BIZANTINISMI ED ALTRI ARCAISMI NELLA PITTURA RELIGIOSA DI JACOPO TINTORETTO

In the history of art, Jacopo Tintoretto was always seen as an innovator, who incorporated Tosco-Roman Canon in the Venetian Cinquecento art. My dissertation aims to update the established image of Jacopo Robusti and repristinate his connection to the archaic Venetian tradition. First of all, my thesis reconstructs the historiography of Tintoretto’s byzantine and archaic elements. The historiographic research reveals two main interpretative lines, concerning the retrospective elements in the studies of Tintoretto’s art. I argue that his presumed stylistic imitation of byzantine style was never confirmed by substantial evidence, whereas the iconographic citations of byzantine and archaic paintings were justified by the specific requirements of the tridentine and post-tridentine era. The second part of the first chapter defines the reception of the byzantine and archaic art in the 16th century Venice. The inquiry shows that both categories never had strict borders, but instead were dynamic, thus allowing us to analyze them not stylistically, but chronologically as belonging to the sacred past. The second chapter explores the pattern of the relationship of Tintoretto’s art to the past, focusing on one of his narrative pictures. I argue that the Descent into hell constructed its connection to the past through iconographic citations from the byzantine icon, present in Venice at the time, as well as from St. Marc’s mosaic on the same subject. The modern Tintoretto’s painting appropriated the sacral and ideological value of the archaic images in order to fulfill the requirements of the Tridentine Reform. The archaic images, considered by the beholder as visual documents of the sacred subjects they represented, when incorporated in the new paintings reaffirmed the catholic dogmas, threatened at the time by the Protestant Reform. The third chapter is dedicated to Tintoretto’s representation of Virgin Mary and Child and its traditional elements. Madonna contemplated by St. Marc and Luke was created as a vision, deprived from the terrestrial dimension and thus resulting particularly simple in form as compared to painter’s other images of the Marian subject. As opposed to the medieval representations of Madonna on the crescent moon, which were “transported” from earth to heaven during the Cinquecento renovation, the Berlin Madonna shows how Tintoretto managed to create a new mimetic post-tridentine icon. Further examples of the relation of Tintoretto’s paintings to the medieval images explicate how the old images were incorporated in the new form. The mosaic of the Madonna in Glory with All Saints, created from the Tintoretto’s workshop cartone, represented in the form of vision the sacred old venetian image of the Madonna. It connected the new mosaic to the St. Marc’s Basilica, where the icon was preserved as well as to the body of Venetian State and its mythical origin. The research reveals that the sacred old imagery of Venice played a determinative role in Tintoretto’s art. The contrast between old iconography and his pronouncedly modern style created the tension of time in the painting, recognized by the public in the context of the cult status of Tintoretto’s sources. The patterns of Tintoretto’s artistic reflection on the old sacred images contributed to the transformation of the linear evolutionistic paradigm of the Cinquecento art as they allowed to see the Tintoretto’s images as a constellation of different time vectors, which simultaneously projected them in the sacred past and future, confirming their sacred value and their orthodoxy.