DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68745#0036
CHAPTER II
THE MAN AND HIS LIFE—I
JACOPO ROBUSTI has two biographers of his own day
and near it. Vasari was his contemporary, but seems
scarcely to have taken him seriously, and his notices are
but short ones. We wish he had given us more of those
agreeable gossiping details for which he is so famous, and had
spared us the diatribes against what he disliked in Tintoretto’s
style.
Carlo Ridolfi, a mediocre artist and man of letters, finished
his work on the Venetian painters in 1646, so that he was writing
about fifty years after Tintoretto’s death. The memory of so
great an artist would have been fresh, men old enough to recollect
him well would have been still alive, and it is evident that
Ridolfi has sought them out and has collected a mass of desultory
anecdotes and information as near as possible at first hand. In
Ridolfi’s time, posterity had already set its seal on the painter’s
work, and he writes of him with heartwhole if sometimes indis-
criminate admiration; but in Vasari’s day the ‘ violence and
extravagance ’ of his style were still a matter of controversy, and
Messer Giorgio criticises him with all the boldness of a contem-
porary, and looks on, amused at the eccentricities of the passionate
genius whose real nature is beyond his comprehension.
‘ In the same city of Venice,’ says Vasari, suddenly interpolat-
ing a living bit of narrative in the laboured record of a dull and
forgotten Battista Franco, ‘ there lived and still lives a painter
called Jacopo Tintoretto, full of worth and talent, especially in
music and in playing divers instruments, and in other respects
amiable in all his aspects : but in matters of art, extravagant,
capricious, swift, and resolute; and the most hot-headed (il piu
terribile cervello) that ever has taken painting in hand, as may be
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THE MAN AND HIS LIFE—I
JACOPO ROBUSTI has two biographers of his own day
and near it. Vasari was his contemporary, but seems
scarcely to have taken him seriously, and his notices are
but short ones. We wish he had given us more of those
agreeable gossiping details for which he is so famous, and had
spared us the diatribes against what he disliked in Tintoretto’s
style.
Carlo Ridolfi, a mediocre artist and man of letters, finished
his work on the Venetian painters in 1646, so that he was writing
about fifty years after Tintoretto’s death. The memory of so
great an artist would have been fresh, men old enough to recollect
him well would have been still alive, and it is evident that
Ridolfi has sought them out and has collected a mass of desultory
anecdotes and information as near as possible at first hand. In
Ridolfi’s time, posterity had already set its seal on the painter’s
work, and he writes of him with heartwhole if sometimes indis-
criminate admiration; but in Vasari’s day the ‘ violence and
extravagance ’ of his style were still a matter of controversy, and
Messer Giorgio criticises him with all the boldness of a contem-
porary, and looks on, amused at the eccentricities of the passionate
genius whose real nature is beyond his comprehension.
‘ In the same city of Venice,’ says Vasari, suddenly interpolat-
ing a living bit of narrative in the laboured record of a dull and
forgotten Battista Franco, ‘ there lived and still lives a painter
called Jacopo Tintoretto, full of worth and talent, especially in
music and in playing divers instruments, and in other respects
amiable in all his aspects : but in matters of art, extravagant,
capricious, swift, and resolute; and the most hot-headed (il piu
terribile cervello) that ever has taken painting in hand, as may be
10