Venetian School Research Articles

Russian-Eastern Intersections. A Venetian ‘Anomaly’

This article is devoted to the research of a group of scholars from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice who over the course of several decades – especially starting from the 1970s, and partly up to now – have studied the cultural and political relationships between Russia and Asia. Some of these scholars were specialists in Russian studies, others came from orientalist disciplines (in particular Iranian and Turkish studies), but showed an in-depth interest – also based on acquaintance with the language – in Russia and the Soviet Union. Their research has produced a large number of publications, of a predominantly literary and historical nature, which constitute an important contribution to the knowledge of Russian-Eastern interactions, with particular reference to the Caucasus, but also to Central Asia, Crimea and the Volga region. Some aspects of this ‘Venetian school’ of Russian-Asian studies can be very useful, albeit counter-current, for present-day research on the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet area.

The contribution of Grigore L. Trancu-Iasi to the evolution of accounting theory, practice and profession in Romania

This article seeks to portray Grigore Trancu-Iasi (1874–1940) as a versatile figure in academic, professional and political fields. It shows the fundamental role played by Trancu-Iasi as a key actor in the evolution of accounting theory, practice and profession in Romania in the context of accounting knowledge transfer from the different Italian schools of thought to Romania. The analysis highlights not only his contribution to the dissemination of doctrines on bankruptcy, double-entry bookkeeping and the functioning of the azienda (firm) but also his pivotal role in the synthesis of the various Italian schools of thought, which were conflicting at the time. Trancu-Iasi translated and adapted bankruptcy studies carried out by Italian scholars from different schools of thought. For instance, he referred to the study of the logismographic method Tuscan School and the subsequent asset-centred accounting system promoted by the Venetian School, and the studies on the azienda presented by different Italian schools. Therefore, in this article, Trancu-Iasi emerges as an outstanding interpreter of the new trends in Italian accounting theory and of the needs of an entire professional group in Romania.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЯ ОБРАЗА МАРИИ МАГДАЛИНЫ В СЮЖЕТЕ «ПИР У СИМОНА ФАРИСЕЯ» В ИТАЛЬЯНСКОЙ ЖИВОПИСИ

Mary Magdalene occupies a special place among the Gospel characters. Her name is mentioned several times in all the synoptic Gospels. Being a participant in the central events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, she appears already in the earliest Christian images. The rich pictorial tradition associated with her expanded as her fascinating and controversial biography developed, blending the features of various heroines with the name Mary or nameless sinners. This article considers the process of composition, as well as semantic and artistic transformation of the plot, which became widespread in European fine art — "The Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee" on the example of Italian art from the Middle Ages to the High Renaissance. This selectivity is justified by the fact that the key processes in the formation of iconographic schemes took place in early Christian and medieval art and underwent qualitative changes in Proto-Renaissance and Renaissance art in Italian art schools. In turn, the Italian High Renaissance art in this case is limited to the Venetian school, since it was within this national school that the most characteristic processes were observed. The study uses historicalformal, iconographic and iconological methods.

From 1960 to the Present Day: The Influence of the Gestalt Theory on Didactic Devices for Language Teaching

The present work discusses from a historical perspective the influence that the Gestalt Theory has had in Italy on the development of language teaching models from the 1960s to the present day. Different sources have thus been investigated, taking into account in particular the Venetian school of educational linguistics. The second part of the article is devoted to the presentation of a model created for teaching and learning Italian for study purposes, that is a practical proposal also indebted to the Gestalt theory. The model results from the attempt to transfer to the field of educational linguistics both findings made available by psychological research and by neuroscientific studies, in particular those which rely on the embodied nature of language.

Venetian Cinquecento Pictures and France in the 1820s: Painting, Perception, Influence

This article deals with reassessing Venetian Cinquecento painting in France in the 1820s. This research is a series of case studies related to this problem and providing various types of historical analysis. It examines particular artworks, artistic, social, political contexts, and the influence of Venetian art on the formation of a new artistic language in France in the 1820s. Using an analysis of a wide range of both visual and verbal primary sources, I explore theoretical and practical aspects of the reassessment of Venetian Cinquecento painting in early nineteenth-century France. The paper presents a detailed examination of various French publications of that time regarding Venetian art, as well as a comparative analysis of artworks by Venetian and French artists, namely, Jacopo Robusti, Paolo Veronese, Andrea Schiavone, Eugène Delacroix, Xavier Sigalon, and Eugène Devéria. In this article, I address the following questions. What was the knowledge about Italian Renaissance art in France in the early 19th century? What place did the Venetian school take among the Italian schools of painting in the French consciousness at that time? How was Venetian painting perceived, revisited and presented? How did it influence the formation of a new artistic language in the 1820s? This study reveals the causes, specifics, aspects, and far-reaching consequences of the reconsideration of Venetian Cinquecento painting in the 1820s and its significance for the understanding of the patterns of art development in 19th-century France.

Rivalités à Venise

Ten years ago, the exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese… Rivals in Renaissance Venice was held at the Musée du Louvre. The narrative framework of this exhibition was based on the artistic and psychological confrontation between these three giants of the Venetian school of the Cinquecento. Through analysis and comparison of Tintoretto's and Veronese's pictorial style and their works, these two artists’ personalities emerge opposites in every way.

Зображення Богородиці у сакральному мистецтві та музейних колекціях Венеції

На основі італо- й англомовної літератури представлено аналітичний огляд зображень Богородиці у релігійному живописі, скульптурному мистецтві, музейних колекціях і мозаїках м. Венеції. Почитання Пречистої Діви Марії, як покровительки міста, у Венеції має давні історичні витоки й яскраво виражене за допомогою візуальної мови мистецтва різних стилів, зокрема італійського ренесансу. Відомі малярі, представники знаменитої венеційської школи живопису, залишили після себе велику кількість полотен присвячених Богородиці, які зберігаються у храмах, музеях, галереях Венеції та репрезентують важливий вимір для сучасних історичних, мистецьких, теологічних і маріологічних досліджень.
 Іншим важливим аспектом є мозаїки храмів Венеції та островів Венеційської лагуни, які представляють переплетення візантійського стилю з творчими здобутками венеційських майстрів, які ґрунтовно навчалися техніки візантійського мистецтва, у результаті витворивши свої унікальні стилістичні особливості.

Sonata for the trombone of the second half of the 16th – the beginning of the 19th centuries in the context of historical and national traditions of development of the genre

Sonata for the trombone of the second half of the 16th – the beginning of the 19th centuries in the context of historical and national traditions of development of the genre

On Art, Wealth, and Power: The Venetian Republic.

In the city of Venice, the combination of light, water, and architecture of buildings and public spaces has inspired artists, photographers, and filmmakers (1). Venetians have cultivated the image of their city as a place of exceptional beauty and deliberately used art to enhance it (2, 3). Its art goes back to the Byzantine period. Today it maintains a prominent position in the art world through art festivals, such as the Venice Biennale established in 1895, which includes alternating the International Art Exhibition and, from 1980, the Architecture Exhibition (4). During the Italian Renaissance, the Venetian approach emphasizing color was contrasted with the Florentine one, which favored drawing ( disegno ), although there is also a rich tradition of Venetian drawing (5). The leading Venetian school was that of Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516) and several members of his family, followed by Giorgione (1478–1510) and Titian (1490–1576), and later Paolo Veronese (1528–88) and Tintoretto (1519–94) (5, 6). In the 18th century, the leading Venetian painter was Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (6–8). And then there were the view painters ( vedutisti ) of the 18th century (9). The paintings representing city views were desirable souvenirs to acquire during a Grand Tour—a period of continental travel fashionable among North European elites between the 17th and 19th centuries. The most prominent vedutisti were Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), known as Canaletto; his nephew Bernardo Bellotto (ca 1722–80); and Francesco Guardi (1712–93) (10). Canaletto's pictures were painted with great precision and, apart from the architecture, contained a broad range of figures representing Venetian life. In contrast, Guardi's paintings were more impressionistic, being painted with looser brushstrokes. Fig. 1 shows one of them, representing the church of Santa Maria …

On the italian debate concerning “Economia Aziendale”. The recent discovery of a manuscript by Emilio Ravenna (1930)

The paper relies upon the recent discovery of the textbook of Accounting adopted in Palermo’s High Business School (the ‘ancestor’ of the Faculty of ‘Economics & Business’, founded after in 1936), just in its first years of opening (academic year 1930-31). It is a printed manuscript. This book was written by the local professor of Accounting, Emilio Ravenna, who operated in Sicily between the last decades of XIX century and the firstones of XX one, commonly considered (Guzzo, 2003) an intermediate scholar between the ‘Venetian’ (Besta) and ‘Tuscan’ (Cerboni) Italian Schools, adhering to the former for the accounting method and to the latter for the general theory of administrative functions, but here revealing more as belonging to the latter. The book is placed within a period of strong debate for the Italian community, after Zappa’s manifesto for the new science of “Economiaaziendale”, and also includes a full conception of Accounting as an open criticism to “Economia aziendale”. The interest for this discovery is due to the explicit answer to the defy launched at ‘Ca’ Foscari’ (University of Venice) by Gino Zappa. But the most relevant issue is that this answer does not come from the main ‘Venetian School’ of Besta disciples, then dominating in Italy, but from a true ‘survivor’ of the older ‘Tuscan School’, strictly follower of Giovanni Rossi work, and in those times already declined. It is noteworthy the fact Ravenna generally agrees with Zappa, confuting, however, only that his conceptions would be really new. The following paper, then, presenting the basic contents of the aforementioned book, with a peculiar stress on the doctrinal items concerning Accounting and “Economia aziendale”, reveals a continuity, perhaps overestimated by Ravenna,between the late XIX-century ‘Scientific Accounting’ by Cerboni and the early XX-century “Economia aziendale” by Zappa.

Humanism and Colonial Governance in the Venetian Ageaen: The Case of Giovanni Bembo

In this article, I examine the autobiographical writing and reading practices of Giovanni Bembo, a colonial governor posted to Skopelos and Skiathos in the Aegean in 1525. During his term as rettore in the Aegean, Bembo’s scribe had an affair with his daughter and helped her to abort her ensuing pregnancy. Bembo then ordered the scribe to be publicly castrated. In the aftermath of this violent act, Bembo was blacklisted from any further governmental position in Venice. In his autobiographical letter, written ten years after the events on Skiathos, Bembo reflects on his role in the colonial Aegean, using textual practices that he learned in Venetian humanist schools during adolescence. I argue that in Bembo’s autobiographical writing and annotations, we can see the ways in which humanist education shaped the Venetian patrician colonial administrator’s experience and practice of governance in the Aegean.

Časoslov Blažene Djevice Marije (Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis) iz Znanstvene knjižnice u Zadru

Časoslov Blažene Djevice Marije iz zadarske Znanstvene knjižnice do danas nije temeljitije proučen, a riječ je o primjerku s početka 16. stoljeća koji sadrži tri vrste iluminiranih inicijala: litterae historiate, litterae dominicalis i litterae ferialis. Od toga broji šest figuralno oslikanih inicijalnih prikaza uokvirenih bogatom marginalnom dekoracijom, četiri litterae dominicalis te mnoštvo littera ferialis. U radu se na temelju stilskih mletačkih i ferrarskih sitnoslikarskih karakteristika pretpostavlja njegovo sjevernotalijansko porijeklo, a upozorava se i na neke srodnosti s ostalim suvremenim ferrarskim iluminacijama koje se čuvaju u Hrvatskoj.

Painting and Poetry in Early Modern Spain: The Primacy of VenetianColorein Góngora’sPolyphemusandThe Solitudes*

AbstractLuis de Góngora’sFable of Polyphemus and Galatea(1612) andThe Solitudes(1613) have inspired comparisons to painting ever since they first appeared in manuscript form at the Court of Philip III. Engaging the doctrine ofut pictura poesis, which notes the kinship between painting and poetry, Góngora creates pictorial conceits modeled in color as if using a painter’s palette, and thus his poems read like imaginary art galleries. By way of both plastic and discursive references to the Venetian school, Góngora inserts his poetry into one of the most salient polemics of his time, theparagone tra colore e disegno, the debate over the supremacy of Venetian color versus Florentine draftsmanship. This essay seeks to provide a reading of Góngora’s major poems in light of theparagoneas it played out in seventeenth-century Spain among art theorists and painters such as Francisco Pacheco and Domenico Theotocopoulis (El Greco), and intertwined with related discourses pertaining to artistic progress and innovation, including the link between aesthetics and religious reform.

Iluminirani psaltir 15. stoljeća zadarskih franjevaca

The author discusses an illuminated manuscript from the convent of St Francis at Zadar. Nine folios featuring the most representative initials from this manuscript were cut out in 1974 and their whereabouts have been unknown ever since. Only old black and white photographs of this psalter are known in the scholarly literature. With the aid of colour details preserved on a roll film at the Conservation Office at Zadar, the author attempts to reconstruct their original appearance. He highlights the fact that this psalter has not been thoroughly analyzed or consistently described. He establishes that this is a Liturgical psalter (psalterium feriale) which differs from a Biblical psalter, and that it contains a hymnal (psalterium cum hymnis). Each psalm and hymn begins with an illuminated initial, most of which are decorative. However, the psalter has eight figural initials ( littera historiata), which the author analyzes individually and establishes as a direct reflection of the division of the psalter into the days of the liturgical week. Figural decoration was given only to the initials of the first psalm of each new liturgical day (feria), which makes seven in total. These are: Psalms I, XXVI, XXXVII, LII, LXVIII, LXXX and XCVII, where Psalm I marks Sunday, Psalm XXVI Monday and so on, until the end of the liturgical week. Figural decoration was also given to the very first initial at the beginning of the psalter which opens with a so-called Invitatorium. Each figural initial is described in detail and special emphasis is given to initial B on folio 5 which represents the richest initial in the entire psalter. At its bottom is a depiction of St Bernardine, rather than St Anthony of Padua or St Francis as has been suggested.In this paper, the author publishes all the initials and places them in the context of their respective psalms. The paper graphically differentiates three types of initials through the use of different typesetting. The figural initials, littera historiata, are printed in bold, the italic typeface is applied to the littera dominicalis, while the others, ‘littera ferialis’, which form the majority, are printed in regular typeface. The colour red is used for a rubrica, that is the subtitles which mark the psalter’s individual sections, such as the Invitatorium, feria, hymns etc. This enables even those who have no command of Croatian to gain insight into the entire content of the psalter. Contrary to current opinion which claims the psalter to be the work of a Venetian school, and contrary to an isolated view that it was created at Zadar itself, the author deems that the psalter was created in the circle of Bologna, most likely around 1460 or soon after this date.

Wystrój malarski kaplic kościoła Kamedułów na Bielanach i jego znaczenie dla sztuki Krakowa 1. połowy XVII w. (kaplice Królewska i Delpacowska)

Ogromne znaczenie eremu bielańskiego dla dziejów sztuki polskiej czasów przełomu manieryzmu i baroku jest od dawna należycie docenione. Dotyczy to jednak w pierwszym rzędzie architektury i jej wystroju (stiuków), a w znacznie mniejszym stopniu malarstwa. Wielokrotnie przywoływano w opracowaniach sztuki polskiej 1. połowy XVII w. malarski wystrój kaplic bielańskich, najczęściej jednak ograniczano się do stwierdzenia, że część tej dekoracji jest dziełem weneckiego malarza Tomasza Dolabelli i jego warsztatu(wystrój malarski kaplic Królewskiej i Delpacowskiej) i ilustruje proces niejako „degradacji” tego artysty, który przybywszy do Polski w ostatnich latach XVI w. z czasem zagubił osiągnięcia wielkiej szkoły weneckiej doby manieryzmu, zaniżył standardy wykonywanych dzieł i uległ swoistej „sarmatyzacji”, dostosowując się do gustów i oczekiwań miejscowych odbiorców. W malowidłach dwóch najważniejszych kaplic bielańskiego kościoła widziano dzieła jegosamego, jego uczniów i naśladowców. Teza o „sarmatyzacji” i obniżeniu się poziomu twórczości Dolabelli niedawno poddana została krytycznej analizie, przy okazji której przywołano i w pewien sposób „zrehabilitowano” źródłowo potwierdzone dzieła tego artysty z kaplicy Królewskiej.

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting ed. by David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (review)

REVIEWS 185 lated into Venetian pictorial dialect” (44). Examples of the half-length Madonna, the Bellini brothers’ favored type, are discussed to further exemplify this Veneto-Byzantine style, while Cretan icons of the Madre della Consolazione type are briefly contrasted as representatives of what Byzantinists would call Creto-Venetian style. Campbell is right to notice that, even though Greek and Venetian painters had different reasons for merging each others’ distinctive styles—commercial concerns or the close association Europeans made between Byzantine art and sanctity—it is not clear if any devotional distinction existed in the actual use of the emerging images (59). Unfortunately, discussions of the examples included in the catalogue do not move far beyond an all-too-familiar discourse, limited to identifying whether a painting is “Latin-inspired” or “Byzantine-looking.” Like the exhibition, the catalogue aims to blur the east versus west dichotomy , where western art is often artificially elevated. Written (in most part) from a western perspective, however, this catalogue proves how difficult it is to escape the modern borders of scholarly fields, even while looking at artists and patrons who themselves, over 500 years ago, managed to synthesize brilliantly the quintessential values of their cosmopolitan Mediterranean reality. The Italian images of Mehmed II suggest that, despite religious concerns, he admired European art and actively constructed a European image for himself. He requested established artists from various Italian courts and commissioned medals and painted portraits glorifying him as a successor of Alexander the Great. At his court, Greek scholars and bureaucrats worked alongside their Muslim peers. However, J. M Rogers and Alan Chong show that, even though Mehmed’s library and art collection joined cultures, his successors did not share his tolerance towards the occident, and thus his patronage was less influential than perhaps he might have expected. Chong’s essay, “Gentile Bellini in Istanbul: Myths and Misunderstandings,” is one of the strengths of the catalogue, disentangling the intricacies of Gentile ’s eastern visit. A close analysis of the artist’s few works securely dated to his Istanbul period clarifies their chronology and attribution. Last but not least, the artist who preceded Bellini at the Sultan’s court in 1478–1479, Costanzo da Ferrara, is firmly identified as Costanzo di Moysis. Little is known about this Italian, originally from Venice but active in Ferrara and Naples, whose oeuvre cannot be reconstructed in the absence of stylistic evidence. The second half of the fifteenth century marks the height of Italian fascination with the east. It was a period of explosive cultural dialogue—one that continues to stir our scholarly fascination today. The exhibition curators and the authors of this catalogue were successful in presenting Gentile Bellini as a case study, offering a reconsideration of an artist who, during his lifetime, was considered Venice’s most important painter. CRISTINA STANCIOIU, Art History, UCLA Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, ed. David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art 2006) 336 pages, 31 halftone + 162 color ill. This substantial, abundantly illustrated catalogue, created to accompany exhibitions at the National Gallery in Washington and the Kunsthistoriches Mu- REVIEWS 186 seum in Vienna, brings together some of the foremost scholars of Venetian art to shed new light on a significant moment in the history of Venetian painting. The exhibitions highlighted a period of considerable stylistic change in the painting of the Venetian schools from 1500 to 1530. The exhibitions and the catalogue were meant to illustrate this transition by bringing together the paintings of not only the three masters listed in the title, but also other lesser-known painters of the beginning of the sixteenth century like Lorenzo Lotto, Cima da Conegliano, and Vincenzo Catena. The catalogue brings together these artists seamlessly, creating for the reader a vivid picture of the artistic world of early sixteenth-century Venice. By not concentrating on a single artist, as many exhibitions do, the catalog presents a more complete idea of artistic development in all genres of paintings. Few scholars of Venetian art would doubt the significance of the three decades chosen by the exhibition organizers in the history of the city’s painting. During these thirty...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Old Masters

Dante Gabriel Rossetti played a major role in forming Victorian patterns of taste. As a young painter, he rejected the conventional path by turning from the techniques of post-Raphaelite artists towards the style of the Italian and Flemish early Renaissance. A number of Rossetti's sonnets are dedicated to old master paintings and his work as an artist reflects various influences at different times in his career. In the 1860s he began to emulate Titian and the Venetian school, and at a later point he discovered Botticelli, who subsequently became an icon of the aesthetic movement. During the nineteenth century, art students in Western Europe were encouraged to revere their predecessors. Whether they were making detailed drawings after classical sculpture or copies from the old masters, the 'sense of the past' was always with them. The 'past', however, was not a static concept. As Francis Haskell has so brilliantly demonstrated, the precise identity of these great predecessors was constantly evolving and changing. (1) While some were 'in', others were 'out', and the space between the two took in a wide variety of 'grey areas'. The career of Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustrates the shifting sands of nineteenth-century taste. In 1846, as a young Royal Academy student, he told his godfather, the naturalist Charles Lyell, that he was 'making some drawings at the Academy from The Gates of San Giovanni at Florence, the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti, which Michel Angelo pronounced worthy to be the gates of Paradise'. (2) Appropriately enough, it was while Rossetti was studying the Academy's cast of the famous fifteenth-century doors that a fellow student, William Holman Hunt, noticed him: alone, perched on some steps stretched across my path, drawing in his sketch-book a single female figure from the gates of Ghiberti. I had recently been attentively drawing some of the groups for their expression and arrangement, and I told Rossetti then how eloquent the Keeper had been in his comments on seeing me at work from the group of 'The Finding of the Cup in Benjamin's Sack', saying that Ghiberti's principles of composition were in advance of his time in their variety of groupings, and that his great successors had all profoundly profited by these examples. (3) The Keeper, Mr Jones, told Hunt that he 'regretted that the gates were not more often studied by young painters' (Hunt, 1, 107). Hunt and Rossetti spoke for a while about 'these quattrocento epochal masterpieces', although, as Hunt remarks, it was their common love of the poetry of John Keats which brought about their 'intimate relations' (ibid.). From Richard Monckton Milnes's Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, published in 1848, the young artists discovered that Keats, enthralled by prints of the Campo Santo frescos in Pisa, shared their enthusiasm for 'the early men'. (4) When they drew up a list of 'Immortals' in August 1848, however, expecting their friends to sign up to it, there were only two 'early men' among them, Ghiberti and Fra Angelico. Ghiberti was certainly 'Pre-Raphaelite', in the strictest sense of the word, and it is apposite that his work should have brought Hunt and Rossetti together. The name eventually chosen for their Brotherhood, formed with five others in 1848, demonstrated a shift in taste, a movement away from admiration for the artists of the high Renaissance to those, such as Ghiberti, who preceded them. The Pre-Raphaelite Brothers were not alone in championing what had previously been dismissed as 'primitive' art. Charles Lyell gave a copy of Anna Jameson's Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, first published in 1845, to Rossetti. Reprinting a series of articles originally published in the Penny Magazine, the book's scope included painters from Cimabue to Titian and the Venetian school. The same author's Sacred and Legendary Art came out in 1848, with descriptions and illustrations of 'early' paintings. …

Les tableaux italiens du Settecento dans les ventes parisiennes au XVIIe siècle

Ingrid Lemainque, Italian paintings of the Settecento in 18th-century Parisian sales ; In 19th-century France, contemporary Italian painting seems to have been little valued, if one believes the artistic literature of the time. A statistical analysis based on the thorough survey of Parisian sales catalogues between 1730 and 1799 enables one to distinguish a different truth, the presence of a particular taste for Settecento Italian paintings and reveals the importance of landscape and the Venetian school in these sales, to the detriment of more conventional schools and artists.

Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594) is an ambiguous figure in the history of art. His unorthodox paintings are not readily classifiable, and although Venetian by birth, his claim to be truly of the Venetian School has long been in doubt. As a youth, he was quickly ejected from the workshop of the great Titian, accepted then, as now, as the apogee of Venetian painting. In the long career which nonetheless followed, Tintoretto increasingly abandoned the humanist narrative and sensual colour values which typified the work of Titian and the venerable Venetian Renaissance tradition. Critics and writers such as Vasari, Boschini, Ruskin and Sartre all placed Tintoretto in total opposition to the established artistic practice of his time, but this view offers an over-simplified and historically inaccurate answer to the question of Tintoretto's relation to tradition. This text offers an important re-assessment of Tintoretto's place in art history by showing that the artist, far from rejecting existing artistic practice, sought to create a modern technique and an aesthetic which, for all its originality and sophistication, made its first appeal to the shared emotions of the widest possible viewing audience.

The development of painting on coloured surfaces in sixteenth-century Italy

Paint samples from nearly 140 sixteenth-century Italian panels and canvases in the National Gallery, London, have been examined to determine the nature of their preparatory layers. The results are presented in tables organized by colour. These tables are subdivided into three geographical regions, roughly equivalent to the established art-historical division into the Florentine and Roman, the North Italian and the Venetian Schools. By organizing the results in this way, it is possible to distinguish patterns of development and usage. These appear to contradict many traditional assumptions about the introduction of painting on coloured surfaces.