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Tons of Tintorettos
Venice's Scuola Grande di San Rocco, an ancient Venetian men's club slathered in Tintoretto paintings
A scuola was a lay fraternity whose members dedicated their time and money to a charitable cause. It was also a venue for these private gentleman's clubs to show off, and to that end many scuole commissioned artists to decorate their home bases.
When the Scuola di San Rocco held an artists' competition in 1564, Renaissance master Jacopo Robusti (1518–94)—better known as Tintoretto because because his father was a tintore, a fabric dyer—pulled a fast one on his rivals. Instead of preparing a sketch for the judges like everyone else, he went ahead and finished a painting, secretly installing it in the ceiling of the Sala dell'Albero off the second-floor hall. The judges were suitably impressed, and Tintoretto got the job.
Over the next 23 years, the artist filled the scuola's two floors with more than 50 amazing works, the largest collection of his works anywhere. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt on the ground floor is superb, but his masterpiece hangs in that tiny Sala dell'Ablergo, a huge Crucifixion that ranks among the greatest and most moving works in the history of Venetian art.
Tintoretto was a devout, unworldly man who traveled beyond Venice only once. His epic canvases are filled with phantasmagoric light and mystical spirituality.
Begin upstairs in the side chamber called the Sala dell'Albergo, where the most notable of the enormous canvases is the moving La Crocifissione (The Crucifixion). In the center of the gilt ceiling of the Great Hall, also upstairs, is Il Serpente di Bronzo (The Bronze Snake).
Among the eight paintings downstairs, each depicting a scene from the New Testament, the most noteworthy is La Strage degli Innocenti (The Slaughter of the Innocents), so full of dramatic urgency and energy the figures seem almost to tumble from the frame.
Although dark by nature of the painter's brush, the works were restored in the 1970s. A useful guide to the paintings inside is posted on the wall just before the museum entrance. There are a few Tiepolos among the paintings, as well as a solitary work by Titian. (Note that the works on or near the staircase aren't by Tintoretto.)
The Accademia di San Rocco (tel. +39-041-962-999, www.musicinvenice.com) sponsors highly recommended chamber orchestra concerts in these evocative environs.
Campo San Rocco, San Polo
tel. +39-041-523-4864, www.scuolagrandesanrocco.it
Open daily
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This material was last updated December 2006. All information was accurate at the time.
Copyright © 1998-2008 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
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