Tancred Baptizing Clorinda
Location: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
City: Houston, Texas
Artist: Domenico Tintoretto
Contents
Artist Biography
About the Painting
Related Links and Resources
References
Artist Biography
Domenico Tintoretto (Domenico Robusti), Venice, 1560 – 1635.
Born to painter patriarch Jacopo Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1519-1594), an artistic education was as readily available to Domenico Tintoretto as it was for his less recognized sister Marietta (1554-1590). Although Domenico achieved a degree of success as an independent artist, his reputation remains inextricably tied to his father’s.
Seventeen year-old Domenico was admitted to the Venetian painter’s guild in 1577 and the confraternity of painters seventeen years later. At a young age, he was employed in his father’s workshop while it completed commissions at the Doge’s palace. Domenico’s skilled hands joined countless others in meeting Master Tintoretto’s demand for speed using techniques that were viewed as unusual and abbreviated by Renaissance standards. Technical analysis has revealed Jacopo’s life-long devotion to the red lake pigments, which so important to the cloth dyeing industry on which the family moniker is based. Deviating from the common practice of the time, he applied thin lake glazes directly atop dark black or brown-colored ground to create areas of shadow. He then proceeded to build highly irregular layers of scumbled and impastoed paint in rapid succession, often concluding work on drapery with intense red and orange highlights. Analysis of the works in the Doge’s palace reveals a maze of sketched preliminary drawings and revisions that assistants like Domenico deciphered and obeyed.
Policies of the Tintoretto workshop did not preclude Domenico from pursuing independent commissions, which consisted of battle scenes and religious subjects and some civic portraits. Technical analysis has revealed that the bright yellow-orange tones of Domenico’s own paintings are derived from a synthetic version of the valuable raw pigment orpiment. His incorporation of this affordable and plentiful colorant places him in the company of other Venetian painters, including his father, Giovanni Bellini, and Titian. The younger Tintoretto’s use of this pigment corroborates documentary evidence of artificial orpiment’s prevalence in the sixteenth-century Venetian market.
About the Painting
In the bold and accomplished painting, Tintoretto depicts the Christian knight Tancred administering the baptismal rite for his dying adversary, who was revealed to be his Saracen love only after he removed her helmet to honor her last request. This painting’s authorship, date, and circumstances of facture have been the subject of much discussion and debate. One theory holds that Domenico Tintoretto was commissioned to design a decorative cycle based on episodes from the story of Clorinda in the romantic Torquato Tasso epic Jerusalem Delivered (ca. 1575) by either a Venetian or Mantuan patron. Rosanna Pedrazzi Tozzi offered three oil sketches at the British Museum as support for this theory in spite of questionable iconographical evidence. Another Tintoretto canvas tentatively described as “Guelpho wounding Clorinda” (Rhode Island School of Design) has been argued in relation to Tozzi’s proposal.
Related Links and Resources
Kimbell Art MuseumConservation Department research carried out in conjunction with the 2001 exhibitionEuropean Masterpieces: Six Centuries of Paintings from the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia compares two versions of a portrait of Doge Pietro Loredan. An accompanying slideshow includes x-radiographs.
Restoring Tintoretto’s The Paradise
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in partnership with Bank of America Merrlll LynchAn in-depth online feature documenting the complete restoration of the competition painting for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace. Includes detailed analytical studies of pigments, x-radiographs, and infrared images. The complete restoration process is described using high-resolution photographic details, slideshows, and videos.
Kingston Lacy Estate, DorsetDescription of a ceiling painting that was cleaned, analyzed, confirmed as a Tintoretto, and put on public view for the first time in 2001. Removing aged varnish has clarified the image but has left art historians at a loss for an identifiable subject. Entry includes a zoom-able photographs of the painting before and after cleaning.
References
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———. “Domenico Tintoretto’s Tancred Baptizing Clorinda: A Closer Look.” Venezia Cinquecento 3, no. 6 (July-Dec 1993): 121-138.