Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) (1518-94).

Art Review 'Tintoretto'

Lights! Darks! Action! Cut! Maestro of Mise-en-Scène By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Published: March 1, 2007

MADRID, Feb. 26 — "I have sometimes seen Tintoretto as equal to Titian," the artist Annibale Carracci wrote, "and at other times as inferior to Tintoretto."

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Stop-action and kinetic virtuosity: Tintoretto's "Rape of Helen" (around 1578-79), Helen, knocked over like a lamp in one corner, disappears amid a melee of archers, swords, horses and boats.

You can get the same impression trudging across Venice and peering in countless churches at big, generally brown, more or less legible pictures attributed to him, scratching your head, wondering how the same man could have painted them all. The sheer acreage of canvas he covered was somehow meant to overwhelm the Venetian art scene during the 1500s, which he finally dominated once his older rival, Titian, died. He was pushy, impatient, squallish and, when he wasn't careless or wildly overextended, not a little too talented for Titian, who instead promoted the more easily loved Veronese. La Serenissima clearly doesn't describe the city in which they all jockeyed. These days, with paintings shipped like Christmas cards across the globe for exhibitions, it's remarkable that the Jacopo Tintoretto show at the Prado here, through May 13, is the first full-dress retrospective since the one in Venice in 1937. Tintoretto painted too much, too unevenly, and too many of his pictures are too huge to be moved. But the Prado has a few great pictures of his. They're supplemented by loans from Venice and elsewhere. With around three dozen paintings and a handful of drawings, the show, organized by Miguel Falomir, a Prado curator, is a model of connoisseurship and smart editing. It occupies the central gallery of this sublime museum, placing Tintoretto beside rooms of Rubens, El Greco and Velázquez, who revered him. His "Last Supper" actually faces Velázquez's "Meninas" through an open door. (That view alone justifies the plane ticket.) This means that Velázquez, peering from behind a canvas in his own picture, stares at the Tintoretto, as if, perhaps, that is what he's painting.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid "Jesus Among the Doctors" is part of a retrospective of the Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto, at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

All jutting diagonals and tumult, "The Last Supper" is typical of what Tintoretto managed: an improbable, acrobatic sort of balancing act, so that his pictures are like houses of cards. Their stop-action quality explains the standard linkage of him with film, and you can see it everywhere. In "The Presentation of Christ in the Temple," staged from below so that we're put in the front row, the main protagonists, Mary and Jesus, occupy the middle ground, but another mother and child wait their turn for consecration. They're in the foreground, to one side, virtually in our laps. Through them, we're made aware that the scene is just a passing moment. Tintoretto invented these standard subjects as if from scratch, as he did himself. He was born in Venice around 1518 into a Brescian family whose name turns out to have been Comin. His first biographer, Carlo Ridolfi, claimed that Tintoretto as a boy tutored briefly in Titian's workshop, before being thrown out, then taught himself to paint, which isn't likely, since Venetian law required six years of apprenticeship. It's not known where he studied, only that he looked hard at Raphael and Michelangelo. Drawings show him copying Michelangelos from odd angles as if inspecting the sculptures like jewels in his hand.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid "The Raising of Lazarus" (1573), a painting packed with a kind of centrifugal energy, is part of a retrospective of the Venetian painter Tintoretto, at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

His first works are awful. He was a slow starter. But by his late 20s he is painting "Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan," mixing hulking bodies with Titian's color and adding in a kind of earthy comedy that linked him to a circle of intellectuals who wanted to undercut artifice with wit. Mars cowers under a table. A yapping dog gives his hiding place away. Everyday details also humanize his pictures, make them more immediate. An old man helps another codger pull off his pants in "The Washing of the Feet." A necklace of pearls scatters when Lucretia struggles against Tarquin, a symbol of her lost virginity, like the painting of the princess straddling a limp dragon, her flushed face reflected, fish-eyed, in the armor of St. George in "St. George, St. Louis and the Princess."

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid "The Burial of Christ"

Tintoretto had an official style when on duty for the Palazzo Ducale and, in these circumstances, having too much to do, he occasionally turned over commissions to his son Domenico and a changing staff of assistants. He also had a more personal style: looser, sketchier, more attuned to modern eyes. Dancing lines produce complex traceries like clouds of fireflies in the night air. You see it in "St. Augustine Healing the Lame," the great S-curve of its composition, packed with brawny pilgrims, straight out of Michelangelo's Sistine, set against a chalky backdrop of bright light. You see the same brushwork in "The Kidnapping of Helen," a miracle of kinetic virtuosity. Bare-breasted Helen, knocked over like a lamp in one corner, disappears amid a melee of archers and swords and big-rumped horses and teetering boats, the panorama sharply receding into a swarm of filigreed white-on-dark brushwork signifying distant skirmishes. The effect dazzles, stopping the eye suddenly at the sight of a drowning man in the middle ground, his tiny head serenely bobbing in the water.

National Gallery, London "The Origins of the Milky Way"

That's my second-favorite moment in the show. My favorite is in "The Raising of Lazarus," a small, not great picture, but densely packed with a kind of centrifugal energy coiling around the ungainly figure of Lazarus, who's green. His head recedes into shadow, so you barely see his face. But a tiny fleck of white in his eye, a light that kindles his reawakening, brings him to life. It's what Roland Barthes, the French critic, liked to call a punctum, the spot, marking time, that burns an image into memory. "Left to himself, he would have covered every wall in the city with his paintings," wrote another Frenchman, Sartre. "He would have covered the ceilings, people would have walked across his most beautiful images; his brush would have spared neither the facades of the palaces, nor the gondolas, nor perhaps, the gondoliers." If a kind of visual logorrhea has obscured Tintoretto's achievement, it doesn't negate his best work. He was his own worst enemy in the end. The Prado's tact does him, and us, a service. In an age of overblown exhibitions and general excess, it's a rare show that manages this. The exhibition "Tintoretto" remains at the Prado Museum, Paseo del Prado, Madrid, through May 13; museoprado.mcu.es.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007