Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti)
Italian (Venetian); 16th-century
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
...%
The Flagellation of Christ. c1585. Oil on canvas
... (TFS, 2025)
Montreal, Canada: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
79%
Portrait of a Nobleman. c1560. Oil on canvas
As can happen with Venetian painting, the parts here are individually greater than their sum. It's not just that the delightful, unresolving pattern of the cloak detracts a little from the picture's structure overall, or that the muddy background behind the sitter grants itself too much liberty as a presence among presences, but more generally that there tends to be more import in the way any one square inch of this canvas has been painted than in the coming together as a whole of all those many discrete units of painterly brilliance. Glass half full, though: Tintoretto is more than worth liking for his technique alone. A flush of tinged brown in this painting can seem to concentrate the dispersed energy of the reds all around it (see his chest and long cuffs); lines will appear as lines till they soak or, even, pixellate into the hues they should be cutting through. (TFS, 2025)