Wednesdays with Tintoretto

"Michelangelo's draughtsmanship and Titian's sense of colour" is the description Carlo Ridofi coined to describe Tintoretto's painting, which merged the best of the two great masters in an art that springs from works of exceptional beauty.  Villa explores the Venetian painter's masterpieces through words and images.

The fascinating story of Tintoretto's life: through the narration of some of the most significant works in the whole production of the great master, Giovanni Villa will accompany us in the dicovery of a life devoted to art.

Titian, Vasari, Sustris, Demio, Bonifacio Veronese, Bassano, El Greco, Schiavone and Paolo Veronese were the painters who worked alongside Tintoretto in Venice.  In 16th century Venice Tintoretto's vision with its multitude of different viewpoints, its contrasting light and shade and its oblique perspective was the synthesis of a Mannerist sensitivity that he interpreted without the slightest [...]

Unlike Titian and Veronese, Tintoretto rarely addressed the theme of the classical Olympian gods.  But when he did do so, he never turned his back on his own very strong sense of ethics, which almost invariably ended up triumphing over the aesthetic and allegorical components in such works.  Tintoretto always aimed to elicit his audience's sense of responsibility, involving them in the mechani [...]

A "devout" yet by no means conformist painter, Tintoretto was one of the greatest painters of bibilical subjects in the Venice of his day.  Though interested in New Testament themes, as evinced by the complex cycle in the Scuola di San Rocco, he certainly did not disdain addressing themes and episodes from the Old Testament.  Deeply involved in the cultural debate triggered by the precepts of [...]