Five hundred years after his birth, Venice celebrates the artistic achievements and era of Jacopo Tintoretto. The success of Jacopo and his son Domenico is inextricably linked to the Scuola Grande di San Marco. Indeed, Jacopo created some of the most famous paintings in 16th-century Venetian art for the Scuola's chapter hall. Thanks to Domenico's contribution, the ensemble commenced by his father was the most gradiose cycle devoted to the patron saint of Venice since the decoration of Saint Mark's Basilica. Founded in 1260-21 as a flagellant congregation, the Scuola became a charitable institution that, among other aims, provided medical care for the poorest of its members. After its suppression in 1806, the Scuola house the Venice City Hospital until the mid-20th century, when it was turned into a library with 18,000 medical and scientific volumes. This book offers the reader an unprecendented and fascinating glimpse of life in Tintoretto's Venice. Analyzing the themes of the exhibition in depth, the catalogue explores the relation between devotional activities, medical practices, anatomical studies and images of the human body by examining a wide range of period sources, including paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, musical scores, illustrated books, engravings, printing plates and surgical instruments.

"Considered one of the three greatest painters of sixteenth-century Venice, along with Titian and Veronese, Tintoretto was a bold innovator. His free, expressive brushwork made his work look unfinished to contemporaries but is now recognized as a key step in the development of oil-on-canvas painting. Even today's audiences are astonished by the superhuman scale, painterly dynamism, and visionary qualities of his work. On the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto's birth, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of his career and achievement, with fifteen essays and reproductions of more than 140 paintings--many newly conserved--as well as a selection of his finest drawings. One special contribution is a focus on the artist's portraiture" -- Library of Congress.

For Ruskin, some dates represented turning points in his personal and working life: 23rd September 1845 is one such date. In letters written from Venice to his father that autumn he writes of being overwhelmed by the power of Tintoretto, and of feeling called to safeguard his paintings together with the fate of the city itself. Ruskin's discovery of Tintoretto's work plays a central role in his aesthetics, and was to inspire some of his best writing. Through 'Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice', works that were to be deeply influential throughout mid 19th-century Europe, Ruskin contributed to the establishment of Tintoretto's international fame and his insights still inform our ways of looking at his painting. The collection of writings published here appears for the first time in a well-organised and easily consultable form, a form that Ruskin himself had planned for English visitors. It takes us to paintings in churches throughout the city, though it is the Church and Scuola di San Rocco which stand out as having been the focus of extended and concentrated attention on Ruskin?s part. Neglected by Ruskin scholars, his "Venetian Index", in particular, meticulously records the state of conservation of Tintoretto's canvases at a time of neglect and conflict, while surveying the artist's oeuvre as a whole and minutely examining individual paintings.0Quintessentially Ruskinian in its investigation of the language of sacred iconography and the origins of landscape painting, this guide to Tintoretto's painting generates interpretations which art historians will find stimulating, but will also prove illuminating for non-expert readers wishing to explore a great painter through the sensibility of the critic who first introduced him to the English.

Over the past twenty years or so it has finally been understood that Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19-1594) is an old master of the very highest calibre, whose sharp visual intelligence and brilliant oil technique provides a match for any painter of any time. Based on papers given at a conference held at Keble College, Oxford, to mark the quincentenary of Tintoretto’s birth, this volume comprises ten new essays written by an international range of scholars that open many fresh perspectives on this remarkable Venetian painter. Reflecting current ‘hot spots’ in Tintoretto studies, and suggesting fruitful avenues for future research, chapters explore aspects of the artist’s professional and social identity; his graphic oeuvre and workshop practice; his secular and sacred works in their cultural context; and the emergent artistic personality of his painter-son Domenico. Building upon the opening-up of the Tintoretto phenomenon to less fixed or partial viewpoints in recent years, this volume reveals the great master’s painting practice as excitingly experimental, dynamic, open-ended, and original.

The Renaissance was a golden age in the long history of Venetian painting, and the art that came from Venice during that era includes some of the most visually exciting works in the whole of western art. This attractive book - a comprehensive account of painting in Venice from Bellini to Titian to Tintoretto - is an accessible introduction to the paintings of this period. Peter Humfrey surveys the development of a distinctly Venetian artistic tradition from the middle years of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century. He discusses the work of Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto as well as the paintings of those less well known - such as the three Vivarini, Cima, Carpaccio, Palma Vecchio, Lorenzo Lotto and Jacopo Bassano. Humfrey analyses these painters' works in terms of their pictorial style, technique, subject matter, patronage and function. He also sets the art against the background of the political, social and religious conditions of Renaissance Venice, as outlined in his Introduction. The book includes an appendix that provides brief biographies of thirty-six of the most important painters active in Renaissance Venice.

The first definitive biography of the master painter in more than a century, Titian: His Life is being hailed as a "landmark achievement" for critically acclaimed author Sheila Hale (Publishers Weekly). Brilliant in its interpretation of the 16th-century master's paintings, this monumental biography of Titian draws on contemporary accounts and recent art historical research and scholarship, some of it previously unpublished, providing an unparalleled portrait of the artist, as well as a fascinating rendering of Venice as a center of culture, commerce, and power. Sheila Hale's Titian is destined to be this century's authoritative text on the life of greatest painter of the Italian High Renaissance.