MASP

By all indications, Tintoretto attended the studio of Titian (1488/90-1576), but was sent home due to conflicts with the master. A large part of his paintings can be found at various locations in Venice, two highlights being those at the Doge’s Palace and the Scuola Grande di San Marco. What distinguished Tintoretto from his contemporaries was the intense use of color, reinforced by quick, firm brushstrokes, marked by abrupt interruptions. He distorted perspective, disorganized human anatomy and intensified the color contrasts to give vibrations to the shadows, striving for greater expressiveness and drama. He was more interested in the emotional dimension behind each scene than accurate depiction. MASP has two quite distinct paintings by Tintoretto, one created during his youth and another in middle age. The painting Ecce Homo or Pilate Presents Christ to the Crowd (1546-47) alludes to the biblical passage in which Pilate consults the crowd in regard to Christ’s fate. In the pyramidal composition, the public watches the scene of characters deciding Christ’s fate while making theatrical gestures as if onstage. The dog adds a touch of nonchalance to the scene and might have been painted to take care of a large empty white-and-gray area.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017

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The episode is derived from John 19,4, which describes the judgment of Christ with important variants in relation to Matthew and Luke, above all in emphasizing Pilate’s efforts to dissuade the Jews from a condemnation. After being whipped and crowned with thorns, Christ is presented to the multitude that had crowded in front of the Praetorian palace with Pilate’s words: “Here is the Man” (Ecce Homo), as the priests and multitude clamored: “Take him and crucify him” (Tolle, crucige). According to Sandberg-Vavalà (1929, p. 252, n. 7) and Réau (1957, p. 460), the subject was ignored in the iconographic tradition until the 14th century, with the exception of the 9th-century ivory plaques and in 11th-century Otonian illuminated manuscripts. It is only in the 15th century that this theme apparently spreads from northern Europe in direction of Italy, where the rst representations appear only at the end of the 15th century and beginning of the 16th, through Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea Solario, and others. An Ecce Homo was cited in the inventories of the Galleria Gonzaga, in Mantua, and evaluated at thirty-six lire (Luzio 1913, p. 89). The work was published in 1923 by Von der Bercken and Mayer and in 1924 by Pittaluga, who dated it from c. 1547. When it was still in the Sedelmayer’s Collection, in Paris, Venturi (1929, ix, pp. 437-440) republished it and placed it “among the works that represent Tintoretto’s initial phase”. e author wrote a long commentary, based on the consensus among scholars that the work was partly inspired by Titian’s Ecce Homo in the Museum of Vienna, dated 1543, in which Aretino is pictured as Pontius Pilate. Although Coletti (1940) and Pallucchini (1950) argue for a much later dating, at the end of the sixties, Titian’s 1543 Ecce Homo remained a touchstone and Pallucchini himself was to revise his opinion in favor of a date during Titian’s youth –in 1965 and also in a December 31, 1976 letter to E. Camesasca. According to Bardi (1956), De Vecchi (1970), and Rossi-Pallucchini (1977), the work should indeed be dated between around 1546-1547. A youthful work, this Ecce Homo is an eloquent document that allows one to understand the painter’s early style. Inevitably, it is associated with the St. Mark Freeing the Slave (1547-1548), in the Venice Galleria dell'Accademia, since the two feature figures that are almost identical in their clothing and coloring, and even in their placing in the composition. As Venturi observed, equally outstanding is the scenic impact of the great diagonal created by the staircase in the Museum of Vienna Ecce Homo painted by Titian in 1543. But Tintoretto inverted Titian’s composition. Habitual reading from le to right tends to strengthen the aggressiveness of the gure attacking the Christ and Pilate group so that the gures of Pontius Pilate and his companion, foretelling the stylization of El Greco, seem to bend under the pressure of this attack. The narrative becomes denser in a moment of suspense when the fantastic nervousness of the luminous reections seems to electrify the characters of the drama and the energy of the mob seems to be on the point of bursting into the cries of Tolle!, Crucige that was to seal the fate of the prisoner. The dog, a common element in Venetian painting of the Great Century lends a quotidian touch to the rhetoric of the atmosphere of heightened tension.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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