Tintoretto’s Big Books

Although the dazzling and impulsive Venetian painter Tintoretto came to maturity in Venice toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when he began to paint a much-acclaimed cycle of pictures for the Scuola di San Marco, he had already achieved at least one masterpiece sometime earlier in the 1540s, when he painted Christ among the Doctors—a picture now in the museum of the Opera del Duomo in Milan that is worthy of our closest attention (fig. 1). Critics have recognized the painter’s explosive reinvention of the monumental Roman art of Michelangelo and Raphael and the scintillating appropriation of Titian’s shimmering chromatic art in Tintoretto’s tumultuous rendering of the Bible story that tells of how Jesus shocked his learned elders with prodigious learning.