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Tintoretto as a young man, in a self-portrait from 1546-48.
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The sixteenth-century Venetian may have created masterpieces, but perfection wasn’t his game.
You can get drunk on Tintoretto, the subject of a rare and wonderful retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. I did the other day, and came away convinced that the sixteenth-century Venetian may or may not be the greatest of painters, but he’s the only one for me right now, supercharging my faith in art as a means to invigorate the world. I’ve sobered up a bit since then, but the effect lingers. It’s not because Tintoretto created masterpieces. He did at times—often on a grand scale, in vast canvases peopled with gesticulating, soaring, tumbling figures—but perfection wasn’t his game. What excites is what he was: a born rebel with a lowdown drive in service to a staggeringly resourceful intelligence. From humble roots—the oldest of three children of a tinto, a dyer—he waged, more than conducted, a career in competition with favorites of the Venetian aristocracy, chiefly his sublime elder Titian and his elegant rival Veronese. Just look at him. In the first of two self-portraits that bookend the show, the artist is in his twenties, in the late fifteen-forties, and hellbent for glory, flinging a sudden gaze over his shoulder at us. His features are coarsely, even vulgarly emphasized, with red lines .../www.newyorker.com/magazine