MASP

Nicknamed Tintoretto (“little dyer”) for being the son of a dyer, Jacopo Robusti (1518-1594) was one of the main painters of the second half of the 16th century. Influenced by Titian (1490-1576), the most notable Venetian painter at the time, he followed one of the main techniques practiced by the Venetian school since the previous century: the strong use of color, both as structure and as a tool to captivate attention. Tintoretto became known for a group of paintings at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and for daily scenes in San Marco, which feature a dramatic luminosity. Lamentation over the Dead Christ (or Pietà) was produced when Tintoretto’s studio was most prolific. In Christian iconography, the lamentation appears in two passages in the history of Christ: his deposition from the cross and burial. In both variations, Christ is held by his Mother, an image we know as Pietà, where the Virgin mourns the materialization of her son’s tragic destiny. However, in Tintoretto’s painting there are none of the usual markers that situate the scene, instead there is only a landscape, as if they were out in the woods. The vegetation, halos and clothes are treated with ochre, red and golden tones that give the painting a warm feeling, different from the glittering light we see in his earlier works, and provide the picture with a welcoming atmosphere, a more intimate lamentation. The heads of the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist are delicately outlined by halos, as a way of identifying both their holiness and human side.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2020

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The work is so closely linked to the same scene painted by Tintoretto to decorate a lunette (Pinacoteca Brera, Milan) that Von der Bercken (1942, p. 110) considered the Masp’s painting – when it was still in the Contini Bonacossi’s Collection – “a sketch” (Vorwurf) or a work “somewhat anteceding the Brera Pietà, dated 1563”. This attribution was reiterated by P. Toesca in a letter to P. M. Bardi, dated July 11, 1947, situating it “among the most beautiful and unusual work of the master’s juvenile period”. Toesca went on to emphasize that Tintoretto’s work has “the vigorous contrast of light and darkness, tempered however by Titian’s influence, which leads the painter to sensitive effects in composition, attitudes, and color without diminishing his most peculiar talents and characteristics that show the hand of the master in every detail. The swift and expressive touch of Tintoretto is present throughout”. Giorgio Pudelko (letter to P. M. Bardi, July 24, 1947) also insisted on the c.1545 dating. Giuliano Briganti (letter to P. M. Bardi, undated), however, supported the attribution to the painter but dated the work “with some precision at between 1560 and 1570, given its close relation to the well-known Brera lunette, dated 1563”. Contrary to Von der Bercken, however, Briganti poses that “it is a later version, both for its characteristics approximating it to Robusti’s late works, and because it seems evident that the dense four-figure composition, even though dilated and ‘uncentered’ was born to be included within the sphere of the lunette. This may lead to dating the painting after 1563, nearer 1570”. As Briganti similarly observes, there are also other contemporary versions of the theme, such as one in the Escorial, with an identical Joseph of Arimathea and one in the Brass’s Collection in Venice. e dating of the work at a time immediately subsequent to the Brera lunette was nally also adopted by De Vecchi (1970, p. 103, n. 155b), who describes it as an autograph replica “with few variants” of the Museum of Milan work. Similarities notwithstanding, it should be observed that the Milan and São Paulo works do not represent the same scene. The Brera canvas is a Deposition from the Cross, whereas that of the Masp is a Lamentation over the Dead Christ, a scene from the Christological cycle situated between the Deposition from the Cross and the Deposition in the Tomb. The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, at Masp is not from any of the evangelical texts and appears in the iconography only from the 12th century on, according to Réau (1957, ii, p. 519), “under the influence of the Meditations of the Mystics, unless they had not simply been inspired by the popular funeral lamentations that persist till today throughout the Mediterranean Orient, and even in Corsica”. Tintoretto places the Masp Lamentation in a more extensive space, in the background of which spreads a sunset of superb tonal richness and lyrical enchantment. Iconographically, the invention is a free adaptation of the scene, situated in a wood, with no reference to the so-called unction stone (venerated today in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in Jerusalem), on which the body of Christ was lamented. e iconography of these funereal elegies originated, in any case, in Byzantine art, in which they were called Trenas. ey arrived in Italy in the 14th century and from there spread throughout Europe. Four or five years after the creation of these Pietà, El Greco disembarked in Venice (1567) at the age of only twenty-two. Tintoretto had such a powerful impact that the Pietà that El Greco painted almost thirty years later in 1595 or thereabouts still reflects Tintoretto’s composition conserved in the two versions of the Milan and São Paulo museums.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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