Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti)
Italian (Venetian); 16th-century
Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
88%
The Flagellation of Christ. c1585. Oil on canvas
It's difficult to think of another painting as wrenched by its own design as this one is. It's not just in how the figures are twisting in every direction, but in the way the picture's volume seems to give itself over to each of them in turn, falling off into five different spatial configurations to fit these five incommensurately writhing forms. Jacopo Bassano, another Venetian, has pictures like this one whose sense of order comes along after the objects have been placed, and even Rubens can cheat perspective for the sake of a well-painted thing. But here the breakup isn't a result of some higher logic; it is the logic. What it's meant to facilitate, I think, is Tintoretto's manic brush, which would have had the power to rend apart this image if it weren't already so rent. But since there's no centrifugal force here, there's nothing for the galaxy of marks that make up the back of the figure on the lower-right to distract you from; there's no center you lose sight of when you notice those thousand bulges in the man beside Christ. (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)