Tintoretto developed original compositional solutions with a declared taste for the theatrical and an unfettered use of artificial lighting schemes and diagonal perspective, making him one of the most important Venetian painters of the second half of the 1500s.
[Tintoretto / Complete works] This monograph, divided into three volumes, analyzes the religious and secular works and the portraits of Tintoretto. After examining the key moments in the artist’s career, the study covers all the documentary evidence available on the life of the painter and his signed, attributed and lost works. The question of the evident contrast between his portraiture and his religious works is investigated: while in the religious works Tintoretto offered images of the humble, of “little people” in the presence of divinity, the portraits show us the elite of his day. Yet this is only an apparent contradiction. In Tintoretto, as he depicts the crisis of an era, the demise of the Renaissance, the natural and the unnatural, the worldly and otherworldly, the real and the unreal blend in a unified, melancholy vision.