Review: Tintoretto was brilliant and ambitious. This new exhibition shows he was also sublimely weird.
Jacopo Tintoretto, “The Deposition of Christ,” circa 1562, oil on canvas. By Philip Kennicott Philip Kennicott Art and architecture critic Email Bio Follow Art and architecture critic March 20 at 1:25 PM Among the gripping moments in the National Gallery of Art’s exhilarating Tintoretto exhibition is a small detail that seems to project beyond the limits of a painting on canvas.
If the young artist did indeed adopt this dictum, then he was self-consciously proposing a career that would redeem Venetian painting of its supposed deficit: a lack of rigor in the design and construction of images that was all too often hidden by a sumptuous, painterly overlay.
Unfortunately, most of those works can’t travel, so visitors to the National Gallery will have to imagine the impact of essential early works, such as Tintoretto’s 1548 “Miracle of the Slave,” in which St. Mark flies into the picture from on high to save a naked Christian slave, prostrate on the ground in a dramatically foreshortened position.
Tintoretto himself is curiously absent. We can sense his flair for bawdy humor in the early bedroom farce “Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan,” in which the older figure of Vulcan inspects his unfaithful wife’s thighs while Mars, hiding beneath a bed, tries to quiet an obstreperous dog. His intuitive mastery of and games with perspective are evident throughout, in his drawings and in works meant to be seen affixed to ceilings or placed high above doors.
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