Chapter 8: The beautiful reddish light of the philosopher’s stone

Perfect painting is imperfectly transcendent. Less interesting painters do not know what to do with the choice between substance and illusion. Poor painting does not push the equivocation as far as it can go, until the paint teeters on the edge of transcendence. An unsuccessful picture might have a passage where the paint doesn’t matter at all, and the forms might just as well have been photographed instead of rendered in oil. Then in another place the paint might suddenly become obtrusive, and distract the viewer from the contemplation of some distant landscape, bringing the eye sharply back to the surface of the canvas. It may be that the human mind can only think of one aspect at a time: either a painting is what it represents, or it is a fabrication done on a flat surface. Or perhaps it is possible to think of both the surface and what seems to be behind it at once, in a twofoldness of attention that takes in both equally

When paint is compelling, it is uncanny: it hovers on the brink of impossibility, as if nothing that close to incorporeality could exist. Like the hypnotic red powder of the Stone, paint can reach a pitch of unnaturalness where it seems that it might lose every connection with the tubes and palettes where it began. That is the state that counts, and not the choice between fictive space and canvas, or between illusion and paint. It’s not the choice, but the narrowness of the gap: the incredible tension generated by something so infinitesimally near to perfection. Among painters Tintoretto is especially famous for his diaphanous figures, floating ghostlike across vast stretches of luminous dark canvas. They are painted so lightly, so quickly, that they almost disappear, but at the same time Tintoretto painted so loosely, and with such broad strokes, that is never possible to forget that they are merely paint.

Who is Tintoretto? Tintoretto was one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school and probably the last great painter of the Italian Renaissance. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso, and his dramatic use of perspectival space and special lighting effects make him a precursor of baroque art. To help him with the complex poses he favoured, Tintoretto used to make small wax models which he arranged on a stage and experimented on with spotlights for effects of light and shade and composition. This method of composing explains the frequent repetition in his works of the same figures seen from different angles. He was a formidable draughtsman and, according to Ridolfi, he had inscribed on his studio wall the motto `The drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian'. However, he was very different in spirit from either of his avowed models -- more emotive, using vivid exaggerations of light and movement. His drawings, unlike Michelangelo's detailed life studies, are brilliant, rapid notations, bristling with energy, and his color is more sombre and mystical than Titian's.

Tintoretto

A comparison of Tintoretto's final The Last Supper with Leonardo da Vinci's treatment of the same subject provides an instructive demonstration of how artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance.

Leonardo's is all classical repose. The disciples radiate away from Christ in almost-mathematical symmetry.

In the hands of Tintoretto, the same event becomes dramatic, as the human figures are joined by angels. A servant is foregrounded, perhaps in reference to the Gospel of John 13: In the restless dynamism of his composition, his dramatic use of light, and his emphatic perspective effects, Tintoretto seems a baroque artist ahead of his time.