An Impetuous Genius Drawings by Jacopo Tintoretto

Good evening, everyone. I'm Colin Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library and Museum. Welcome to the first public lecture associated with our current series of exhibitions. season, which is a truly uplifting season at the Morgan. We inaugurated, we opened yesterday Frankenstein, 200 Years of Frankenstein, and Drawing in Tintoretto's Venice, which I hope you've seen in the Engelhardt Gallery. The museum will be open after the lecture, so If you've seen it, you'll want to see it again after hearing John's remarks. And we are delighted to be part of a group of museums celebrating the 500th birthday of Jacopo Tintoretto. The exhibition will be open until January 6th, and it will then move on. to the National Gallery in Washington, our partners in this exhibition, where there will be a retrospective devoted to Tintoretto's paintings and drawings, and we are pleased that this The exhibition will have another life in Washington. I'll also mention that, starting Monday, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has organized a dossier around Tintoretto and portraiture. And so this is an exciting opportunity to test some of the ideas we see here. in the exhibition at the Met and vice versa. As most of you know, Tintoretto is among the most distinguished artists of the Italian Renaissance. His works at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco are a Venetian counterpart to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, some of the most expressive and moving paintings in Italy. And although Tintoretto is familiar to many of us, I think, Most of us, as painters, have never seen his drawings, and there are over 200 of them. systematically studied, and we hope that, and I'm sure that, this exhibition will be a revelation. There are many lenders and many supporters of the exhibition. I thank them, as well as the many staff members. It truly was a labor of intense care and thoughtfulness. The person that I am really grateful to John Marciari, and John, as you know, is the Charles W. Englehart Curator and Head of the Department of Drawings, a position he assumed at the Morgan in 2014, and the first project that he brought with him and that he wanted to work on was this exhibition devoted to Tintoretto. He has done, among many other things for which he is responsible and that have occurred, During his time here, he has conducted systematic and careful research on the topic. He has identified the drawings we should be looking at, and that we have borrowed from museums as far afield as the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Albertina, and the British Museum. The title of his lecture, An Impetuous Genius, comes from the connoisseur, 18th-century French connoisseur, Pierre-Jean Mariette, whom we dedicated an exhibition to here a few years ago. For him, Tintoretto was a fiery genius, the kind of artist we would not expect to have made careful preparatory drawings. Yet, as John has noted, and as we will see, there are dozens of drawings by Tintoretto's works that have survived. His exhibition and catalogue enable us to review and reassess them. nature of Tintoretto's work as a draftsman, but also the role of drawing in Venice in the 16th century. I've heard him talk about his exhibition. He is enthusiastic, knowledgeable. and gripping, as he will be tonight. So let's welcome John to the podium. Thank you. Thank you, Colin. Thank you all for coming. As Colin explained, the title of my lecture is drawn from remarks that Mariette wrote in the catalogue of the sale of the collection of Croissant. The impetuous genius of Tintoretto was such that he almost never made drawings for his paintings. He contented himself with modeling little figures which he set up in a theater, which he then lit. When he was assured of the effect of the lighting and was satisfied Given the disposition of the groups, he went directly to painting. It is therefore astonishing, Mariette wrote that there are in the collection of Monsieur Croissant so many drawings by this Master. Now, it turns out, I don't believe there was a single authentic Tintoretto drawing among the 35 or 40, as listed in the catalogue, but the point remains the same. And I like starting with Mariette not only because of the impetuous genius of her phrasing, but because he represents a kind of midpoint between Tintoretto's era and the present day, writing in the middle of the 18th century. Mariette was a very sophisticated critic. and he knew what had been said about Tintoretto by Vasari and Dolce and others during Tintoretto's time, but he also, in a way, gives birth to a modern art history. And the same ideas that are expressed by Mariette, continues to populate scholarship today. But going back first to Vasari, Who wrote of Tintoretto that he was "il più terribile cervello," the most terrible, the most extraordinary brain that painting has ever produced. He surpassed the limits of extravagance, working at random, ending without design, senza disegno, as if to prove that art is but a jest or a game. If he had only recognized how great an advantage he had from nature, and had improved it through study, had he not hastily completed his work by mere manual dexterity, He would have been one of the greatest painters Venice has ever had. Impetuous, he almost never made drawings. He worked without design, dashing his work off by mere facility of hand, rather than with forethought and proper intellectual consideration just as a skilled Florentine draftsman would have done. Now, these ideas, as I have said, continue to resonate to this day. and we do not expect Tintoretto to draw, and we are almost apologetic when assessing his drawings. So that, for example, one recent scholar on Tintoretto has written, quote, that the most A famous drawing from Tintoretto's career is the one he never produced, which is not a way of looking. regarded him as a draftsman. In 1564, the leaders of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, this confraternity hall that had been built between about 1515 and 1560, but had remained undecorated, held a competition to decorate the ceiling of the Sala dell'Albergo, the boardroom of the confraternity Hall up on the second floor, and they invited the four leading artists in Venice. Titian was not part of the competition, but they invited Tintoretto, Veronese, and Giuseppe Porta. Salviati, a Florentine who had moved to Venice, and Federico Zuccaro, who had recently arrived from Rome. They asked all four to create a drawing that would be reviewed by the board, and which would then select the winner of the competition, giving the commission first for the ceiling, and then ultimately for much of the painting in the Scuola. Two of the drawings seemed to have survived. or at least there are drawings of the subject, of the glory of Saint Roch by Giuseppe Porta on the left from the British Museum, and by Veronese from the Gardner Museum on the right. Federico Zuccaro, I'm sorry, that's Federico Zuccaro—Giuseppe Porta's drawing doesn't survive, but he must have made one. But Tintoretto made no drawing, and instead, when the board was assembled to judge the winning competition, pulled a scrim of some sort away from the ceiling, revealed that he had placed a finished painting there. It remains there still. I mean this—you must admit, is a brilliant, if irreverent, stroke. It showed him to be not only a good painter, but one who could work quickly and efficiently, who wouldn't worry about the cost of materials who wasn't going to get bogged down in all the details. But interestingly, the fact that he did this has had been used to justify the fact that he was not a draftsman. Of course he didn't make a drawing. He He was Venetian. He did not make drawings, despite the fact that Veronese, another Venetian, had done so. And it fits into a much larger pattern that we see in Venetian art as a whole. And here too, once again, we return to and blame Vasari, who in his Lives of the Artists explained that Titian began his training in the proper art of design well, in Giovanni Bellini's workshop. But then he discovered Giorgione, an abandoned drawing, abandoned proper study, and more or less Vasari goes on to say, and the rest of Venetian art goes off the rails. And it's on the basis of this that the famous disegno-colore dichotomy develops. Vasari distinguishes what he thinks It's remarkable how profound Florentine art, design, thought, intellect, and planning are, in contrast to the superficial. the seductiveness of Venetian painterliness. And ironically, the Venetians sort of give away the ground on this argument. So Ludovico Dolce, writing his La Rattino just after the first edition of Vasari's Lives, more or less agrees and says, well, yeah, you know, Venetians It doesn't matter about disegno. We opt for colore instead, essentially accepting the Venetian approach. did not focus on drawing or care about disegno. Now, Dolce is a somewhat interesting writer, but he's a literary dog's body. And we seem to think he speaks for all Venetian artists when He wrote this, and it has solidified into the prevailing opinion about Venetian draftsmanship. This sets the stage for Mariette, 250 years later, or Mariette, 200 years later, still believed. And it is the foundation of much of what is written about Venetian drawing today. And yet, from Tintoretto, this impulsive artist who worked without consideration or design, We have well over 100 surviving drawings, which constitutes a significant body of work for a 16th-century artist. types. They vary in techniques. They are on different scales. They are of different types. They function differently as part of the artistic process. And moreover, the overwhelming The majority of these are not casual sketches, but rather studies for figures in specific paintings. precisely the kind of preparatory study that this artist never made. He listened to the writers. As in these two examples, both in the exhibition, made for figures in the making of the Golden Cat. We'll return to these later. And even so, despite all these drawings, when talking about Tintoretto's habits of artistic production are such that it is never the drawings that are of central focus. This exhibition is the first since 1956 to examine Tintoretto as a draftsman. The 1956 exhibition was really just the Uffizi putting a selection of drawings on the wall. This is the the first solo exhibition truly to bring together this body of work and to examine it anew. But as I say, it's not the drawings that have been the focus. Instead, this is the most commonly quoted passage when we talk about Tintoretto's method of constructing his paintings. A version of it had already appeared in the Mariette quote, which I began. And this is from Carlo Ridolfi, who writes The first complete biography of Tintoretto, although nearly 40 years after Tintoretto's own time died. But he talks about how Tintoretto made the little models out of wax and clay, dressed them in pieces of cloth placed in small houses or scenes, these shadowbox theaters, and then would hang models suspended from the rafters to study their foreshortenings. It's a nice idea, and it gets so great emphasis that the current exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice has even commissioned a Little wax figure. Actually, it's not little at all. The diorama is about four feet wide. And they've hung a small dressed Redeemer doll from the rafters next to the Mats Vodov painting. And while I'm being slightly flippant about this, I am skeptical, and I find it hard to believe. that an artist who, by the time he created the Forge of Vulcan, had already been drawing the nude human body For half a century, a little wax model was really required in order to project figures in space. There is a vast body of drawings that speaks to the contrary. And so, ultimately, the exhibition upstairs and the accompanying catalog are intended to offer a new perspective on this material, talking not only about how drawings figured in Tintoretto's work, and of emphasizing drawing, the importance of drawing to him, but also to look more broadly at Venetian art in 16th century, and to demonstrate how central drawing was to Venetian artistic practice, regardless of what Vasari and 500 years of parodistic critics may have said. This is not to say that drawing functions in the manner it does in Florence or Rome, but rather to undermine it Color Di Zegno dichotomy, and to suggest instead that there is a distinctive Venetian Di Zegno, hence the idea of a show about drawing in Tintoretto's Venice, rather than merely Tintoretto's drawings alone. And as Colin mentioned, it's one of a series of exhibitions. organized to celebrate the 500th birthday of the artist. And some of the same themes that are also explored in this exhibition, Life Study, to which I will turn shortly, for example in the exhibition at the Met. And I think we're going to see a new image of this artist and the Now, onto the drawings, and onto the show, which gets off to a roaring start with the astonishing, I think, is the best word—drawing by Titian from the Fitzwilliam Museum. Now, if we talk about Venetian drawing, this is pretty much what comes to mind. It's in black. and white chalk, or charcoal and black and white chalk on blue paper. It's not a precise, carefully crafted, linear drawing, but rather something experimental and exploratory. Something, I think, incredibly powerful. But if this drawing were by Leonardo or Raphael, we would talk about as being a primo pensiero, a first thought in an intellectual process design. Whereas a Titian is almost always described as impressionistic and painterly pictorial values, as if there were no intellect behind the drawing. We, as critics, as scholars, all too often fall into the Vasari trap. And it is a familiar Venetian manner of drawing, These impressionistic black and white chalk drawings on blue paper. But it's one of many. different ways in which Venetians drew. And the first section of the exhibition is intended to demonstrate This. So yes, others follow this manner. So you have at the top, in the center, a drawing by Paris Bordone, imitating Titian's chalk technique. Although, Interestingly, it copies a pen drawing by Titian. So there's a kind of fun awareness of media. in that. But you also see other kinds of drawings, the brush drawings by Andreas Chiavone, or the colored chalks by Bassano, or the pen and wash sketches by Veronese, all being produced essentially simultaneously in Venice at the time. It is as rich and diverse a tradition of drawing as I think exists anywhere in Italy, in a certain sense. And even more so, we get the idea that Tintoretto emerges from this rich and varied tradition, is aware of it, and adopts various elements from it. modes at different times. So as a young artist in the 1540s, he is associated with Chiavone. We know that they are working together, they may have collaborated on certain paintings, and there There are a handful of things that are almost indistinguishable in terms of whether they are by one or the other artist. Even Vasari gets one of Tintoretto's altarpieces wrong and attributes it to Chiavone. And you see those brush drawings by Chiavone, two examples on the left from Washington and Princeton, and you gain an understanding of how Tintoretto appears in these drawings from the mid-1940s. is doing something essentially similar, drawing a little with chalk, a little with pen, using a lot of brush and wash. They are painterly impressionistic drawings, if you want to call them that. And this A great study of Venus and Vulcan from Berlin is as good a place as any to start with something more serious. discussion of Tintoretto as a draftsman. It is a study for the painting in Munich, and there is a A great story is unfolding in this scene, where Vulcan has discovered his wife Venus in bed with Mars. Who, at least in the painting, is hiding under the bed. You can see his head sticking out from there. The dog is going to give the game away while Cupid sleeps off in the corner. Now, in the drawing, we only have the two principal characters, Venus and Vulcan. Now, this is one of those drawings that are always—I don't know if there's a single printed discussion that doesn't refer Back to Rodolphe and the little shadowbox theaters. And yet, when we look at it, I don't know that that makes perfect sense, despite even one scholar's attempt to create a computer model to prove otherwise that this was done using a shadowbox. Because if it's truly made with such a theater, how would Did these wax figures actually stand up or sit in space? And if he's using it to understand space and perspective, why is the perspective so far off? And why is the reflection in the mirror in The back incorrect? If he's actually using a theater to project images directly onto the canvas, First of all, he doesn't need to make a drawing, because the argument states that he built the theater. so that he could go straight to painting. And then, it simply doesn't read as something created from such a setup. Yet, it's hard to say, because it's one of only a handful of compositional drawings by Tintoretto that have survived. So although there are many studies by him, they are almost all figure drawings, usually a single figure. And we believe the drawings must have been preserved in the workshop by type. All the compositional drawings together, the figure drawings, actually There is a reference to the bundle of male figure drawings and the bundle of female figure drawings. And somewhere along the way, the bundle of compositional drawings got lost. Interestingly though we know that the bundle of compositional drawings by his son, Domenico, remained intact, because it is still together as a group in the British Museum, or at least much of it still is, having been acquired in the 17th century. So you can see how one group survives while another simply does not. gets lost. And thus, we lack comparable evidence to address the larger questions Regarding this compositional drawing. It's almost one of a kind. Anyway, even if Tintoretto used a little theater for this, although I would like to pay him a tribute far more deserving than this, even if this Is made with a diorama, would he even possibly have been able to use one to create a painting? like The Great Miracle of the Slave, created two or three years later? This is an extraordinary, monumental, complex composition, far beyond what I think could be easily arranged in a diorama. Now, surprisingly, not a single drawing can be connected to this painting. Not a single direct figure drawing survives from what was the most important commission he ever really had the first 50 years of his life. It is the painting that defines Tintoretto's career, in a sense. But I think we can see other drawings that are similar to those he would have made for us, such as this study, which is on exhibition from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a man posing, a man in ordinary clothing, in 16th-century attire, using a posing staff to Hold the pose. And he is, I'm not saying he's a study for the man in blue, but if you spin him In space, it's remarkably close to that kind of life study that would have been employed. Likewise, we have drawings like this one from decades later, made in a different context, but there must have been a similar kind of life study made for the nude that appears, the Nude Slave foreshortened at an angle in the foreground of the painting. This painting, I think, is as much about the study of life as it is about anything else. And I think to prove that point, we can look at some of the other works done right around the same time, or in the years just following, such as this one, which is in the exhibition, Christ Mocked, shown alongside the drawing from the Louvre, which is the poster boy, if you will, for our exhibition. And this seems, In a way, blatantly a life study, blatantly a study of someone sitting in the studio with his arm propped up on the side of the couch, drawn from life, worked up, and then plugged into the painting. Although even as he is drawn, he somehow receives the Tintoretto treatment. He's stretched out. He's been made more expressive, more emotional than the opposing model is likely to be. has been himself. But this is a pattern we see. Saint George and the Dragon in London, done 1552–53, for which there is a nude study, again in the Louvre, for the body of the dragon's victim in the background. Or, again from 1549–50, Saint Augustine Healing the Lame, now in the museum in Vicenza, which seems almost like a painting about life drawing. It's full of posed nude models. This is the sort of thing that, if it were by a Florentine artist, we'd be discussing how he was deliberately importing staged life studies into the painting to make a programmatic Point. Again, none of these drawings are for that painting, but one can imagine many others. like it being used. There is this highly damaged study in the Uffizi, which is normally mounted upright, but when you turn it 90 degrees onto its side, it's awfully close to this body in background. If he's drawing something like that for someone in the background, he must have made Other studies for the foreground figures are very similar in type, even though they do not survive. 200 drawings may be a lot for one artist, but it can only be a fraction of what he made over a a career that lasts 60 or 70 years. And then, returning to these two studies which I showed Earlier for the making of the Golden Calf. Now, this is for one of the large paintings, a pair of large paintings. made for his own parish church, the Madonna dell'Orto, which at a slightly difficult moment In his career, where commissions are not assured, Tintoretto offers to paint these two enormous paintings, more or less for free, for the cost of materials alone. He paints the Last Judgment, and then this, the making of the Golden Calf. So, we have this sculptor here with his dividers in his hand pointing to a calf that's grey, that is to say, made of clay. And all around, people are collecting gold, presumably to be melted down and cast into the Golden Calf. So, it's a sort of pre-history of the story. And down here in the foreground, and the painting is on the left wall of the choir, so These are the two figures closest to the congregation in the church; you have this group of one woman. Removing the earring from the other. And yet, the two drawings have nothing particularly feminine about them. at all. Instead, they are drawings of nude males, presumably, once again, based on the study of men posing, or youths posing in the studio, then somehow transposed into typical Tintoretto figures. But again, this idea of requiring an understanding of these figures as nudes underneath their clothes before painting them in the manner he does flies in the face of everything we've ever I've been told about Tintoretto as a draftsman, and these are not isolated examples. I could go through Many of them, but I'll just use one more. This standing figure from the Morgan Collection, worked up in chalk, then overlaid with a touch of oil paint, which is for the figure of Prudence which is in the choir of the same church, in the Medina dell'Orto. Again, understanding it as a nude male what ultimately becomes a clothed female figure. And once again, the idea of working and reworking and considering carefully, because this drawing begins with chalk and is then developed in paint, then he holds it up to the light and traces it through so he can consider it in reverse, something he does over and over and over again. There are, there are, I don't know, 30 drawings that are traced in this manner. We have two on display in the exhibition, mounted on double-sided stands. This is a kind of standard trick in Central Italian draftsmanship. We think of someone like Parmigianino doing this kind of thing all the time. But it again speaks to a careful process of consideration and preparation for all of these paintings. And he experiments with how he does this. Some drawings are nude, and then there's a second drawing with drapery. Others times he just keeps working on one piece of paper. I love this drawing from the Uffizi, where you seem to have, I think, four different positions for the head inclined. You see, sort of, you know, noses moving through space with two different arms, first executed in black chalk, refined with this sharp piece of chalk, dipped in oil or charcoal, and then a touch of white highlight, and that actually corresponds to the drapery covering that figure in the painting. Or in this case case, he uses chalk and then grabs a pen, and with brown ink, refines the contours. Interestingly, in the old catalog of Tintoretto's drawings, neither of these is accepted, partly because This isn't it; this is the only example of a drawing in which he used a pen. And for that scholar, that was too much of an anomaly. For me, instead, there's a consistent pattern. Grab a brush and trace it in oil, dip your chalk into a little oil, and go over the contours that way. Or if you if you happened to have a pen on the table that day, you would use it for this drawing. Again, there's a constant experimentation and evolution in his drawings. And that same sense of experimentation comes out brilliantly in this painting, acquired a few years ago by the Yale Art Gallery. It's clearly some sort of studio experiment. First of all, Tintoretto never paints. panel. This is a piece of wood. But it's not the poplar that you would usually use for a painting. It's not a prepared panel. Instead, it's hammered together. There's a board here, a series of boards, and then another one at the end. It's larch wood, a hardwood that no one has ever used for a painting. It's a cabinet door, or the bottom of a drawer, or something similar, which hasn't even been planed smooth. These are gouges in the wood, and it's not gessoed or prepared for painting. And we look at it, and you can see, oh, he's drawing in paint, and then he works up this one head to a high degree of finish. It's unfinished, but one gets a sense this might be It was never meant to be a finished painting. There are strange relationships among the figures. There are strange elements of scale. There are multiple layers of drawing. You feel as though you can see Look closely and you'll see some darker drawings in here. However, upon technical study, when you examine this with an infrared camera, and you see something even more extraordinary. This sketch that I don't you could ever anticipate, even from the unfinished painting seen in natural light. It's perhaps easier to compare them side by side, with the position and scale of John the Baptist, his head is here in the painting, and then there in the sketch. And the position of Christ is completely different. There's a bit of architecture or something in the background here. So there's this layering of media. There's this first sketch in black, then there's a sketch in a kind of dark brown, then there's the drawing in white paint, and this sort of reddish, mauve-like color that often resulted from him mixing the leftover paint on his palette together and using it that. We know it is composed of all sorts of pigments. And all this is very visible in this painting because it is unfinished and experimental, but the technical study being conducted on all of his paintings, many of which were restored for the exhibition in Venice, reveals that this way of working, layer upon layer, drawing in paint and then working up to a high degree of finish, is more More common than we would ever expect. A paper on this topic will be presented at our symposium on November 1st. Tintoretto evolves, though. He moves from these kinds of drawings in the 1960s to something simpler. more schematic, hastily sketched in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s before his death. He gets to what we call the "sacco di noce" style, the bag of nuts style, with musculature that has come a long, long way from any sort of life study and takes on a life of its own. The figures are more schematic. And you think, well, why do this? I mean, part of it is constant experimentation. but I think it's easily explained when you consider how much work the guy had by this point his career. By the middle of the 1570s, first Titian died in 1576 from the plague, leaving the open to commissions, not just in Venice, but throughout all the aristocratic courts around. And Tintoretto quickly secures work for Mantua for the first time. And then there are the two great Fires at the Palazzo Ducale, which require the repainting of miles of rooms throughout the palace. A top which Tintoretto had by that point won the right to do all of the decoration for the entire Scuole di San Marco, upstairs, downstairs, boardroom, main hall, and so on, by himself For himself. He needed a huge, vast workshop to accomplish even a fraction of this. And I think these schematic drawings are not just a matter of time. Who has the time to sit and make them? A careful life drawing when you have 38 figures to paint today? But I think, also, with the big workshop, there is a more easily followed map for the students to follow. Take something and put one of those up there in the painting. We do get the sense that there are many paintings executed by One assistant or another, not always terribly good, but one for which there are drawings by the master. himself. He's still orchestrating the projects in the studio. He's not retired at all, but he isn't painting the large-scale works himself. And part of the exhibition on the upper floor is about the training of assistants and those who follow, his children, including Domenico. And I think this is A nice juxtaposition of a Jacopo and a Domenico. There are a few instances of that in the exhibition. Palma Giovine, who comes to Venice from a different training, but then is immediately Associated with the Tintoretto studio. And there are several ways in which we can prove that. And then even this mysterious draftsman, who is there in Venice, somewhere in the atmosphere of Tintoretto and Palma Giovane, and who has recently, it has recently been suggested, might be the young El Greco in Italy. These, however, are discussions for another time. topics of their own. What I want to conclude with instead are the other body of drawings by Tintoretto, Not the preparatory studies, but the large group of studies following sculpture. There are many copies. after Michelangelo, especially after the group of Samson and the Philistines. More than 60 drawings such ones are known, the vast majority of which are drawn from the front and back. There are drawings after the Medici tombs. We have a couple of examples upstairs. And these two call to mind literary devices. Rodolfi tells us that Tintoretto wrote on the wall of his studio, The design of Michelangelo and the Gloria of Tiziano, which, as you know, sounds pleasant, a Venetian copying Michelangelo. Although it is a phrase that had already appeared in Pellopino's dialogue back in the 1540s. Doesn't mean that Tintoretto didn't adopt it, but it's a kind of literary device and may not have truly captured the essence of what Tintoretto was all about. The drawings are not only after Michelangelo. There are examples drawn after Sansovino. Models, and there are nearly fifty sheets following the so-called Grimani Vitellius, this ancient bust unearthed in Rome and sent by Cardinal Grimani back to Venice, where it remains to this day Now in the Carrera Museum, in the archaeological museum. Now the traditional account of all these sculpture drawings, whether after Michelangelo or Sansovino or antiquities, that they are an artwork of a young Tintoretto, an artist who didn't truly emerge from any single workshop training himself by observing everything. It's a kind of eclectic approach often seen in Art from the 16th century. And perhaps, just perhaps, he did study these subjects as a young artist. But in the course of researching this exhibition, I believe there's a different story. that came out. So in the case of the Grimani Vitellius, there are at the British Museum Five double-sided sheets. Here they are arranged in the study room. So, ten drawings in total of this. bust attributed to Tintoretto. And there are differing opinions. There are certain details that drawings. Some are from the left, some are from the right, some are slightly further down below. Some are higher. The sheets can vary greatly in quality. There could be a truly excellent drawing. On one side, and then you turn the sheet over, and it could be the worst of draftsmen on the back. There is at least one left-handed draftsman in the set, or at least someone who shades from the top. from left to lower right, the way a left-handed artist would. They are clearly by a number of different artists. This is not hard to imagine. Fioletti presents us with this slightly romanticized view of a artist's studio, but you can imagine a cast of the bust set up and young students sitting around and all making their drawings. But there are other problems when you look at these, because Sometimes we know the bust had two ears, it still exists. Sometimes it's not clear what the draftsman... is this hair or an ear, or what in the world is going on here? He's lost sight of the form. which he wouldn't do if he were copying the bust, but he would if he were copying the drawing. Even more revealing are the highlights. Almost all of these drawings have one, two, three, or four dots. white up the nose. A small smudge over the right eye and a light dab on the chin. Now, if You're sitting on the left side of the bust, and the light is wherever it is, and someone else is When drawing from the right side, the highlights shouldn't be in the same position; they should shift. according to your position and relative to the light. So what do you make of all this? Or what What have I made of all this? It seems that the only logical explanation is that students are drawing. this bust from different angles, but with one of Tintoretto's or two of Tintoretto's own drawings stuck to the wall with it. So they're, in a way, learning to draw by learning, studying a form. in the manner of the master and following his guidance on how to draw. And this is true not only for the Grimani Vitellius, as well as for the Sampson drawings. So here you have one side of a sheet in the Courtauld and then front and back of the sheet from Harvard that's upstairs in the exhibition. And it's just too coincidental that these drawings would have exactly the same layout, unless they're copying something else. And once again, those dots of white highlighting, They're slightly oxidized here, so perhaps easier to read across the shoulder. You see them there, You see them there, you see them there. And then interestingly, there's even a brush drawing by Palma Giovanni in the exhibition, which has the same highlighting dots that Palma did not have usually used. So this idea of copying Tintoretto's own interpretation of the sculpture as a means of learning. Now, what does all this tell us? One is, these drawings are not by Tintoretto, or only rarely so. And they are almost certainly not the young Tintoretto, but rather the established master who used them to train that vast workshop in the 70s and 80s. The dating, the attribution, the function of these is entirely different. They also, however, point to the the centrality of drawing to artistic education in Venice, that this painter had his students make drawings. Moreover, if we compare them to the drawings from the 70s, the old Bag of Nuts study from the Albertina, for example, I think we begin to understand that these schematic forms of muscles are meant to remind students to think about volumes, to think about figures in space, Think about creating figures that are expressive and emotive—that was the lesson, ultimately. learned from drawing the Michelangelo cast. It's not about copying Michelangelo himself, not to mention learning from that example of creating expressive bodies. And then finally, These drawings, I think, emphasize the fact that all of the preparatory drawings, the schematics, Stylized, simple preparatory drawings were functional. They were not exercises in aesthetics. They are never carried to a high degree of finish merely for the sake of beauty alone. And so to conclude with one final literary reference, once again from Rodolphe, with two of the more schematic late drawings from the exhibition illustrating it, Tintoretto was visited by some Flemish youths who had come to Venice after being in Rome, and they brought with them some drawings executed with extreme care in red chalk. And Tintoretto asked them, well, how much time did How much time did you spend on these drawings? And they said, some said 10 days, some said 15. Truly, Tintoretto said, and you can imagine him smirking as he says this, you could not have taken less. And then he dipped. His brush, in black, made, with just a few strokes, a figure, boldly touching it with white. highlights. And he turned to them and said, "We poor Venetians do not know how to draw except" this way. Tintoretto was fully aware of what drawing was in central Italy and what it could become and how it might work, but he wasn't interested. He drew constantly throughout his entire career, and he painted in long, flowing lines. His art is absolutely grounded in the process of disegno, but it's a a distinctive Venetian disegno evident throughout the works of the entire century. Thank you.