by an author himself at
the end of his life.24
The posthumous re-invention of Tintoretto raises the issue of the timeliness of
Ridolfi’s biographies of the Venetian artists. That is, while biographies of Tintoretto and histories of Venetian art were possible prior to this moment in time, a
specifically Venetian history of art in which Tintoretto would emerge as the
primary agent of change seemed to come only with the physical disappearance of
that name. The questions that need to be addressed in order to grasp the
historical specificity of this claim are: what were the circumstances that made it
possible to understate Tintoretto’s contribution in the sixteenth-century art
literature? Likewise, how do we account for Tintoretto’s sudden visibility in the
seventeenth century? What material circumstances enabled the completion of
Ridolfi’s biographies in the 1640s and not any earlier?
At a practical level, it would have been unlikely for Ridolfi to have realized
such a task before this moment because he was preoccupied in the 1620s and
1630s with his collection of drawings by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Italian artists. The cannibalized remnants of Ridolfi’s albums are now held in
Christ Church library in Oxford; the earliest volume of the Christ Church albums
is traditionally dated to 1631 and the latest to 1638.25 As with Vasari’s Libro del
disegno from the 1560s, which coincides with the period in between the publication of the first and second editions of Le vite, Ridolfi’s selection was wide and by
no means focused solely on Venetian artists. Similar to Vasari’s Libro, the function
of Ridolfi’s collection seems to have been both commemorative and historical: on
the one hand, Ridolfi responded to a need to preserve the great achievements of
deceased and living artists for the memory of future generations; on the other
hand, there was a great desire to disentangle the various strands of that
mnemonic web and straighten them into a tightly organized, linear history of the
past. Ridolfi’s period of intense collecting was punctured by the plague of 1630
and then by the death of his friend and Tintoretto’s son, Domenico, five years
later.
At another level it could be suggested in somewhat polemical terms that the
Tintoretto to emerge from the Vita di Giacopo Robusti was conceptually implausible
prior to the 1640s. Or rather it only became possible for Ridolfi to comprehend
and represent Tintoretto’s impact on Venetian painting and the consequence of
the Old Master’s disappearance upon that same history – a history-in-thebecoming – in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, when the last of his
artistic heirs had passed away. For although Domenico was survived by his
siblings, among whom were his brother Marco and his sister Ottavia (who married
Casser), he was the last member of the Robusti bloodline actively engaged in his
father’s profession. The point of no return, then, is 1635. In the wake of Domenico’s death and at the high point of Ridolfi’s collecting activities, Tintoretto
gained a new visibility and a teleological narrative, or history, of Venetian art
became possible. Perhaps without realizing it at the time, Ridolfi’s connoisseurial
activities of the previous decades – his systematic even if often flawed process of
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visual analysis and historical taxonomy – ultimately prepared him for the larger
discursive monument that would be constructed through his writings.
TINTORETTO, ‘IL VENETO NOME’
If Vasari’s and Zuccaro’s negative characterizations cast Tintoretto as the young,
rash despoiler of Pittura, what was the alternative that Ridolfi’s biographies
offered? The sequence of events unfolded as follows: in 1642 Ridolfi publishes the
Vita di Giacopo Robusti detto il Tintoretto, celebre pittore cittadino Venetiano in Venice
through Gugliemo Oddoni; four years later the Vita di Paolo Caliari Veronese, celebre
pittore appears through a different printer, Matteo Leni, as a final advertisement of
Ridolfi’s forthcoming opus magnum; in 1648, Ridolfi’s lives of the Venetian painters, Le Maraviglie emerges from the Venetian printing house of Giovanni Battista
Sgava in two separate volumes, bearing two different dedications and illustrated
with engraved portraits of the Venetian artists. The first half of Le Maraviglie is
dedicated to Gerard and Jan Reynst and largely completed by 1646, for the dedicatory letter dates to 25 June of that year; the dedicatory letter for the second
part, addressed to Bartolomeo Da Fin, bears the inscription ‘Venice, 22 June 1648’.
While the two editions remained essentially the same, Tintoretto’s role from the
one to the other changes and it is the repetition as much as the difference that is
striking.
When Ridolfi published the one-off biography of Tintoretto in the summer of
1642, he strategically dedicated it to Doge Francesco Erizzo and the Venetian
Senate (the two parts of Le Maraviglie, in contrast, were presented to influential
foreign collectors in Venice).26 In the dedicatory letter, Ridolfi praised ‘Venice,
admired above all other cities for the condition of its site, for the abundance of
riches, for the splendour of its glorious gestures, and its incomparable government’ for having produced Tintoretto – the ‘most beautiful gem of painting’ –
who brought fame and honour to the city through his ‘divine art’.27 With an
exalted sense of civic duty, Ridolfi intended to ‘render immortal the names of the
Great’; in emulation of ancient historians, he hoped to ‘forever conserve the
virtue, valour, and fame of great men’, so that in recounting the stories of such
individuals he would provide models of ideal behaviour for the men of today.28
Why begin with Tintoretto? Looking back from the art-historical judgement of
the twenty-first century, Titian, undoubtedly the most famous and celebrated of
the so-called ‘glorious triumvirate’, would have been the obvious choice. In 1642,
however, that possibility was not open to Ridolfi as Tizianello (Gian Maria
Verdizotti) had only recently published a biography of Titian, dedicated to Lady
Arundel, entitled the Breve compendio in 1622. An argument can also be proposed
that Titian had also become ‘too old’ by 1642 (sixty-six years had already passed
since Titian’s death); in this regard, Tintoretto’s assumed ‘youth’ finally became
an asset. The second candidate from the ‘glorious triumvirate’ would have been
Veronese, but he too was an unsuitable contender for this occasion. To be sure,
the 1646 Vita di Paolo Caliari suggests that the option was not entirely implausible,
although in retrospect it is clear that Tintoretto’s biography had to have preceded
that of Veronese in light of the larger project still in medias res.29
Two reasons can help make sense of Ridolfi’s choice. The first was the death of
Tintoretto’s son Domenico some years earlier; it was a case of interpreting the
present through recent events, and the Robusti were the last of the last. The
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second – and more critical element –
had to do with Tintoretto’s essential
Venetianness and this element is key
in Ridolfi’s revisionism (while David
Rosand and Tom Nichols have underlined Tintoretto’s unique venezianità
in more recent times, it was Sartre, as
we have heard, who most dramatically highlighted this aspect in
1957).30 Unlike Titian and Veronese,
Tintoretto was a Venetian by birth
and, therefore, the most appropriate
of the three Old Masters with whom
to commence what was decisively
being framed as a Venetian project.
In the 1642 publication Ridolfi
specifies that the Vita is the ‘first fruit
of the hard labour’ he has undertaken
and that he is presenting it to the
Doge and the Senate in honour of one
of its ‘most worthy citizens’. Tintoretto, he writes, has illustrated in the
1 Portrait of Carlo Ridolfi from Carlo Ridolfi,
rooms of the Palazzo Ducale the
Le Maraviglie dell’arte, 1648. Venice: Giovanni
victories of the most celebrated city
Battista Sgava. Photo: Research Library, The
rendering ‘the Venetian name forever
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California, famous in painting’.31 Three points
ID 85-B23276.
can be made about this line – reso per
sempre famoso nella Pittura il Veneto
nome. First, ‘il Veneto nome’ suggests the name of the Venetian painter (Tintoretto).
Second, that same phrase refers to the name of the body politic (the Venetian
state), which is rendered immortal through Tintoretto’s paintings. Third, ‘nella
Pittura’ here means that the doubled ‘Venetian name’ (that of the artist and that
of the state) will be forever remembered in painting, by which is understood a
history of painting and, more specifically, a Venetian history of painting.
This patriotic drive is undisguised in Ridolfi’s 1642 dedication of the Vita di
Giacopo Robusti to Erizzo and the Senate and is made all the more evident in the
half-title that is added to the 1648 edition of Le Maraviglie dell’arte, overo delle vite
degl’illustri pittori veneti, e dello stato (On the Marvels of Art or on the Lives of the
Illustrious Painters of Venice and the State). Like Francesco Sansovino’s popular
guidebooks, Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia (1561) and Venetia città nobilissima et
singolare (1581), Ridolfi’s Vita belonged to a grand tradition of encomiastic texts in
praise of the Venetian State. The State, for its part, did not fail to acknowledge
Ridolfi’s efforts, knighting him shortly after receiving the Vita, an honour he is
quick to point out in his own portrait and biography in Le Maraviglie (plate 1).32
The venezianità of Ridolfi’s venture is evident in the discursive framing of
Tintoretto; he is introduced in his biography as ‘Jacopo Robusti known as
Tintoretto Venetian citizen and painter’. Tintoretto’s Venetian identity is perhaps
more tellingly revealed in the way Tintoretto is represented visually within the
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2 Portrait of Tintoretto from Carlo Ridolfi, Vita di Giacopo Robusti, 1642. Venice: Gugliemo Oddoni.
Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.
two publications. In the 1642 artist portrait (plate 2), Tintoretto is shown in threequarter view, his brows slightly furled and his forehead creased with age. His body
is encircled in a frame around which an inscription reads: ‘Jacopo Tintoretto
famous Venetian painter at the age of eighty-two’. The date is somewhat of an
enigma since Tintoretto died around the age of seventy-five or seventy-six (Ridolfi
repeats this error in the biographies).33 The slip artificially ages Tintoretto; it
represents him as being even older and more venerable than he actually was. The
cross-hatching is loose, spinning in a circular manner behind the figure’s head;
the curling wisps of his beard seem almost unkempt, contributing to the intensity
of Tintoretto’s expression. He seems psychologically alert, but the time stamp in
the inscription serves as a reminder to the reader that the celebrated painter,
even if present in the pages in the book, was already absent from life. The 1642
portrait does not correspond to any known portrait of Tintoretto, although
significant morphological similarities can be made with the youthful self-portrait
(plate 3). Both images are dominated by the piercing gaze of the artist, who looks
out to confront the spectator. The hairline in the earlier image seems to have
receded with age; likewise, the sitter’s beard seems to have grown into full
maturity in the subsequent print.
The 1648 portrait (plate 4) takes this process of retrospective ageing a step
further. In comparison to the earlier likeness, in Le Maraviglie Tintoretto is
refashioned in more sober terms; even the unruliness of his beard has now been
groomed. Posed frontally before an orderly field of tightly rendered horizontal
lines, his body is constrained by both the frontal composition and the restraint
imposed upon him by his costume. His image is now contained in the same
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3 Tintoretto, Self-Portrait, c. 1546–8. Oil on canvas, 45.1 ! 38.1 cm. Philadelphia: Philadelphia
Museum of Art (Gift of Marion R. Ascoli and the Marion R. and Max Ascoli Fund in honour of
Lessing Rosenwald, 1983). Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art (1983-190-1).
rectangular frame as all the other artist portraits. Here Tintoretto poses
respectfully as one painter among many others.
Tintoretto’s Venetian identity in both portraits is also underlined through
sartorial modesty: the bearded artist is dressed in a simple white shirt worn under
the traditional, fur-trimmed black toga of the Venetian citizen; a becho or sash is
draped over the shoulder to indicate his status as a man of mature age in
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conformity with the prototype
illustrated in Cesare Vecellio’s
late sixteenth-century costume
book Gli habiti degli antichi
et moderni (1598).34 This is
Ridolfi’s Tintoretto – the selftaught master expelled from
Titian’s studio, the unassuming
painter who declines Henry
III’s knighthood, the humble
servant of the State who
accepts nominal payment for
the Paradise in the council hall,
the gracious Venetian host who
opens his studio to foreign
artists and who is forced by his
wife Faustina to wear his Venetian toga in public.35 Tintoretto
is represented in both word
and image as the embodiment
of mediocritas and communitas,
the constitutive ideals upon
which the early modern Venetian belief in republican
equality was grounded.36
At the same time Tintoretto’s difference is not completely erased. Whereas the
majority of the other artists are
shown in three-quarter view,
Tintoretto alone in the parte
seconda faces the viewer head on
in this solemn manner.37 His
exemplarity is also inscribed
through other means. In
contrast to Tintoretto’s definition as a cittadino venetiano,
Titian and Veronese – neither of
whom were Venetian citizens
by birth – are depicted in their
portraits for Le Maraviglie (plates
5 and 6) in rich fur stoles, worn
over gold chains and fine
garments. Both men are represented as men of great international honour and fame,
embodying a different kind of
courtly ideal. Titian’s image is
4 Portrait of Tintoretto from Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie
dell’arte, 1648. Venice: Giovanni Battista Sgava. Photo:
Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles, California, ID 85-B23276.
5 Portrait of Titian from Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell’arte,
1648. Venice: Giovanni Battista Sgava. Photo: Research
Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California,
ID 85-B23276.
6 Portrait of Veronese from Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie
dell’arte, 1648. Venice: Giovanni Battista Sgava. Photo:
Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles, California, ID 85-B23276.
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based upon a well-known model that
derives from an altered version of the
painted Self-Portrait in Berlin, which was
also known through various engraved
versions such as the one made by
Agostino Carracci.38 Veronese’s corresponds to a lost model which is known
through a copy now in the Cugini
Collection in Bergamo.39
The reference for Tintoretto’s
portrait is a little more complicated.
Ridolfi used the same engraving in
both the 1646 and 1648 editions of
Veronese’s life, but this was not the
case with Tintoretto. For source
hunters, the 1648 portrait by Jacopo
Piccini of Tintoretto in Le Maraviglie
seems to have been modelled upon
the monument designed by Ludovico
Pozzoserrato around 1588. This con7 Gijsbert van Veen, Portrait of Tintoretto, late
struction is said to have been made to
sixteenth century. Engraving, 27.8 ! 21.4 cm.
commemorate Tintoretto’s seventieth
Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-OBbirthday and was recorded in an
15.716).
engraving by Gijsbert van Veen, dedicated to Alessandro Vittoria, a Venetian sculptor and friend of the Robusti family (plate 7).40 Ridolfi’s design,
therefore, is drawn from a well-known public portrait of the artist’s face. In Van
Veen’s print, Tintoretto is placed in an oval frame set upon a classicizing architectural construction crowned by Atlas on the left and ‘Minerva Pictrix’ as
Painting to the right, situated in an open landscape, with billowing clouds above
and a low horizon line below. The subsequent print in Le Maraviglie is traced from
the figure in this one; the face of the artist has been reversed, but the bodies are
identical. Unlike the picture from Le Maraviglie, but like the 1642 portrait in the
Vita, circular lines emanate like a halo from Tintoretto’s head in the background
of Van Veen’s print.
Following Detlev von Hadeln’s observations in the 1920s, scholars have
generally accepted the Louvre Self-Portrait (plate 8) as the source for Van Veen’s and
Piccini’s prints.41 The prototype and its progeny, however, are not entirely identical, and the difference is significant. Even though it is difficult to discern
Tintoretto’s attire in the Louvre painting, where he appears almost as a disembodied spectre, close inspection of the canvas indicates that the painter has
shown himself garbed in a fur stole much like his venerable counterparts in Le
Maraviglie rather than in the sober robes of the cittadino venetiano. This is not to
suggest that the painted and engraved images are unrelated. They share the same
frontal view onto the artist’s face; however, the artist’s body in the two prints is
clearly and strategically refashioned in Venetian terms. In retaining the calm
expression upon the artist’s face from the Louvre picture, the engravers pay
homage to the artist’s self-portrait (although perhaps not this specific one); but in
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8 Tintoretto, Self-Portrait, 1588. Oil on canvas, 64.8 ! 52.1 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Photo: r
akg-images/Erich Lessing.
changing the costume, they also change the meaning signified by that body. The
symbolic import of the body is reiterated in the portrait of Domenico, who
appears in Le Maraviglie in the same pose as did his father in the Vita; as in his
father’s portraits, he, too, would be pictured in the same regulation black Venetian toga (plate 9). In short, the Robusti painters – father and son – were represented first and foremost as painters of the Venetian state, exemplars and
guardians of il Veneto nome.
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9 Portrait of Domenico Tintoretto from Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell’arte,
1648. Venice: Giovanni Battista Sgava. Photo: Research Library, The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, California, ID 85-B23276.
Writing about the interaction between word and image in sixteenth-century
Venetian portrait books, Bronwen Wilson has argued that the engraved portrait
functions as ‘a mnemonic device that also memorializes’, a device ‘charged with
reviving the presence of an absent individual, and with propelling the memory of
that person into the present’. At the same time, through this process of visual
commemoration, the reader is encouraged ‘to scrutinize its topography for
evidence of the sitter’s talents and actions’ because ‘the face’, she concludes, ‘is
like a map [. . .] to the sitter’s personality.’42 Textual description and visual
representation, in other words, reinforce each other in the construction of
historical personalities. If this is the case, where do the ‘personality maps’ in the
Vita and Le Maraviglie bring the reader?
The two portraits of Tintoretto construct very different identities of the artist.
In the Vita, Tintoretto’s slightly uncombed self still reflects some of the Vasarian
attributes of extravagance and fierceness; in Le Maraviglie these elements have
been suppressed, and his frontal pose emphasizes the nobility of the artist’s body.
The former represents a more internalized image (or what Vasari referred to as
the artist’s ‘formidable mind’) as reflected on the surface of his face; the latter is a
more externalized presentation of the mask and costume that define the artist’s
public persona.
Ridolfi’s substitution of the more intense 1642 image with the more
composed 1648 version reflects the different roles that Tintoretto performs in the
Vita and Le Maraviglie. In the Vita he was the protagonist in his own story; in Le
Maraviglie he was but one character in a larger drama; he was a singular agent
(although a luminous one) operating within a multiplicity of other such subjects.
Hence, while Tintoretto may have been first among equals in order of publication,
he became one among others represented through both word and image as
identifiably Venetian in Le Maraviglie. Out of all the painters included in the two
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parts of Ridolfi’s text, six are both identified by the title ‘PITTORE CITTADINO
VENETIANO’ and have their portraits included: Vittore Carpaccio, Giovanni
Bellini, Jacopo Robusti, Pietro Malombra, Domenico Tinoretto and Sante
Peranda.43 Out of these Venetians, two are not visibly dressed in the same
minimalist Venetian costume as the others (Carpaccio is shown in profile in a
nondescript shirt and Peranda is shown in a simple but noble shirt with slit
sleeves), and Gentile Bellini is represented in Venetian robes, but is identified
instead as ‘Painter and Knight’.44
Peranda’s position as a Venetian painter who returned from a successful
career in Rome and his placement within Le Maraviglie is strategic and deserves a
more detailed analysis than can be provided here. Suffice to say that he is, for all
practical purposes, the ‘last’ Venetian biography in the parte seconda. Although Le
Maraviglie ends with the biographies of Filippo Zanimberti (one of Peranda’s
followers), Tiberio Tinelli (a celebrated portraitist), Claudio Ridolfi (who was
Ridolfi’s contemporary but not a direct relative) and Ridolfi’s autobiography,
which appears in the notice to the reader, all four figures come across as a coda to
the life of the last great Venetian artist of Ridolfi’s time. Peranda dies in 1638, a
few years before the publication of the Vita di Giacopo Robusti, further heightening
the sense of closure that Ridolfi seems to have felt. At the same time the final lines
of Peranda’s biography reveal a silver lining in Ridolfi’s dark clouds. Alluding to
Peranda’s students ‘who are still alive’, Ridolfi concludes in a colophon forming
an arrow ending with three asterisks: ‘the minds of the Venetian School will
always produce new wonders and marvels with their brushes.’45 Closure in this
instance also points to things to come in the future.
This forward/backwards movement signals to another critical difference
between the two biographies, one that highlights the re-positioning of Tintoretto
within Ridolfi’s larger scheme. Albeit constituting one part of a larger assemblage, Tintoretto remains a pivotal figure. In the Vita he stands as a metonymy for
the ‘Venetian’ within a larger history of art and as the artist within a history of
Venice; in Le Maraviglie he becomes a shifting, liminal figure, a double metonymy
for both the ancient and the modern within art and its history. Unlike the
singular focus of the Vita, Le Maraviglie is structured chronologically, beginning in
the fourteenth century and ending in Ridolfi’s own time. This new form is of great
importance because Tintoretto is now displaced by Guariento as the first
biography in the series, and Ridolfi, to be sure, takes the opportunity to link the
one with the other:
in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, [Guariento] painted a Paradise over the tribune where there
used to be a painting in green chiaroscuro and which has now been replaced by Tintoretto’s
painting, in which the Saviour is represented in the centre in the act of placing a golden crown
upon the head of his mother the Virgin [. . .].46
In noting the earlier monochromatic decoration upon the same wall, Ridolfi
retroactively connects the Paduan painter with the medieval past; in referring to
Tintoretto’s Paradise in Guariento’s biography, Ridolfi also charts a narrative of
causality in which a historical telos effortlessly unfolds from the past to the
present.
679
Guariento and Tintoretto, however, are not positioned as a definitive beginning and end. Le Maraviglie, to repeat, was divided into two parts. The first half
chronicles, among others, the lives of the would-be founding fathers of Venetian
painting and concludes with the biographies of the celebrated Veronese and
Bassano workshops. This part of the story ends and the next half begins again in
the parte seconda with Tintoretto. The parte seconda was dedicated to Bartolomeo
Da Fin, an amateur collector of art and the reigning guardian grande of the Scuola
Grande di San Rocco, where Tintoretto had devoted much of his career.
Why begin again with Tintoretto? That is, why subtract Tintoretto from the
other two thirds of the ‘glorious triumvirate’ to which he belonged? Why exile
him to the second volume? It could be argued that Tintoretto already haunted the
parte prima. On the one hand, his biography was not included with the others – he
was, therefore, missing from the pages of the text. On the other hand, the Vita had
already told his story once before, and the memory of that tale rendered it
unnecessary to repeat it again here – he was, in this regard, always-already
present within the discourse. The two halves are, in fact, unequal (the first
consisted of 406 pages, whereas the second only contained 324 pages). This detail
is significant when we consider that almost a quarter of the parte seconda (eightyfour pages) is devoted to Tintoretto’s expanded biography, as well as that of his
two children, Marietta and Domenico, and his other pupils; thus, the leading role
was performed by the collective identity of the Robusti family. New anecdotes
were added in order to illustrate Tintoretto’s distinctive wit and to demonstrate
the speed and audacity of both his brush and his mind. In this regard Ridolfi
carefully and deliberately transformed what had been perceived in the previous
century as negative qualities into positive ones for new seventeenth-century
readers.
Among the many stories told about Tintoretto from one edition to the other,
two stand out, because they are repeated in the Vita and Le Maraviglie, and both
reinforce the perception of Tintoretto as an old as well as a modern artist. The
first involves an incident that Ridolfi says took place around the time of Tintoretto’s competition with Veronese in the decoration of the Palazzo Ducale.
Tintoretto’s great art, he writes, could not help but attract vicious talk from
jealous enemies; however, some ‘young painters of great virtue’ who were
eavesdropping in the aisles ‘leapt out from their hiding places and came to
[Tintoretto’s] defence.’47
The second anecdote similarly links Tintoretto to a modern artist, Agostino
Carracci, who requested permission from Tintoretto to engrave some images from
the Scuola di San Rocco during his sojourn in Venice. Tintoretto was so pleased
with the results that he is said to have embraced him.48 Carlo Cesare Malvasia
elaborates upon this story in his lives of the Bolognese artists, the Felsina pittrice
(1678), adding that in rendering the Crucifixion Agostino changed the position of
some of the figures and in doing so improved them. Anne Summerscale noted
that Malvasia has Tintoretto respond – ‘Keep it up, you know more than I do’ – in
Venetian dialect at this point in his biography of the Carracci, and Bellori, in his
biography of Agostino, claimed that Tintoretto agreed to instruct Agostino’s son
as a result of the exchange.49
For Ridolfi, Malvasia and Bellori, Tintoretto represented the facilitator who
negotiated the link between the great tradition of the Cinquecento and that of
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the Seicento. In having the young artists jump to his defence against the Old
Guard, Tintoretto is cast as a forerunner of the new. In portraying him as the
padrone of Agostino’s son, he is grafted onto the hearty family tree of the Carracci,
who had themselves become legends in their own right by the 1640s. This retroactive historicization of Tintoretto as a multifaceted historical actor nuances the
sixteenth-century image of the artist, where he was very clearly framed as part of
the younger generation of rowdy, undisciplined painters.
By starting with Tintoretto in the Vita and by starting again with Tintoretto in
Le Maraviglie, Ridolfi’s hero functioned as both a marker of discontinuity between
two volumes in the larger history of Venetian art as well as an instrument of
continuity, renewing the stories of greatness that Ridolfi, in spite of his own
pessimism, dearly hoped to witness again in his own life. To begin again with
Tintoretto meant to impose a significant divide but also to establish a new series
within the discursive space of history. The parallelism established between
Guariento (who begins Le Maraviglie) and Tintoretto transforms the role of the
latter from the last of the first to the first of the moderns. At the end of Tintoretto’s biography he is heard advising the new generation of artists not to lose
sight of the path traversed by the masters of the past.50 If Guariento’s fresco of the
Coronation of the Virgin in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, the heart of the Venetian
state apparatus, had been ravaged by time and by fire, Tintoretto’s enormous
canvas depicted Paradise restored. What was lost in the past was regained in the
present through Tintoretto’s brush, and, in the end, with Ridolfi’s pen.
Although Le Maraviglie emerges out of an established tradition of biographies
of illustrious men, Ridolfi’s collection was among the first regional histories of
art. It is rivalled only by Giovanni Baglione’s Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti, dal
pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572, in fino a tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642, which
appeared in the same year as the Vita di Giacopo Robusti. Previous texts, such as
Antonio Campi’s Cremona fedelissima città (1585), as well as Francesco Sansovino’s
numerous guides to Venice, subsume the discussion of art under the aegis of the
state. Baglione’s and Ridolfi’s, therefore, are unique in this regard. Both texts
focus on the construction of a history of art localized within one state – papal
Rome and the Venetian Republic. However, while for Baglione the individual
artist (regardless of his origin and training) is fortunate to work in Rome under
the patronage of great men, for Ridolfi the artist is simply fortunate to be Venetian and the Venetian State (in spite of the obvious circularity of the argument) is
fortunate to produce so many great artists.51 Ultimately, Ridolfi’s Le Maraviglie
partakes in a process of myth-making and at a scale for which the Venetians were
infamous.52 If, to follow the Burckhardtian line, the state is a work of art, here art
was undeniably being used to craft statehood; a history of Venetian art, in short,
was inevitably also a history of Venice.
ET IN VENETIA EGO
It cannot be known what Ridolfi thought as he began the titanic chore of writing
a history covering three centuries of artistic production in that most serene of
republics. We can, however, examine how he framed that endeavour after the fact.
In the 1648 notice to the reader of Le Maraviglie, Ridolfi recalls how, when he began
writing the lives of the Venetian painters, he did not expect to be ‘engulfed by the
immensity of this ocean’.53 Persuaded by his friends, first he published Tintor& ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2008
681
10 Frontispiece plate from Carlo Ridolfi,
Le Maraviglie dell’arte, 1648. Venice: Giovanni
Battista Sgava. Photo: Research Library, The
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
California, ID 85-B23276.
11 Historia plate from Cesare Ripa,
L’Iconologia, 1611. Padua: Pietro Paolo Tozzi.
Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.
682
etto’s life and then, after much coaxing,
he set upon the difficult task of
‘documenting three hundred years of
history’.54 He details the great efforts he
undertook to gather and preserve the
many memories of people, places and
things of the past, and to accumulate the
series of engraved designs that he
commissioned from Jacopo Piccini and
Giovanni Zorzi.55
If history, as it has been claimed, ‘is
that which transforms documents into
monuments’, that which commands
disjointed events into a grand narrative,
the frontispiece to the 1648 publication
(plate 10), might be read here as an
emblematic representation of the very
discursive process in which Ridolfi was
engaged in the decades bracketed by
Domenico’s death, at one end, and
the publication of Le Maraviglie, at the
other.56 Seated before a tomb-like structure in an open field, is a young, winged
woman, who is immediately identifiable
with Cesare Ripa’s personification of
History in L’Iconologia (plate 11). Simultaneously, she might also be less literally
interpreted as a synthesis of History and
Painting – i.e., as a luminous Historia of
Pittura.57 Ridolfi’s hybrid figure is
depicted with a brush in one hand and
an inkpot in the other hand, simultaneously painting and writing the title
which is to be engraved into the stone
monument.
Three further comparisons can be
made here. First is the frontispiece that
opens the second edition of Vasari’s
Le Vite where the three personifications
of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting
are shown seated together (plate 12).
Above them a winged figure of Fame
blows an instrument with three horns
calling forth the architects, sculptors
and painters resurrected by Vasari’s text.
Like figures in a Last Judgment scene,
these dormant souls emerge twisting in
all of their Michelangesque muscularity
from the earth below. The Latin text
beneath derives from a passage in Virgil’s
Aeneid describing Aeneas’s safe passage
out of Troy: ‘I will make known that in
this safe haven, these men never
perished, nor were vanquished by death.’
Le vite represents the very ‘safe haven’ in
which ‘artists are protected from death,
living forever in Vasari’s biographies’.58
The two frontispieces deploy symbols and
tropes in an unambiguous manner to
communicate the ambitions of their
respective authors. However, while
Vasari’s artists are being brought back to
life by Fame, Architecture, Sculpture and
Painting in such literal, embodied forms,
Ridolfi’s artists are being constructed,
instead, as a discursive monument that
repels the threat of death.
While there is a certain degree of
conceptual resemblance between the
two images, Ridolfi’s personification is
morphologically closer to the Muse in
Girolamo Teti’s Aedes Barberinae (plate 13),
published in Rome in 1642 (the
same year as Ridolfi’s Vita and six years
before Le Maraviglie). Seated on a broken
classical fragment in the courtyard
before the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, a
young woman carefully retraces the title
of Teti’s book upon the tablet before
her, the dome of St Peter’s visible in the
far distance beyond. A group of mischievous putti are shown to her right: one
watches as she writes, another holds the
emblematic Barberini laurel before the
spectator’s eyes, a third is wrestling with
a crane, and a fourth appears in the sky
above with a banner. In both the Aedes
Barberinae and Le Maraviglie, the female
figures are preoccupied with the
task of inscribing the title of the two
books that they introduce; both are situated on the left and seen from behind;
both cast their own shadows upon the
documents they author.
While the two women share a certain
visual similarity and conceptual logic, a
12 Frontispiece from Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’
più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, 1568.
Florence: i Giunti. r British Library Board.
All rights reserved (137.d.14–16).
13 Frontispiece from Girolamo Teti, Aedes
Barberinae, 1642. Rome: Mascardi. Photo: the
author.
683
14 Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego, c. 1650. Oil on canvas, 85 ! 121 cm. Paris: Musée du Louvre.
Photo: r akg-image/Erich Lessing.
third and more apposite point of comparison might be drawn between Ridolfi’s
figure and Dibutades, the Corinthian potter’s daughter, as recounted by Pliny the
elder in the Natural histories (35.151), who traces the shadow of her soon-to-beabsent lover, thereby inventing painting. In a similar manner, the hybrid figure of
Historia/Pittura inscribes the title of Ridolfi’s work upon the monument before her,
thereby inventing a history of Venetian painting constructed from the portraits of
artists from the distant and recent past. Like the young Corinthian maid, she
memorializes the forms of the dead, guarding them from the threat of oblivion.
In the background to the left, Father Time dives downward towards the earth
below. With scythe in the one hand and hourglass in the other, he enters the
tranquil Arcadian landscape brandishing his instruments of death.
Ridolfi’s young woman, however, remains steadfast in her activity, unperturbed by this melodramatic yet ineffectual phallic intrusion. Rather, like the
contemplative shepherds in Poussin’s Et in arcadia ego (plate 14), painted in the
decade just after the Vita and Le Maraviglie, Ridolfi’s heroine calmly composes
herself – i.e., she puts things back in order and narrates her own story with
unflinching self-control. Her dignified posture and intellectual absorption
counter the awkward descent and theatricality of the aged male figure. The
shadow cast by her arm comes to a point at the tip of her brush as if all knowledge
and authority emanates from that hand. Writing upon the blank memorial before
her, Historia/Pittura – like Ridolfi, whose opus she is commemorating – is busy
transforming the multiple, distinct documents of the past into a luminous,
historical monument for the future.
684
The author’s task of recording
the names of the deceased and of
protecting memory and history against
forgetting and oblivion is encapsulated
in an almost imperceptible detail upon
the empty architectural space of the
monument. In the gap just below her
left hand and above her elegantly
posed left foot, the artist has represented a snake curling over upon itself
in a knot, a symbol here for eternity
(plate 15). What might initially be read
as a bas-relief is, upon closer inspection, a living being that casts a shadow
beneath itself as it materializes from
the surface of the stone. This figure
emerges as an irruption upon the body
of the monument, blurring the
boundaries between the animate and 15 Detail of frontispiece from Carlo Ridolfi,
inanimate, but also making us acutely Le Maraviglie dell’arte, 1648.
conscious of the differences between
the two states in that same moment of conceptual conflation – i.e., in calling our
attention to the ambiguity of the representational sign, the viewer is pushed to
reflect upon the ontological nature of the thing represented.
The shadow of the serpent’s head that falls to the right and the circle
formed by its twisting body pull us into the space of the tomb. Moreover,
like the ghostly O in the famous painting that so obsessed Louis Marin contemplating Panofsky writing about Poussin, the serpentine form here beckons
the spectator to look more closely, and, in doing so, to gaze at one’s own
mortality:
Put the eye back in the O through a small gap and look from there at the other eye – across –
dead, now, here . . . Put the eye back in the O and continue – rewrite . . . Put the eye back in the O
to see the single shadow under the single letter: the blade of the scythe that amputates the
living, cutting away their double.59
The emergent figura serpentina in Ridolfi’s frontispiece, however, is not a morbid or
melancholic intrusion of things past. Instead, its liminal state between decorative
stillness and animate presence pushes the beholder to contemplate the promise
of immortality that is made possible through the historian’s pen – the eternalization of memory through the careful inscription of ink on paper, the remembrance of the deceased by the men of the future.
If Tintoretto was characterized as a young upstart by the authors of his own
time, he would later be re-presented as the venerable elder statesman of Venetian
Renaissance painting at another moment in history. For Ridolfi, the discursive
process of retroactive historicization was facilitated by Tintoretto’s death and,
more poignantly, with the eventual disappearance of his son Domenico. The
co-dependency of the living and the deceased is described in a passage from
685
Alessandro Berardelli’s poem that was published at the beginning of the Vita and
again in Le Maraviglie:
With the brush the painted image is given
Spirit and emotion in the canvas,
And with the pen lifeless paintings
And deceased painters are made eternal.
The outlines are clear now that you’ve come to
Draw the shadows out of the dark abyss,
And the painters and paintings out of oblivion.
To return life to that which has been released from life.60
The comparison between the brush and pen attests to the power of both
portraiture and literature to render men immortal. This also presents us with a
convincing explanation as to why Ridolfi placed the life of the Venetian portraitist
Tinelli in the appended section after Peranda’s biography in Le Maraviglie.61 If, to
cite the old Albertian dictum, painting can make present those who have become
absent through death (De pictura, book 2), here Berardelli makes the same argument for the historian’s tale.
Death affords us another life – a Nachleben – because it is through death that
histories are born and through death that the flesh-and-blood author is transformed into an author-function capable of constant renewal. Returning one last
time to Ridolfi’s frontispiece, one can read the dialectic between presence and
absence in the text that scrolls across the banner held aloft by the young putto
reclining in the foreground: ‘We who are about to die, live; we who are victorious,
die.’ Like the Virgilian pastiche that anchors Vasari’s frontispiece, the laconic line
here reads like a footnote, which informs the reader that in becoming posthumous (MORIMUR VICTURI) the artists entombed in Ridolfi’s marvellous
mausoleum of art have now become immortal (VIVIMUS MORITURI). In other
words, they have become discursive sites, the very building blocks of all histories.
Notes
I would like to express my gratitude to Miguel Falomir, Gervase Rosser, Nicholas
Davidson, Rose Marie San Juan, Sarah Monks, Pat Rubin, Jo Applin, Jacqueline
Thalmann, James Clifton and Stathis Kouvelakis, who kindly discussed different
aspects of this material with me as it was still in progress and to the two anonymous readers who provided crucial and much-appreciated criticism and corrections in the final stages. Research for this article has been generously funded by
the Philip Leverhulme Prize. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
1 Luigi Scaramuccia, Le finezze de’ pennelli italiani,
ed. Guido Guibbini, Milan, 1965, 101: ‘triunvirato
ben glorioso in Pittura per questa gran Città di
Venetia’.
2 For a general survey of Tintoretto’s critical
fortune, see Anna Laura Lepschy, Tintoretto
observed. A documentary survey of critical reactions
from the 16th to the 20th century, Ravenna, 1983.
686
3 Paolo Pino, Dialogo della pittura, ed. Susanna
Falabella, Rome, 2000, 121: ‘oggi dı́ sono de’
valenti pittori [. . .] Giacobo tinore [. . .]’. Michelangelo and Titian are given pride of place above
these thirty-four men.
4 Francesco Sansovino, Delle cose notabili che sono in
Venetia, Venice, 1592, 35: ‘Habbiamo hora
Tintoretto, tutto spirito, tutto prontezza [. . .]
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Dell’inventione è abbondante, ma non hà gran
patientia, la quale suol condurre a fine ogni cosa,
e certo ch’egli abbraccia troppo’. See also Linda
Borean, ‘Documentation’, Tintoretto, ed. Miguel
Falomir, Madrid, 2007, 423, for the shorter, less
judgemental passage from 1556 written under
Sansovino’s pseudonym (Anselmo Guisconi) and
the subsequent expanded revisions from the
1590s.
Lodovico Dolce in Mark Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’
and Venetian art theory of the cinquecento, Toronto,
2000, 194–5: ‘E di presente io temo, che la Pittura
non torni a smarrirsi un’altra volta: percioche
de’ giovani non si vede risorgere alcuno, che dia
speranza di dover pervenire a qualche honesta
eccellenza: e quei, che potrebbono divenir rari,
vinti dalla avaritia, poco o nulla si affaticano
nelle opere loro.’ On the disputed identification
of Tintoretto with the ‘giovani’ in Dolce’s text,
see Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, 338–9, and Tom
Nichols, Tintoretto: tradition and identity, London,
1999, 70.
Tom Nichols, ‘Tintoretto, prestezza and the poligrafi: a study in the literary and visual culture of
Cinquecento Venice’, Renaissance studies, 10: 1,
(1996), 79–80, n.21–2; on Tintoretto’s social
circle, see also Roland Krischel, ‘Jacopo Tintoretto: una biografia da rintracciare’, Jacopo Tintoretto nel quarto centenario della morte, eds Paola
Rossi and Lionello Puppi, Venice, 1996, 65–9 and
Roland Krischel, ‘Andrea Calmos Brief an Jacopo
Tintoretto’, Wolfenb.utteler Renaissance-Mitteilungen,
16, (1992), 8–19.
Aretino commissioned two paintings of Apollo
and Marsyas and Argus and Mercury from Tintoretto, which inspired an enthusiastic letter of
gratitude dating to February 1545. Aretino later
retracted his support in another infamous letter
from 1548 where he advises the young artist: ‘E
beato il nome vostro, se reduceste la prestezza
del fatto in la pazienza del fare’; cf. Lettere
sull’arte di Pietro Aretino, ed. Ettore Camesasca, vol.
3, part 2, Milan, 1960, 52–3 (lettera CCXI. III, 161,
car. 110 v.) and 204–205 (lettera CDII. IV, 420, car.
181 r.).
Elizabeth Pilliod, ‘Representation, misrepresentation, non-representation: Vasari and his
competitors’, Vasari’s Florence. Artists and literati at
the Medicean court, ed. Philip Jacks, Cambridge,
1998, 30–52.
Lepschy, Tintoretto observed, 19–20, for instance,
underlines Vasari’s debt to Sansovino.
See, for instance, Raffaello Borghini, Il riposo,
Florence, 1584, 551–9; Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo,
Trattato dell’arte della pittura, Milan, 1584, 216–17;
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Rime, Milan, 1587, 101;
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del tempio della
pittura (1590), ed. Robert Klein, Milan, 1974, 255,
388–9; Muzio Sforza, 1590, 47–8; Muzio Sforza,
Rime, Venice, 1590, 47–8. See also Borean, ‘Documentation’, 442–4, 446.
Federico Zuccaro, Il lamento della pittura sù l’onde
venete (1605) in Scritti d’arte di Federico Zuccaro, ed.
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
D. Heikamp, Florence, 1961, 119 and 127: ‘Che
veggio, ohimè? Chi tua beltà ti fura,/E chi
t’induce à cosı́ grave pianto./O del Mondo
bellezza alma Pittura?/Dimmi, ti prego, la cagion
di tanto/Duol, che t’afflige, e ti tormenta il core,/
E che ti cinse questo oscuro manto?’; ‘Cadei,
misera me, per un Tentore,/Che di far cose
grandi mi diè segno,/Mentre de gli anni suoi era
nel fiore./Questi de l’amor suo mi diè per pegno/
Due manigli; ma poi di bizaria/Mi pose sottosopra tutto il regno.’
Giulio Cesare Gigli, La pittura trionfante, eds
Barbara Agosti and Silvia Ginzburg, Porretta
Terme, 1996, 37. While Gigli’s short text stands as
an early attempt to counter the negative image
of Tintoretto as a profligate young thing in art
and love, in the end it did not have any lasting
impact on the transformation of Tintoretto’s role
in the pages of history per se (and in all fairness
this was hardly Gigli’s aim. Gigli intended to
write a new set of biographies entitled the
Gareggio pittorico as a corrective to Vasari’s
campanilismo, but this project was never realized.
On the genesis and objectives of Gigli’s various
projects, see Agosti and Ginzburg’s comments in
La pittura trionfante, 7–13; Philip Sohm, ‘La critica
d’arte del Seicento: Carlo Ridolfi e Marco
Boschini’, La pittura nel Veneto. Il Seicento, part 2,
ed. Mauro Lucco, Milan, 2001, 742; Michel
Hochmann, Peintres et commanditaires à Venise
1540–1628, Rome, 1992, 144–5. It has recently been
suggested that Tintoretto’s family was originally
from Brescia (see Miguel Falomir, ‘Jacopo Comin,
alias Robusti, alias Tintoretto’, Tintoretto, ed.
Miguel Falomir, Madrid, 2007, 22–4). In this
regard, Gigli’s sympathies may also have been
based on this shared identity.
I have argued elsewhere that Tintoretto, like
Caravaggio after him, would be made to play the
role of the extravagant, headstrong young
‘modern’ artist in the writings of certain
authors; see Maria H. Loh, ‘‘‘Huomini della
nostra età’’: Tintoretto’s preposterous modernity’, Tintoretto. Actas de Congreso, ed. Miguel
Falomir, Madrid 2008.
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Prisoner of Venice’, Situations IV, trans. Benita Eisler, London, 1965, 12, 15.
Sartre, ‘The Prisoner of Venice’, 20–1.
Sartre, ‘The Prisoner of Venice’, 27.
Sartre, ‘The Prisoner’, 59–60.
On the author function, see Michel Foucault,
‘What Is an Author?’, Language, counter-memory,
practice. Selected essays and interviews, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, 1977, 114–38.
On Ottavia, Casser, and the conditions set for
them by her brothers, see the discussion of the
Robusti family wills in Mario Brunetti, ‘La
continuità della tradizione artistica nella famiglia del Tintoretto’, Venezia. Studi di arte e storia, 1,
(1920), 267–74.
Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie dell’arte overo le vite de
gl’illustri pittori veneti, e dello stato, part 2, Venice,
1648, 265–7 and Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 2, 269:
687
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
‘E come la sua virtù lo haveva reso degno di
honore, e di lode, cosı́ fù commiserata la di lui
perdita dalla Città tutta, che vide estinto
l’ultimo lume della famiglia gloriosa de’
Tintoretto.’
For Domenico’s will, see M. de Mas-Latrie,
‘Testament de Dominique Tintoret fils et élève du
Tintoret’, Gazette des beaux arts, 19, (1865), 484–5;
Evelyn March Phillips, Tintoretto, London, 1911,
153–4.
For Tintoretto’s will, see M. de Mas-Latrie,
‘Testament de Jacomo Robusti dit Tintoret’,
Gazette des beaux arts, 19, (1865), 96–8.
Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 2, 269: ‘Ma poscia
cangiò opinione per i disgusti, che n’hebbe da’
medesimi Pittori, lasciando erede delle cose
tutte della professione Sebastiano Cassieri di
natione germano suo scolare [. . .]’.
For a sustained analysis of melancholia and
aging artists, see Philip Sohm, The artist grows old.
The aging of art and artists in early modern Italy, New
Haven, 2007.
For the history of this collection, see Lionello
Puppi, ‘La fortuna delle Vite nel Veneto dal
Ridolfi al Temanza’, Il Vasari. Storiografo e artista:
atti del congresso internazionale nel IV centenario
della morte, Florence, 1976, 416–17, n. 34; Michelangelo Muraro, ‘Di Carlo Ridolfi e di altre
5fontib per lo studio del disegno veneto del
seicento’, Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf, Berlin, 1968,
vol. 1 (Textband), 430–1; W.G. Hiscock, ‘The
Charles I collection of drawings by Leonardo and
others’, Burlington Magazine, 94: (1952), 287–9;
Charles F. Bell, Drawings by the old masters in the
library of Christ Church Oxford, Oxford, 1914,
20–2.
Gerard Reynst was the Dutch Governor-General
of the East-Indies from 1614 to 1615 who, along
with his brother Jan amassed an impressive
collection of pictures recorded in an illustrated
manuscript dating to around 1627; see Anne
Marie Logan, The cabinet of the brothers Gerard and
Jan Reynst, Amsterdam, 1979, 37–45. Bartolomeo
Da Fin (i.e., Bortolo Dafino) belonged to a
prominent merchant family of German origin
who had established themselves in Venice and
was granted citizenship in 1624; in 1639 Bartolomeo was elected the Guardian at the Scuola di
San Rocco; see Simona Savini-Branca, Il collezionismo veneziano nel ‘600, Padua, 1965, 211–12.
Ridolfi, Vita di Giacopo Robusti, 1642, n.p.: ‘Venetia
ammirabile sopra ogn’altra Città per la conditione del sito, per la copia delle ricchezze, per lo
splendore de’ gesti gloriosi, & per l’impareggiabile suo governo, cosı́ à qualunque superiore si rende nel possedere le più belle gemme
della Pittura, & per haver prodotto il Tintoretto,
il grido delle cui pitture divine, hà forza di trarre
da lontane regioni i popoli à bearne le viste loro,
& i studiosi di questa facoltà ad apprendere
eruditi documenti.’
Ridolfi, Vita di Giacopo Robusti, n.p.: ‘Si pregiano
quelli con li scritti di rendere immortali i nomi
688
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
de’ Grandi . . . Avantaggiano le sue ragioni gli
Scrittori, perche conservano per sempre nelle
carte la Virtù, il valore, & la fama degli huomini,
servendo di norma a’ mortali per ben disciplinare la vita.’
Carlo Ridolfi, Vita di Paolo Caliari Veronese, celebre
pittore, Venice, 1646, n.p. The 1646 biography of
Veronese was dedicated to Giuseppe Caliari, the
artist’s nephew and heir to the contents of the
Caliari workshop but, like the Robusti brothers
and sisters who survived Domenico, Giuseppe
was himself not a practicing artist and, therefore, a Caliari by name only and not by profession.
David Rosand, Painting in sixteenth-century Venice.
Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (revised edition),
Cambridge, 1997, 159–64; Nichols, Tintoretto, see
especially introduction and chap. 2. For recent
challenges to Tintoretto’s Venetianness, see
Falomir, ‘Jacopo Comin’, 22–3.
Ridolfi, Vita di Giacopo Robusti, n.p.: ‘Di questo
gran Pittore havendo io dunque descritta la vita,
& hora mandandola alle stampe, hò estimato
non inconveniente, come primitia delle mie
fatiche, farne dono à VOSTRA SERENITÀ, &
all’ECCELSO SENATO, con offerirle in tributo gli
honori di un suo benemerito Cittadino, che
divinamente hà spiegato nelle Sale del Ducale
Palaggio le Vittorie più segnalate di questa
INVITISSIMA REPUBLICA (da me fedelmente in
questa di lui Vita registrate) & reso per sempre
famoso nella Pittura il Veneto nome.’
Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 2, 317: ‘Stampai quella
del Tintoretto: fu gradita alla Serenissima
Repubblica Veneta, alla quale la consecrai; e
n’ebbi in dono da quel glorioso Senato una
catena d’oro e le insegne di san Marco, con
mortificazione degli invidiosi.’
Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 2, 62. Most art historians accept 1518 or 1519 as the year of Tintoretto’s birth (Ridolfi suggests 1512) and all agree
on 1594 as the year of his death.
The costume that Vecellio illustrated is that of a
Venetian nobleman in winter. Tintoretto was not
a patrician, but belonged to the citizen class. As
Marin Sanudo underlined in his Laus urbis Venetae
(1496), Venetian nobility and citizenry dressed in
the same modest robes as a sign of social cohesion; cf. Sanudo in Venice. A documentary history
1450–1630, eds David Chambers and Brian Pullan,
Toronto, 2001, 7.
Ridolfi, Vita di Giacopo Robusti, 5, 46, 84, 33, 39
and 88 respectively.
On these concepts see Manfredo Tafuri, Venice
and the renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine,
Cambridge, 1989, chaps 1 and 2.
The only other artist posed frontally is Andrea
Mantegna, who appears in the first part crowned
with laurels.
See Immagini da Tiziano. Stampe dal sec. XVI al sec.
XIX, ed. Maria Catelli Isola, Rome, 1976, cat. 14.
39 See Wolfram Prinz, ‘Veronese 5istoriatob’,
Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf, Berlin, 1968, vol. 1
(Textband), 333–41 and vol. 2 (Tafeln), CLVIII, fig.
2.
40 Jacopo Tintoretto e i suoi incisori, ed. Maria Agnese
Chiari Moretto Wiel, Milan, 1994, cat. 6, 29–30,
and Jacopo Tintoretto. Ritratti, ed. Paola Rossi,
Venice, 1994, cat. 14, 164.
41 Detlev von Hadeln, ‘Uber einige Bildnisse von
Tintoretto’, Jahrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen, 41, (1920), 43–5; idem., , ‘A self-portrait by
Tintoretto’, Burlington Magazine, 44, (1924), 92–3.
42 Bronwen Wilson, ‘Reflecting on the Turk in late
sixteenth-century Venetian portrait books’, Word
& Image, 19: 1–2, (2003), 43.
43 Other artists whose portraits are not included
but who are identified as Venetian include:
Francesco e Jacobello Flore Venetiano; Carlo
Crivelli, e Donato Venetiano; Benedetto Diana
Venetiano; Lazaro Sebastiani e Giovanni
Mansueti Pittori Venetiani; Jacopo Bellini Pittore
Pittore Cittadino Venetiano; Vincenzo Catena
Pittore, Cittadino Venetiano (cf. Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 1, 18, 19, 24, 32–3, 34, 64, respectively).
Although a native of Verona, Bonifazio de’ Pitati
can be added to this honorary list since he is
referred to as ‘Bonifazio Venetiano’.
44 Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 1, 38–9.
45 Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 2, 281: ‘gl’ingegni della
Scola Venetiana fanno sempre produrre co’ loro
pennelli nuovi stupori, e maraviglie.’
46 Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 1, 17: ‘dipinsi nella sala
del Maggior Consiglio (che fù prima dipinta di
verde à chiaro scuro) sopra il tribunale il Paradiso, hor ricoperto da quello del Tintoretto, nel
cui mezzo rappresentò il Salvatore in atto di
poner aurea corona in capo alla Vergine Madre
sua [. . .].’
47 Ridolfi, Vita di Giacopo Robusti, 63: ‘Ma tutto che
quell’opera fosse maneggiata da gran Maestro, &
che nel luogo suo rendesse gratiosa veduta, non
puote il Tintoretto isfuggire i morsi de’ contrari,
(poiche la Virtù và sempre accompgnata dall’invidia) che disseminavano, ch’egli avesse tirata via
quella opera di pratica, & con poco studio
condotta, perloche egli dubitava incontrare in
alcun disgusto. Ma Leonardo Corona, Antonio
Aliense, & Gio. Francesco Crivelli giovani Pittori
di molta virtù, che aderivano alla parte sua,
nascondevasi tra de’ banchi, per udire quello se
ne dicesse, & di quando in quando uscivano in
sua diffesa, per modo che superata la persecuzione [. . .].’ In his own biography, Corona is again
depicted as an imitator of Tintoretto (Ridolfi, Le
Maraviglie, part 2, 101), while Aliense is portrayed
as a child prodigy who wins the admiration of
Veronese and Tintoretto for the decorative
paintings he made for Henry III’s visit (Ridolfi, Le
Maraviglie, part 2, 210).
48 Ridolfi, Vita, 33, and Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 2,
21.
49 Malvasia quoted in Ann Summerscale, Malvasia’s
life of the Carracci. Commentary and translation,
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
University Park, 2000, 131–2; cf. Giovan Pietro
Bellori Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni,
Rome, 1672, 121.
Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 2, 59: ‘Diceva, che i
giovani studenti non dovevano giamai scostarsi
dalla via degli eccellenti Autori’ to which the
depressive Ridolfi responds ‘Ma che direbbe se
ritornasse oggidı́ à vedere gli uomini informati
nella pittura alla moda?’
Giuseppe Salviati (nephew of Francesco Salviati)
is among the few exceptions to this rule;
Giuseppe, however, spent the majority of his life
in Venice and Ridolfi makes note of this exception: ‘Il valore di Gioseppe ci invita à ragionar di
lui, il quale per esser dimorato lungamente in
Venetia fù anco detto Venetiano.’ (Ridolfi, Le
Maraviglie, part 1, 221).
On this topic, one need only to look at the vast
scholarship on the myth of Venice, of which the
most relevant for a history of art is David Rosand,
Myths of Venice. The figuration of a state, Chapel Hill,
2005.
Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 1, n.p.: ‘Quando da
principio mi posi à scrivere le Vite de’ Pittori,
non hebbi intentione, che di farne alcune poche
per mio trattenimento, non per ingolfarmi
nell’immensità di questo Oceano’.
Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 1, n.p.: ‘Stampai la Vita
del Tintoretto à persuasione degli amici, benche
non la stimassi ridotta à tal segno, che fosse
degna tua lettura. Ti compiacesti di quella
debole fatica, e mi obligasti à terminare le
rimanenti. Ora gli stimoli de’ medesimi amici, e
le persuasioni del Signor Giunta amatore della
Pittura, il quale cerca compiacerti con nuove
letture, fece io non misurando il tempo mi
ridussi à tessere un’historia di 300. anni [. . .].’
Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie, part 1, n.p.: ‘si principiò à
dipingere in Venetia con qualche convenevole
modo: la quale concernendo la cognitione di
molte vecchie memorie, de’ nomi de’ Artefici, di
confronti, de’ luoghi, de’ tempi, d’informationi,
e d’altre accuratezze, ricercava per à punto
un’animo libero da ogni cura, non il mio
annoiato, altre gli aggravij famigliari, falle
oppressioni continue della Professione, che per
se stessa ricerca tutto l’huomo, havendo imparto
à mie spese quello importino simili risolutioni,
onde mi condonerai, se non riuscisse in tutto
acconcia al tuo gusto, non permettendomi il
tempo più lunga limatura . . . Appagati ancora
ne’ ritratti di quello s’è potuto raccorre dalla mia
diligenza, non senza gran fatica posti insieme,
riportati alcuni ne’ rami dal Signor Gio. Giorgio,
& il resto dal Signor Iacopo Picini industri e
diligenti Intagliatori.’
Foucault, Archaeology of knowledge, 7.
In the 1620s, for instance, Nicolas Poussin
painted a similar allegory of Pittura seated with
two putti in a landscape painting upon a canvas;
see Timothy J. Standring, ‘Poussin et le cardinal
Massimi d’après les archives Massimi’, Nicolas
689
Poussin (1594–1665), t. 1, ed. Alain Mérot, Paris,
1996, fig. 5, 390.
58 Quoted in Joan Stack, ‘Artists into heroes: the
commemoration of artists in the art of Giorgio
Vasari’, Fashioning identities in renaissance art, ed.
Mary Rogers, Aldershot, 2000, 163.
59 Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine
Porter, Stanford, 1999, 104–105.
60 Alessandro Berardelli in Ridolfi, Vita di Giacopo
Robusti, n.p.: ‘Lo Spirito ne le tele, e’l moto dai/Col
pennello à l’imagini dipinte,/E con la penna le
pitture estinte,/E gli estinti Pittori eterni fai,/
Chiaro segno ne mostri, hor che se’volto/A trar
da l’ombre de le fauci oscure/De l’Oblio li Pittori,
e le pitture,/E torni in vita che di vita è sciolto.’
690
61 There is not enough room here to discuss Tiberio
Tinelli, but a few remarks should be made to
underline his importance in Ridolfi’s immediate
context. Tinelli (1587–1639) was perhaps the
most successful and celebrated Venetian
portraitist of his time. It is significant that out of
all the artist portraits in the second part of Le
Maraviglie, Tinelli is the only one shown in profile
– the traditional pose for commemorative or
funerary portraits. In the case of Tinelli, who is
strategically placed at the end of the book,
Ridolfi seems to be making a direct comparison
between his own skills as an historian and the
power of the portraitist to bestow immortality
upon his sitters.

Art History 31.5 2008

Transcript

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