• A profile of ‘The Resurrection of Christ’ painter

‘The Resurrection of Christ’, a dynamic and beautiful oil on canvas painting, is by the famous Italian painter Jacopo Robusti (also known as Tintoretto). It is located at the world famous Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It was painted nearly 450 years ago and shows Jesus Christ rising from his tomb in a burst of heavenly light. It was originally shaped as an octagon and was intended to hang high on a wall or as a ceiling decoration. Two other Tintoretto paintings (‘The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence’ and ‘Portrait of a Gentleman’) are found at Christ Church, University of Oxford.

Tintoretto is one of Venice’s most important artists and one of the famous Italian Renaissance masters. His art shows great energy and inventiveness in its composition and execution. He was born in 1518 and died in 1594. His father’s occupation was a cloth dyer (Tintore in Italian). He thus got the nickname ‘little dyer’ (Tintoretto), which he held on to.

Tintoretto showed great artistic talent from a very young age and spent some time at Titian’s (the other great Venetian master) studio. However, he was expelled from there, and two reasons have been put forward for this, namely Titian was unhappy with his pupil’s brilliant talent or was not able to handle his bold and boundary pushing artistic attitude. Tintoretto lived a modest life, despite earning vast sums of money.

Three of his eight children also took to art, with Domenico and Marietta excelling in the field. Domenico painted a variation of ‘The Resurrection of Christ’ and this is currently found in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Each of Tintoretto’s works of art carries much dynamism and passion. He used much colour and had bold brushstrokes. Many Baroque artists (that is artists that used great drama, rich and deep colour, and intense light and dark shadows in their paintings) that followed him tried to mimic the vivid expressions in his paintings.

Tintoretto was one of the early proponents of canvas for his paintings, as an alternative to wooden boards. He did several paintings at the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto, Venice, with ‘The Last Judgement’ being the best known of them. He also did paintings for the Scuola Grande Di San Rocco (‘Saint Roch Healing the Animals’, ‘Capture of Saint Roch at the Battle of Montpellier’, and ‘Saint Roch in the Wilderness’) and the Doge’s Palace (the home of Venice’s political leader) in Venice. The masterpiece called ‘The Paradiso’ is at the Doge’s palace and is the largest canvas painting in the world.

Some of his other famous masterpieces include: ‘Susanna and the Elders’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, ‘Miracle of the Slave’ at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, and ‘The Worship of the Golden Calf’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. His ceiling paintings at the Palazzo Ducale underwent conservation in 2018, on the occasion of Tintoretto’s 500th birth anniversary, and can be admired even today. In 2016, one of his paintings sold for nearly one million euros.

Giorgio Vasari, the Italian painter and architect, whose biographies of Renaissance painters is well known to art lovers, once described Tintoretto as ‘the most exceptional mind that the craft of painting has ever generated’. Overall, Tintoretto made an important and everlasting impact on Venetian and Italian art in the 16th century and beyond.

(Suranjith L. Seneviratne is a medical doctor, academic, and nature, history, and art enthusiast)