James, Ruskin, and Tintoretto

Henry James's preference for the work of Jacopo Tintoretto (1519-94) over that of Titian (c. 1490-1576) may seem at first sight surprising. Among the masters of the Venetian Renaissance tradition, Titian had long held sway in the canon of educated taste across Europe. In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari had carefully distinguished between the two painters, describing Titian's manner of painting as "judicious, beautiful and astonishing" in contrast to Tintoretto's "fantastic and extravagant" works, and classical-academic art critics of the succeeding centuries tended to follow Vasari's distinction (Artists 458, Painters 509). For Sir Joshua Reynolds, writing late in the eighteenth century, Titian possessed "a sort of senatorial dignity" which exempted him from the crude display of the "mechanism of painting" he saw as characteristic of Tintoretto (66-67). It is no accident, of course, that Reynolds appealed to social categories in making this aesthetic distinction. The identification of Titian with the royal houses and aristocracies of Europe who had so often patronized him as a painter was a long-standing one, while Tintoretto's very different status was proclaimed in his professional nickname. As "Il Tintoretto"—"the little dyer"—Jacopo Robusti took on and promoted a kind of "democratic" persona; the son of a simple cloth dyer, he presented himself as the embodiment of a popular Venetian identity very different from Titian's international and aristocratic profile (Nichols 13-27).

James's preference for the works of "the little dyer" emerged on his very first trip to Venice in the autumn of 1869. ¹ After visits to the Ducal Palace and the Accademia, he wrote to his brother proclaiming Tintoretto "the greatest of them all," and on his return to the city in 1872 his preference was confirmed in an essay, "Venice: An Early Impression." "I had the satisfaction of finding at least [. . .] that none of my early memories were likely to change places and that I could take up my admirations where I had left them. I still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian supremely beautiful and Tintoret scarce to be appraised" (IH 57). In front of Tintoretto's Crucifixion in San Cassiano (fig. 1) ² he felt that he had been "advanced to the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another art—inspired poetry—begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which Tintoret alone is master." ³

James's ecstatic youthful discovery of Tintoretto cannot but remind us of the "conversion" of John Ruskin some thirty years earlier. The almost schoolboyish concern with the promotion of Tintoretto up to the top of the hierarchy of Venetian painters sounds like Ruskin's letters home to his father, and the paintings are described in a Ruskinian breathless enthusiastic hyperbole. Even James's choice of painting is telling: Ruskin had particularly celebrated the San Cassiano Crucifixion as "quite beyond price" (which had not stopped him subsequently making a bid to buy the picture for the collections of the National Gallery in London!). However, reading further in James's essay, we find both an acknowledgement of critical debt and an assertion of independence:

The great source of his [Tintoretto's] impressiveness is that his indefatigable hand never drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. No painter ever had such breadth and such depth; and even Titian, beside him, scarce figures as more than a great decorative artist. Mr. Ruskin, whose eloquence in dealing with the great Venetians sometimes outruns his discretion, is fond of speaking even of Veronese as a painter of deep spiritual intentions. This, it seems to me, is pushing matters too far, and the author of The Rape of Europa is, pictorially speaking, no greater casuist than any other genius of...