Tintoretto's Time

Tintoretto’s Time Kamini Vellodi The practice of the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto raises a challenge for art history’s conception of time. Resistant to temporal categorization, Tintoretto’s work suggests a certain inadequacy in the conventional idea of time as chronological and linear – or more specifi cally, of time as the form in which artistic practices can be placed in the chronological and linear order of their actual occurrence. This resistance is effected through the artist’s rejection of historically established values that predate his practice (such as disegno and historia), and an embrace of experimental procedures which, without precedent, and imperceptible in his own time, break with the continuity of established values to signal future possibilities for painting not grounded in painting’s past actualities.1 I call this chronological and linear form of time that Tintoretto challenges historical, insofar as I understand it to be the temporal mode used to position artistic practices, in relations of succession or simultaneity, within history – where history may be understood as the cumulative fi eld of everything that has, and may be represented as having, actually happened. I propose that Tintoretto’s time, the time of his difference from established values of painting, is to be distinguished from historical time understood as the homogeneously chronological and linear form in which the succession of artistic practices can be positioned in intelligible sequences. This distinction is theoretically developed through an appeal to two contrasting positions, both based on Kant’s theory of time. The fi rst, held by Erwin Panofsky, supports the idea of historical time as a homogeneous and unchanging form (of chronology) through which artistic practices can be assigned meaning and represented. This position, which persists in art history, and perhaps most evidently in the method of contextualism – the rendering intelligible of artistic practices through their situation in the time in which they were actually made – remains dominant in the Tintoretto scholarship. The second, expressed by Gilles Deleuze, presents a conception of art’s time as the time of difference that exceeds (historical) intelligibility.2 Through the concepts of the event, the untimely, and the eternal return, Detail from Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of The Deleuzian philosophy supplies a means of attending to the experience of Tintoretto’s Slave, 1548 (plate 2). practice as a shock that produces a new sense of time, as transhistorical. What is ‘shocked’ here is thought – the stupor of thought that does not really think, thought DOI: 10 .1111/1467- 8365.12131 as the form of representation grounded in presuppositions of its image (as ‘natural’, Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 ‘common-sensical’, endowed with a ‘good nature’ and premised on the unity of a XX | X | Month XXXX | pages XX-XX thinking subject) that pre-exist its act. Art history might be said to practice such a © Association of Art Historians 2014 2 Tintoretto’s Time form of thought not only in its attention to the work of art through reference to what is already and commonly known of it, but in its perpetuation of given art-historical methods (where method is a presupposed way of thinking). Against such an image of thought, Deleuze argues for the possibility of a thought without image, as an event of creation with no presuppositions, an affi rmation of difference ‘in-itself’ free from the representational structures – opinions, habits, universals, dogma – that bind it to the same. Occasioned by the experience of something exceptional that forces its genesis, thought no longer precedes its act as an image, but is born in the act of thinking.3 Tintoretto’s difference and its ongoing power to intitiate such an imageless thought is explored with respect to his return in the practice of the seventeenth- century Flemish painter Adam Elsheimer. Here, it is not the forms of Tintoretto’s works that serve as a self-same model to be re-presented, but rather an originary method of experimentation that exceeds the actual forms to which it gives rise, recurring differently to give birth to new forms. In such a return Tintoretto’s work acts as a reservoir for a future innovation, a thought of the past that makes the source return anew. In this way, this paper at once supplies a new reading of Tintoretto’s practice, and a putting to work of the Deleuzian philosophy (that traverses this philosophy’s explicit claims) for a critical attention to problems at the very core of art history’s practice.4 Not of His Time: Vasari’s Tintoretto Even in his own time it was felt that Tintoretto was not of his time. Giorgio Vasari’s verdict on the ‘eccentric painter’ with a manner ‘all of his own and contrary to the use of other painters’ reveals an intimation of deviancy, one that has accompanied the artist’s reception ever since. Whilst Vasari is compelled to include such a ‘painter worthy to be praised’ within his history of the masters, he laments that the artist does not follow ‘the beautiful manners of his predecessors’. Had he done so, ‘he would have been one of the greatest painters that Venice has ever had’. Instead, he remains an eccentric outsider, one whose strength is admired whilst remaining elusive.5 In his resistance to identifi cation with established norms of painting, Tintoretto’s art challenges the idea of time upheld by the author of the fi rst history of art – that is, the idea of a time shared with predecessors and contemporaries, a time in which the continuity of the traditions to which the artist is heir and for which he ought to be a transmitter unfolds. Vasari heralds a model of historical time that has arguably dominated the discipline ever since – a chronological and linear time within which the nexus of infl uences, lineages, and traditions conducts itself, a time within which the works of the great masters are positioned and related but which, for him Tintoretto evades. Thus, of the artist’s ‘awesome and terrible’ Last Judgment (plate 1) Vasari’s attention is brought to the boat of Charon, which is painted ‘in a manner so different from that of others, that it is a thing beautiful and strange’. For Vasari, if only ‘this fantastic invention has been executed with correct and well-ordered drawing’ – the technique of disegno long upheld as the foundation of artistic practice – and if only ‘diligent attention to the parts and to each particular detail’ in the manner of his predecessors, ‘it would have been a most stupendous picture’.6 As it is, it remains, whilst ‘astonishing’, as though painted ‘in jest’. Vasari’s diagnosis does not strike us as unjustifi ed. For Tintoretto does not conceal his jest with painting’s traditions, here rendering one of the most hallowed historiae in its history, one whose desired (moralizing) effect depends primarily upon the clearly expressed distinction between damnation and salvation, almost © Association of Art Historians 2014 3 Kamini Vellodi 1 Jacopo Tintoretto, The Last Judgement, 1560–62. Oil on canvas 1450 × 590 cm. Venice: Madonna dell’Orto. Photo: © Scala. © Association of Art Historians 2014 4 Tintoretto’s Time unintelligible.7 A chaotic outpouring of fi gures writhe, whirl and cascade in a space lacking boundary and orientation. The customary demarcation between the heavenly sphere and the underworld is obscured by a turbulence in which all, even the fi gures of ascension, are subjected to the forces of judgment. Unyielding, surging motion, accentuated by a violent play of tonal contrasts, captures the ‘confusion, turmoil and terror’ of that terrible day, subverting the form of narrative and the formal clarity such a regime demands – and which ‘correct and well-ordered drawing’ would have provided. Only with some struggle can we discern the outlines of the ‘fantastic invention’ of the aforementioned boat, a feature so central to the subject, but which Tintoretto squashes into a dark corner almost as an afterthought. Here, then, is the Last Judgment not as a representation of a story that has already taken place but as an event in its terrible processuality, in the ‘confusion’ before supreme judgment has exercised its indomitable verdict. Such jettisoning of the fi nal destination in favour of the capture of process may be understood as a symptom of what Tintoretto does to the history of art he inherits. That is, there is in this work the practice of painting as an experimental process of thinking which displaces painting as an exercise of judgment – in the Kantian sense of judgment as the application of concepts to the objects of experience – upon the established forms (in this case, the form of the historia) it receives from its past.8 Tintoretto’s painting is an experimentation that seems to temporarily forget its legacy, jettisoning judgment for the disjunctive blindness of the artistic act that thinks anew. Indeed, Tintoretto’s subversion of judgment is something with which Vasari regretfully concurs – insofar as for him disegno (which Tintoretto neglects) is nothing less than an act of judgment, the upholding of which binds the artist to the continuous history of which he is part.9 In his experimental deviancy, Tintoretto frees himself from the bondage to the past, and disrupts the continuity that binds him to that past moment. Defying their judicious placement by an observer within a history understood as a representation of actual events in linear and chronological time, his works demand a new concept of time. And indeed, it appears that, with respect to the question of Tintoretto’s time, art history is yet to arrive at a consensus. He has been understood as both an end – the end of the ‘Golden age of Venetian painting’, the end of the Renaissance, and even the end of painting altogether – and a beginning – the dawn of a new age, ‘the representation of a new generation’, the ‘birth of later sixteenth-century art’ – at once situated in times other than his own, and placed squarely within the sixteenth century.

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