Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.

  • Jameson, Mrs. (Anna), 1794-1860.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    riant invention displayed in some of his vast compositions. The larger the space he had to fill, the more he seemed at home; his small pictures are seldom good. His portraits in general are magnificent; less refined and dignified than those of Titian, less intellectual, but quite as full of life. Tintoretto painted an amazing number of pictures, and of amazing size — one of them, the great Crucifixion, at Venice [Scuola di S. Rocco], is seventy-four feet in length and thirty feet in height: here the Passion of our Saviour is represented like a vast theatrical scene, crowded with groups of figures on foot and on horseback, exhibiting the greatest variety of move- ment and expression. Another very large picture, called the Miracle of St. Mark, is in the Academy of Venice;1 a certain slave having become a Christian, and having persevered in pay- ing his devotions at the shrine of St. Mark, is condemned to the torture by his heathen lord; but just as he is bound and prostrate St. Mark descends from above to aid his votary; the executioner is seen raising the broken instruments of torture, and a crowd of people look on in various attitudes of wonder, pity, interest. The whole picture glows with color and move- ment.2 In our National Gallery we have only [three] works by Tintoretto, but there are ten or eleven in the royal galleries; he was a favorite painter of Charles I., who purchased many of his works from Venice. Two pictures which belonged to this king are now at Hampton Court, — Esther fainting before Ahasuerus, and the Nine Muses. They have suffered terribly from audacious restorers ; but in this last picture the figure of the Muse on the right, turning her back, is in a grand style, not unworthy, in its large, bold, yet graceful drawing, of the hand of Michael Angelo himself. In the same collection are three very fine portraits.3 Tintoretto died in [1594]. His daughter, Marietta Robusti, whose talent for painting was sedulously cultivated by her father, has left some excellent portraits; and in her own time obtained such celebrity that the kings of France and Spain invited her to their courts with the most tempting offers of 1 [See illustration in Sacred and Legendary Art, p. 146.] 2 The beautiful study for this picture once belonged to the poet Rogers, and is now in the possession of [the Baroness] Burdett-Coutts. 3 [See Mary Logan’s Guide to the Italian Pictures at Hampton Court, pp. 29, 30.]