Tintoretto's Time

© Association of Art Historians 2014 2

Tintoretto’s TimeKamini Vellodi

The practice of the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto raises a

challenge for art history’s conception of time. Resistant to temporal categorization,

Tintoretto’s work suggests a certain inadequacy in the conventional idea of time

as chronological and linear – or more specifi cally, of time as the form in which

artistic practices can be placed in the chronological and linear order of their actual

occurrence. This resistance is effected through the artist’s rejection of historically

established values that predate his practice (such as disegno and historia), and an embrace

of experimental procedures which, without precedent, and imperceptible in his own

time, break with the continuity of established values to signal future possibilities for

painting not grounded in painting’s past actualities.1

I call this chronological and linear form of time that Tintoretto challenges

historical, insofar as I understand it to be the temporal mode used to position artistic

practices, in relations of succession or simultaneity, within history – where history

may be understood as the cumulative fi eld of everything that has, and may be

represented as having, actually happened. I propose that Tintoretto’s time, the time of his

difference from established values of painting, is to be distinguished from historical time understood as the homogeneously chronological and linear form in which the

succession of artistic practices can be positioned in intelligible sequences.

This distinction is theoretically developed through an appeal to two contrasting

positions, both based on Kant’s theory of time. The fi rst, held by Erwin Panofsky,

supports the idea of historical time as a homogeneous and unchanging form

(of chronology) through which artistic practices can be assigned meaning and

represented. This position, which persists in art history, and perhaps most evidently

in the method of contextualism – the rendering intelligible of artistic practices

through their situation in the time in which they were actually made – remains

dominant in the Tintoretto scholarship. The second, expressed by Gilles Deleuze,

presents a conception of art’s time as the time of difference that exceeds (historical)

intelligibility.2

Through the concepts of the event, the untimely, and the eternal return,

Deleuzian philosophy supplies a means of attending to the experience of Tintoretto’s

practice as a shock that produces a new sense of time, as transhistorical. What is

‘shocked’ here is thought – the stupor of thought that does not really think, thought

as the form of representation grounded in presuppositions of its image (as ‘natural’,

‘common-sensical’, endowed with a ‘good nature’ and premised on the unity of a

thinking subject) that pre-exist its act. Art history might be said to practice such a

Detail from Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of The Slave, 1548 (plate 2).

DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12131Art History | ISSN 0141-6790XX | X | Month XXXX | pages XX-XX


Tintoretto’s Time

form of thought not only in its attention to the work of art through reference to what

is already and commonly known of it, but in its perpetuation of given art-historical

methods (where method is a presupposed way of thinking). Against such an image of

thought, Deleuze argues for the possibility of a thought without image, as an event of

creation with no presuppositions, an affi rmation of difference ‘in-itself’ free from the

representational structures – opinions, habits, universals, dogma – that bind it to the

same. Occasioned by the experience of something exceptional that forces its genesis,

thought no longer precedes its act as an image, but is born in the act of thinking.3

Tintoretto’s difference and its ongoing power to intitiate such an imageless

thought is explored with respect to his return in the practice of the seventeenth-

century Flemish painter Adam Elsheimer. Here, it is not the forms of Tintoretto’s

works that serve as a self-same model to be re-presented, but rather an originary

method of experimentation that exceeds the actual forms to which it gives rise,

recurring differently to give birth to new forms. In such a return Tintoretto’s work

acts as a reservoir for a future innovation, a thought of the past that makes the source

return anew.

In this way, this paper at once supplies a new reading of Tintoretto’s practice, and

a putting to work of the Deleuzian philosophy (that traverses this philosophy’s explicit

claims) for a critical attention to problems at the very core of art history’s practice.4

Not of His Time: Vasari’s TintorettoEven in his own time it was felt that Tintoretto was not of his time. Giorgio Vasari’s

verdict on the ‘eccentric painter’ with a manner ‘all of his own and contrary to the

use of other painters’ reveals an intimation of deviancy, one that has accompanied

the artist’s reception ever since. Whilst Vasari is compelled to include such a ‘painter

worthy to be praised’ within his history of the masters, he laments that the artist does

not follow ‘the beautiful manners of his predecessors’. Had he done so, ‘he would

have been one of the greatest painters that Venice has ever had’. Instead, he remains

an eccentric outsider, one whose strength is admired whilst remaining elusive.5

In his resistance to identifi cation with established norms of painting, Tintoretto’s

art challenges the idea of time upheld by the author of the fi rst history of art – that

is, the idea of a time shared with predecessors and contemporaries, a time in which

the continuity of the traditions to which the artist is heir and for which he ought to

be a transmitter unfolds. Vasari heralds a model of historical time that has arguably

dominated the discipline ever since – a chronological and linear time within which

the nexus of infl uences, lineages, and traditions conducts itself, a time within

which the works of the great masters are positioned and related but which, for him

Tintoretto evades.

Thus, of the artist’s ‘awesome and terrible’ Last Judgment (plate 1) Vasari’s attention

is brought to the boat of Charon, which is painted ‘in a manner so different from

that of others, that it is a thing beautiful and strange’. For Vasari, if only ‘this fantastic

invention has been executed with correct and well-ordered drawing’ – the technique

of disegno long upheld as the foundation of artistic practice – and if only ‘diligent

attention to the parts and to each particular detail’ in the manner of his predecessors,

‘it would have been a most stupendous picture’.6 As it is, it remains, whilst

‘astonishing’, as though painted ‘in jest’.

Vasari’s diagnosis does not strike us as unjustifi ed. For Tintoretto does not

conceal his jest with painting’s traditions, here rendering one of the most hallowed

historiae in its history, one whose desired (moralizing) effect depends primarily

upon the clearly expressed distinction between damnation and salvation, almost


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1 Jacopo Tintoretto, The Last Judgement, 1560–62. Oil on canvas 1450 × 590 cm. Venice: Madonna dell’Orto. Photo: © Scala.


Tintoretto’s Time

unintelligible.7 A chaotic outpouring of fi gures writhe, whirl and cascade in a space

lacking boundary and orientation. The customary demarcation between the heavenly

sphere and the underworld is obscured by a turbulence in which all, even the fi gures

of ascension, are subjected to the forces of judgment. Unyielding, surging motion,

accentuated by a violent play of tonal contrasts, captures the ‘confusion, turmoil and

terror’ of that terrible day, subverting the form of narrative and the formal clarity

such a regime demands – and which ‘correct and well-ordered drawing’ would

have provided. Only with some struggle can we discern the outlines of the ‘fantastic

invention’ of the aforementioned boat, a feature so central to the subject, but which

Tintoretto squashes into a dark corner almost as an afterthought. Here, then, is the Last Judgment not as a representation of a story that has already taken place but as an event in

its terrible processuality, in the ‘confusion’ before supreme judgment has exercised its

indomitable verdict.

Such jettisoning of the fi nal destination in favour of the capture of process may

be understood as a symptom of what Tintoretto does to the history of art he inherits.

That is, there is in this work the practice of painting as an experimental process

of thinking which displaces painting as an exercise of judgment – in the Kantian

sense of judgment as the application of concepts to the objects of experience –

upon the established forms (in this case, the form of the historia) it receives from its

past.8 Tintoretto’s painting is an experimentation that seems to temporarily forget

its legacy, jettisoning judgment for the disjunctive blindness of the artistic act that

thinks anew. Indeed, Tintoretto’s subversion of judgment is something with which

Vasari regretfully concurs – insofar as for him disegno (which Tintoretto neglects) is

nothing less than an act of judgment, the upholding of which binds the artist to the

continuous history of which he is part.9 In his experimental deviancy, Tintoretto

frees himself from the bondage to the past, and disrupts the continuity that binds

him to that past moment. Defying their judicious placement by an observer within

a history understood as a representation of actual events in linear and chronological

time, his works demand a new concept of time.

And indeed, it appears that, with respect to the question of Tintoretto’s time, art

history is yet to arrive at a consensus. He has been understood as both an end – the end

of the ‘Golden age of Venetian painting’, the end of the Renaissance, and even the end of

painting altogether – and a beginning – the dawn of a new age, ‘the representation of a

new generation’, the ‘birth of later sixteenth-century art’ – at once situated in times other

than his own, and placed squarely within the sixteenth century. Adding to this confusion

is the identifi cation of his practice variously, and sometimes simultaneously, with the

classifi cations (both periodic and stylistic) of the gothic, the Renaissance, the Baroque,

mannerism and the modern.10 Such resistance to chronological placement and to the

continuity of traditions not only invites a model of time other than the chronological and

linear model of historical time that art history customarily, for the sake of constructing a

continuous narrative of historical events, puts to work. It invites too consideration of how

to think the unintelligible as such. The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze attends to both these

demands. Whilst Deleuze’s work has received much attention within the theoretically

inclusive fi eld of ‘visual cultures’, and most especially in writing on twentieth-century art,

the stakes of his philosophy for the thought of pre-twentieth-century art, or conceptual

questions in art-historical ‘methodology’, such as the problem of time, have been little

explored.11 Tintoretto’s subversion of the continuous, linear and chronological time of

history in which thought as judgment on the past conducts itself powerfully embodies

the conviction driving the Deleuzian philosophy in thought as an event of creation that

exposes time in its ‘pure’ state, as the form of difference.


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Panofsky on Historical TimeAs a prelude to this Deleuzian elucidation, I would like to turn briefl y to remarks

made by Erwin Panofsky in a short paper titled ‘Refl ections on Historical time’

(1927).12 This preliminary account is made for two reasons – fi rstly, because Panofsky

presents a conception of historical time that, I would argue, continues to be implicitly

at work within art-historical practice – and therefore any refl ection on art history’s

conception of time needs to consider the claims raised by this essay. Secondly,

Panofsky’s conception of historical time reveals an investment in Kant that in turn

will allow us to better grasp Deleuze’s alternative conception of time – which, whilst

also premised on a reading of Kant, diverges strongly from Panofsky’s conclusions,

and in so doing offers us a means of moving beyond notions of chronology to which

Panofsky, and Panofsky’s legacy in art history, remain indebted.

Panofsky’s conception of historical time is consistent with the underlying

motivation of his project: to render the study of art history ‘scientifi c’. This would

be achieved, he believes, by instilling and conducting art-historical inquiry from an

‘Archimedean point’ given prior to experience.13 In this upholding of a ‘framework

of knowledge’ ‘in the mind’ prior to the experience of objects, we see Panofsky’s debt

to Kant. This debt is given emphasis in Panofsky’s understanding of time as an a priori condition of experience.14 In response to the diffi culty of producing a chronology – and

yet motivated by the desire to produce one nevertheless – for the four master builders

of the cathedral at Reims, due to the presence of disparate styles within the same period

of time, Panofsky observes that historical time, as a construct of the historian, is to be

distinguished from natural (astronomical) time – which is evident, observable time.

That is, whilst the styles are simultaneous according to the measure of natural time,

they are nevertheless different – and it is the historian’s construct of historical time

which may account for this difference of ‘cultural’ times within the same natural time.

Applying Kant’s understanding of time and space as the universal, a priori (that

is, independent of experience) conditions under which objects of experience can

be given to the thinking subject in their phenomenal constitution as appearances,

Panofsky conceives of historical time as an a priori ‘frame of reference’ through which,

together with the historical space that defi nitively accompanies it (a space which,

also being a frame of reference, is irreducible to the question of geography), artistic

practices, as ‘network of phenomena’ can be rendered intelligible and ‘judged’, in the

Kantian sense.15 The Kantian idea of time as the formal and unchanging condition of

our experience is retained; history is understood to unfurl its sequence of meaningful

events within a constant and unchanging form – or rather forms, since there are as

many historical times as there are selected systems of reference.16

Thus, ‘Venetian painting of the sixteenth century’ might function as one such

frame of reference, whereby a particular segment of historical space (Venice) is

conjoined with a particular span of historical time (the sixteenth century) in order to

permit the meaning of the various objects within this frame – including the works of

Tintoretto – to be determined.

However, in this way, Panofsky concedes, art history ends up with an ‘endless

multiplicity’ of heterogeneous frames of intelligibility for its multiplicity of objects.

Consequently, in order to attain ‘unity of meaning’ within the ‘historical whole’ –

in order for example, for us to grasp the Tintoretto of sixteenth-century Venice

in relation to a Giotto or a Delacroix – these ‘smaller frames of reference’ must be

‘re-anchored’ into the ‘larger frame of reference’ supplied by ‘natural’ time and space.

Natural time and space provides ‘the constants to which countless variables can and

must be related again and again’. For Panofsky, it is precisely this temporal duality that:


Tintoretto’s Time

. . . determines the essence of a historical phenomenon: that it represents, on

the one hand, an object of knowledge that transcends the scope of natural

space and time but is, on the other hand, fi xed in a very particular moment in

natural time and in a very particular place in natural space.17

Here, ‘natural time and space’ does not therefore refer to the cyclical time of

astronomical phenomena, but rather to the linear chronological time that can be

called a ‘stretch’. In other words, historical time(s) are ‘sections’ of this continuous,

linear, chronological form of time.

Panofsky presents us with a Kantian idea of historical time as an unchanging

form, a condition of possibility within which the multiplicity of its objects of

experience (works of art) may be related within intelligible frameworks, and

judged. And art history – a discourse that, whether it explicitly declares it or not,

retains the Panofskian preoccupation with the intelligibility of its objects – upholds

this idea of historical time in which intelligible ‘frameworks’ are cut out of the

grand sweep of natural time. In the method of contextualization, an approach

reinforced in recent times by Michael Baxandall’s highly infl uential concept of

the ‘period eye’ – which advocates the reconstruction by the art historian of the

‘mental and visual equipment’ that informed the production of a work in its time,

in order to attribute historical sense to the work – we are presented with a potent

expression of this fi delity.18 Context operates here as an a priori spatio-temporal

construct of the historian, retrospectively superimposed onto historical material

in order to provide a framework of intelligibility. But insofar as contextualism

defi nitively undermines the question of an artist’s difference from his historical

present, by grounding that difference in the circumstances from which it deviates,

this approach needs to be reconsidered when faced by the question of artistic

experimentation and innovation that continues to be experienced long after the

historical time of context has passed.19

Contextualization and Historical Time: Ridolfi ’s MottoDespite the intimations of his ‘slipperiness’, Tintoretto has not been exempt from

this predilection to ‘securely moor’ the work of art within its historical context.20

Indeed, in his case, art history provides us with a very precise example: its

reiteration of a ‘motto’, attributed to the artist by his fi rst biographer, Carlo Ridolfi ,

which situates Tintoretto with respect to the two great painting traditions of his

time – the Florentine tradition of disegno as exemplifi ed by Michelangelo, and the

Venetian tradition of colorito as embodied by Titian.21 In his 1642 Life of Tintoretto, Ridolfi tells us that it was as a response to having been cast out of Titian’s studio that

the young Tintoretto realized he could ‘become a painter by studying the canvases

of Titian and the reliefs of Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was recognized as the

father of design’. And ‘thus with the guidance of these two divine lights who have

made painting and sculpture so illustrious in modern times, he started out toward

his longed-for goal….[and] so as not to stray from his proposed aim he inscribed on

the walls of one of his rooms the following work rule: Michelangelo’s design and

Titian’s color.’22

In situating the artist with respect to the two dominant traditions of painting

in his time, Ridolfi makes a case for Tintoretto’s currency. Posited as an artist whose

‘desired goal’ is inherited, and insofar as the value of this heritage has already been

ascertained, Tintoretto is presented as an artist to be esteemed, relevant to painting’s

current value and to its ongoing progress, a progress that is based on what is already


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established. Tintoretto is judged in accordance with a synthesis of established values.

But in placing Tintoretto within the historical time of tradition’s continuity, Ridolfi

downplays the artist’s difference, his status as an outsider who – as Vasari, for

whom Tintoretto in fact neglected the ‘correct and well-ordered drawing’ practised by

Michelangelo, had recognized - did not learn in the customary manner, an artist who,

unbound from the conventions of a studio practice, was free to affi rm his difference.

Instead, the motto redeems a highly divisive artist within what is already deemed

‘illustrious’, grounding his difference within established values. Indeed, the

formulation of an ideal synthesis of Titian’s colorito and Michelangelo’s disegno long

predated its application to Tintoretto’s practice. We fi rst encounter it in the 1548

dialogues of the Venetian writer Paolo Pino, who was responding to a debate, with

a history that has nothing to do directly with Tintoretto’s works, concerning the

relative worth of Florentine and Venetian painting.23 This question of timing strongly

indicates that Ridolfi was making an appeal to already validated discursive terms to

glorify an artist he considered worthy of accolade – rather than necessarily observing

those traits at work in Tintoretto’s paintings.24

Resistance to Contextualization: The Miracle of the SlaveRidolfi ’s motto remains a stubbornly insistent feature of Tintoretto scholarship,

consolidating the contextualization that did not even (necessarily) begin with the

experience of Tintoretto’s works.25 The analysis of The Miracle of the Slave (plate 2), a work

contentious in its own time and which was even returned to the artist as ‘unsuitable’,

is, in this regard, particularly revealing.26 When scholars accredit The Miracle’s ‘radical

nature’ to one of its most orthodox fi gures – the foreshortened nude fi gure of the

slave in the foreground – a fi gure that had been praised by Tintoretto’s contemporary

Pietro Aretino for its mastery of (Michelangelesque) disegno, that is, for its upholding

of a current, established value of painting, we see how even the ‘radical’ is subjected

to the contextualizing terms of intelligibility.27

But The Miracle is also marked by a feature that challenges Tintoretto’s supposed

allegiance to either of his great contemporaries – the violently foreshortened

aerial fi gure of Saint Mark – a feature for which Aretino (and none of Tintoretto’s

contemporaries) does not, and perhaps cannot, account. This strange fi gure,

unprecedented in painting, undermines the historia to which it ostensibly plays

a defi nitive role.28 The work depicts the moment of Saint Mark’s miraculous

intervention in the scene of a slave’s torture. As with The Last Judgment, Tintoretto does

not narrate the story as something that has already happened, but rather presents the

event in its violent eruption. And it is this experience of painting as an arrest of time’s

narratival passage that imparts to the work its startling power.

Hurtling through the sky at extreme speed, the Saint explodes into the scene. The

torturer holds up his broken tools, astonished. Along with the throng of onlookers,

who crowd in upon the scene with visceral astonishment, he is apparently blind

to the agent of this destruction. And why should he not be? For Tintoretto does

everything he can to make Saint Mark unintelligible: contorting and compressing

his fi gure, casting his face into shadow, projecting him within a space that confl icts

abruptly with the lateral planarity of the picture plane to elicit a near-collision with

the torturer. Consider, by way of contrast, Michelangelo’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (plate 3) in the Paolini Chapel of the Vatican, the work said to be the ‘truly relevant

comparison [with Tintoretto’s] for this physical dialogue of salvation’.29 Here the

fi gure of Christ, whilst indeed highly foreshortened, is nevertheless luminous in its

clarity. Frontally positioned, Christ directly faces us, permitting registration of his


Tintoretto’s Time

divine identity and of his pivotal role in the narrative. Despite his foreshortening,

Christ occupies the same plane as the other fi gurative compositional elements,

giving rise to the sense of homogeneity and harmony that imparts to the work its

classical poise and command. But Tintoretto’s Saint Mark violently demarcates his

own space, apparently with no desire to relate to others, not even to the slave he is

saving. The ‘direct intimacy’ that the historia demands between slave and his divine

rescuer is denied. Tintoretto’s Saint Mark overpowers the signifi cation of the story

with its dramatic effect, casting the work adrift from the ‘historical mooring’ that

the conventions of the historia – clarity, propriety, decorum and above all ‘correct and

well-ordered drawing’ – install.30

Arguably one of the (unacknowledgable) ‘causes’ of the criticism of the work in

its own time, it is this fi gure – more than the well-drawn fi gure of the foreshortened

Slave – that continues to seize us when the contextual problems of historia, disegno and

colorito have long faded as relevant and urgent. In this way, we grasp Tintoretto’s time not

merely as the time of his historical actuality but as the time of an experimentation

marked by the ongoing experience of difference that his work elicits.

To say that one is not of one’s time does not by that token indicate that one is

of another time.31 Tintoretto does not displace one identifi cation for an alternative

identifi cation. Rather there is in his difference an excess to dating as such, and to

the (Panofskian) deduction of intelligibility within historical time which dating

inscribes. The fi gure of Saint Mark was different in its own time, and it remains different

2 Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of The Slave, 1548. Oil on canvas, 420 × 540 cm. Venice: Galleria dell’Academia. Photo: © www.beniculturali.it


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today. Before it, we realise that we are no longer in the sixteenth century. But we are

aware too that we are neither in the seventeenth nor the twentieth. The fi gure marks

the event of painting that eternally escapes the clutches of historical time – earlier

than the present, and later than the past that has happened, forever between the

discrete times of the date.

Attending to this escape is not straightforward . Even the compelling idea,

presented to us in different ways by Aby Warburg and Henri Focillon, and given fresh

impetus in recent times by Georges Didi-Huberman, that the artwork is a complex

of survivals and anticipations, of ‘slow-moving and belated forms existing alongside

bold and rapid forms’, remains bound to the form of chronology upon which the

work of art’s anachronic deformations and reversals are in fact premised.32 The idea

of anachronism does not in itself deliver us from the form of chronological and linear

time that it sets out to subvert. What is required is a critique of this very form. At this

point, I return to Deleuze.

3 Michelangelo Buonarrotti, The Conversion of Saint Paul, 1542–45. Fresco, 625 × 661 cm. Rome: Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace. Photo: © Scala.


Tintoretto’s Time

Deleuze: The Transhistorical Event, and the Historical State of AffairsLet me begin with a distinction Deleuze makes between the event and the ‘state of

affairs’. The time of the one is irreducible to the time of the other. A state of affairs is

historical, and designates what is actually the case at any particular historical time, or

to put it another way, that which is given to lived experience under the conditions

of a historical present – a defi nition Panofsky himself affi rms and supports.33

A historical context is a state of affairs. The event, in contrast, is the ‘transhistorical’

component of everything that happens – it ‘eludes its own actualization’ as history,

bearing within itself a shadowy, ‘virtual’ element that is continually subtracted from

or added to its place in history.34

We are thus supplied with a distinction between history as the succession of lived

states of affairs in chronological time (in other words, events that are over, actualized

and have become established) and the event, whose becoming is never over, and that

thus can begin again, or recur, when (historical) time has passed. Whereas actual

states of affairs pass, and can be represented as belonging to a past that once was, the

event functions eternally as a reservoir of future potential.

This distinction may be clarifi ed through a return to The Miracle of the Slave. The

historian can reintegrate the strange fi gure of Saint Mark within the historical state

of affairs, by explaining its narratival role in the inherited and established form of

the historia or discussing how Tintoretto manifests a Michelangesque treatment of

disegno. But in its experimentation, the fi gure of Saint Mark evades this imposition of

intelligibility, announcing the future now, and collapsing the form of time according

to which the future is always ‘ahead’ of the present.

In this sense, Eric Newton’s remarks that ‘the key to [Tintoretto’s] art is not to be

found in his motto, which looks back into the past, but in his attention to problems

that belonged to the future, problems that neither Michelangelo nor Titian could have

understood’, strikes us as apt.35 We fi nd such preoccupation with ‘futural’ problems

manifested by Tintoretto’s invention of a new method of composition, a method ‘too

strange and too individual for any biographer to have invented’.36

Futural Experimentation: Tintoretto’s Stage-MethodTintoretto trained himself, Ridolfi tells us:

. . . by concocting in wax and clay small fi gures which he dressed in scraps

of cloth . . . . He also placed some of the fi gures in little houses and in

perspective scenes made of wood and cardboard, and by means of little lamps

he contrived for the windows he introduced therein lights and shadows. He

also hung some models by threads to the roof beams to study the appearance

they made when seen from below, and to get the foreshortenings of fi gures

for ceilings, creating by such methods bizarre effects.37

This unprecedented ‘stage-method’ accounts for the panoply of unorthodox

effects we encounter in Tintoretto’s works: from the aerial fi gures of messengers

and celestial bodies such as Saint Mark catapulting, contorted, through charged

skies, to the ghostly crowds that constitute the strange witnesses of the painting’s

‘stories’; from the extremized diagonal spaces in which the actions are set, to the

exaggerated dimensions, proportions and contrasts of their compositional elements.

Wax maquettes give rise to super-pliable, inhuman poses of fi gures, dominated by

the forces of the actions they bear. The ‘little houses’, adjustable and viewable from

multiple points of view, permit a new artifi cial architectonic of confl icting planes,


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and the heightened, irrational illumination with which they are accompanied.

Defying established traditions of compositional method – including the preparation

of a transferrable design, the application of ‘correct and well-ordered drawing’,

and the ‘direct’ composition of forms in the process of painting on the support –

Tintoretto’s ‘stage-method’, unsurprisingly, goes unmentioned in the appraisals by

his contemporaries.

It is, again unsurprisingly, an aspect of his practice of which contextualizing art

history has found it diffi cult to speak. This is not to say that it has been overlooked –

as Marcia B. Hall states, it is in fact ‘well known’ within the scholarship.38 Rather,

methodological fi delity to contextualism means that the radical nature of such

an extreme method is made intelligible through an appeal to the historical state

of affairs.39 But whilst the motto reveals to us a Tintoretto duly answering to the

requirements of his living present, producing historiae that ostensibly satisfy the

demands of the state of affairs under which he was living and producing, the stage-

method designates the time of a difference that traverses the lived necessities of

answering to these demands.

The Miracle of the Slave powerfully expresses this tension between two registers

of time – with its apparent accession to the demands of the historia in question

accompanied by the irreverent undoing of these demands. The elements of the work

that ‘communicate’ the historia – the fi gure of the slave that Aretino had praised, the

fi gure of the torturer, ready to wield his instruments, and the fi gures of the onlooking

crowd, tense with anticipation – constitute its established elements, insofar as they

serve the historia (a historically established form of painting). In contrast, the fi gure

of Saint Mark, in undermining this historically determined narratival function, and

expressing the innovation of the stage-method, acts as the element of the new that

imparts to the work its ongoing radicalism and provocation. As that which remains unrecognizable and unintelligible, a problem not ‘solved’ by the particular and actual

solutions that answer to it, the difference or newness of Tintoretto’s practice is here

experienced as a shock that produces a new sense of time as transhistorical.

Difference, or the new, Deleuze tells us, ‘with its power of beginning and

beginning again, remains forever new, just as the established was always established

from the outset’. The new ‘calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of

recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model’.40 Such

a position is antipodal to Panofsky’s view that an innovation ‘necessarily presupposes

that which is established (whether we call it a tradition, a convention, a style, or a

mode of thought) as a constant in relation to which the innovation is a variable’.41

But Tintoretto’s stage-method is not only new in relation to the established forms

that it subverts (although it is this as well). It remains new even after its chronological

time has passed. The expression of a difference that pre-empts the deviation from

what it effectively negates, it was never simply a reaction against Michelangelo or

Titian as an invention grounded on (in order to challenge) what they have already

done (and here, the fact of the artist’s self-education is not unimportant). Rather, the

method functions as an ‘active’ rather than ‘reactive’ differentiation, an assertion

of difference from which any opposition is effectively produced (and returned into

the narration of history as a succession of events in their actualized forms as states of

affairs) and whose difference persists for a future moment yet to arrive. 42

Deleuze and Panofsky: Two Readings of Kantian TimeA return to Kant – who, not least through Panofsky’s efforts, has functioned as one

of art history’s immanent scaffolds – will help us to clarify the distinction between


Tintoretto’s Time

the two ideas of time to which we have been attending: historical time conceived

as a homogenous, linear, chronological ‘stretch’ (implicit in Vasari, explicated by

Panofsky and perpetuated by contextualist art history), and artistic time as a shock

effected in the experience of art’s ongoing difference that collapses the continuity of

the stretch.43

Deleuze’s philosophy involves an unusual investment of Kant – for him,

‘the philosopher who truly introduces time into thought’.44 Testifying to their

post-Kantianism, both Deleuze and Panofsky intimate the inseparability of the

problem of time from the problem of thought. For Panofsky, time is the form

through which the subject represents and judges the objects of his experience –

through an act of synthesis. For Deleuze, time is the form that splits the thinking

subject in the act of an exceptional experience (an experience for which no a priori concept can be given), rendering impossible representation and judgment. For

Panofsky, historical time is the form under which a self-same, rational subject

represents to himself the historical objects of his study. But for Deleuze, time

is the ‘pure form of difference’ that endangers the very possibility of this act

of representation premised on the subject’s coherency. Deleuze admits that his

aim is to reveal ‘a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive

moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism’.45

This moment – where Kant ‘introduces a kind of . . . crack’ in the subject – is, to

be sure, not one that Panofsky recognizes.

But although Deleuze’s reading of Kantian time is, as he admits, hardly a faithful

rendering, neither is Panofsky’s. For whilst Panofsky posits time as the form of

determination of objects, for Kant, time is not a determination of ‘outer appearances’.46

For Kant, time belongs neither to a shape nor a position. Rather, time concerns the

internal process of representation within the subject.47 Whereas for Panofsky, ‘time

is a function of space’, and both (historical) space and time equally concern the

intuition of (historical) objects, Kant, crucially, distinguishes time as the ‘the form

of inner sense, i.e. of the intuition of our self and our inner state’, ‘the immediate

condition of internally intuiting ourselves’, from space as the condition of our (outer)

intuitions of an object.48 That is, although for Kant both time and space are the

conditions of our knowledge of the objects of experience, time alone concerns how

the subject relates to itself in this process of representation.

Panofsky’s confl ation of time and space as ‘equal’ determinants of the object

reveals the predilections of the historian wanting to attain meaning for, pass

judgment upon and come to know the object before him – something that, of course,

is not Kant’s primary concern.49 Panofsky is at once interested in the conditions of

this knowledge and in the object that can be known. Thus, what for Kant is internal to

the subject becomes for the historian a tool for ‘objectivity’, a tool for, and the means

by which, a set of objects may be attended to in a ‘scientifi c’ manner.

Deleuze, on the other hand, affi rms Kant’s crucial distinction between time as the

form of inner sense and space as the form of outer sense. And he intuits something

yet more crucial about the Kantian system – time’s impact on the very coherency of

the thinking subject.

For Kant, our representation of the appearances of objects given in time

demands an act of ‘synthesis’ (the integration of the multiplicity of appearances

into unities) in the subject.50 There is a synthesis between sensible appearances

and concepts provided by the understanding. For this synthesis, there must be a

transcendental ‘I think’, characterized by its ability to synthesize, that accompanies

‘all my representations of appearances’.51 But there is a paradox here – upon whose


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exposure Deleuze will erect his own theory of time. For if inner sense (time) is the

form of all appearance, then even our existent, phenomenal selves are presented to

the ‘I think’ only as we appear to ourselves.52 In this way, time splits the subject’s

phenomenal existence (or my ‘being’) from its thought. My experience of myself

and my thought about that experience cannot collide – they are separated by

time. It is this separation of the self from the I, this splitting of the subject into an

existent part and a thinking part that are never ‘at one’ – that Deleuze refers to as

‘the paradox of inner sense’.53 Kant’s paradox, Deleuze claims, is that we do not

experience ourselves to be identical with our thought. And it is time that is the

‘agent’ of this disidentifi cation.54

In ‘the supreme effort to save the world of representation’, Kant covers over

this fracture.55 But for Deleuze it is precisely in its ‘schizophrenic’ opening

onto difference – the difference between thought and being – that thought

attains ‘its highest power’, as creative.56 Creative thought is thought which is not

‘innate’ (a form given in advance of its activity to a coherent subject), but rather

a thought engendered in its genesis at the site of an originary ‘threshold’. Such

thought is born not as the habitual reproduction of a given image under which it

recognizes itself, but rather out of the pure necessity of its production. In its capture

of ‘difference in its differing’, the work of art not only expresses such a genesis

and thinks, but in its ‘preservation’ of this difference, as form, it forces those who

encounter it to begin thinking. Deleuze is critical of philosophy – including

Kant’s – that poses as ‘critical’ whilst not critiquing the very form of thought itself.

Kant assumes an image of thought as rational, conscious, judgmental. Panofsky

also makes assumptions of this kind. But ‘the highest thought is one that does not

know in advance what form it will take. Such thought is forced by the exceptional

experience which the work of art can supply – and for which pre-given ideas or

concepts are inadequate. It is the ‘extra-ordinary’ experience of difference ‘in-

itself’ that exposes time ‘in its pure state’, a shock of time purifi ed of its ‘empirical’

content – that is, the relations of succession or simultaneity that characterize

objects in time.

Here, Deleuze turns to Nietzsche’s famously obscure doctrine of the eternal return,

which for Deleuze continues the schizophrenic moment within Kantianism to give

expression to its most profound implications.57 The eternal return is not, Deleuze

contends, the thought that the same returns. Rather, it is the return of ‘the different,

the dissimilar, the extreme, the excessive’.58 It is a synthesis of difference (or ‘forces’),

that makes difference happen again – or ‘affi rms’ it. Against the model of a linear time,

in which things happen ‘once and for all’, and within which the past is something that

once was, and to which one must reconcile oneself with (a burdening of thought with

its ‘history’ that Nietzsche abhors), the eternal return uncovers ‘the superior form of

everything that is’, by carrying out a practical selection among differences according to

their capacity to produce, thus giving rise to a ‘deranged circle of time’.59 This is why

Deleuze calls the eternal return the synthesis of the future – for only that returns which

is productive. To this recurring element Nietzsche gives the name ‘untimely’ – that

which is not subject to time’s passage, but which conquers time, ‘acting against its own

time and thereby upon its time for the benefi t of a time to come’.60

It is the work of art – understood not as a form that can be represented, refl ected

upon and judged, but rather as a constructive process of material experimentation

that can enact this practical affi rmation of difference. Tintoretto gives expression to

this possibility.


Tintoretto’s Time

The Time of Difference and Return: Tintoretto-ElsheimerTintoretto’s time designates the time of his ongoing difference and its untimely return, outside the continuity of historical time. Let us, in conclusion, consider an

instance of this return in the work of the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Adam

Elsheimer.61

Elsheimer’s debt to Tintoretto’s work has often been noted.62 Indeed, the

Flemish painter’s works abound in Tintorettesque motifs, legitimizing the art-

historical discussion of the latter’s ‘infl uence’. The fi gures of Saint John the Baptist

and Christ in Elsheimer’s The Baptism of Christ (plate 4) are, for example, indubitably

borrowed from Tintoretto’s ‘original’ (plate 5). But accompanying this formal

tracery of a motif, this repetition of the same that takes place within the historical

time of chronology within which established values develop in continuous

sequences, a time in which Elsheimer presents himself as Tintoretto’s follower,

is a more profound return – that of the strange, ghostly background fi gures of

4 Adam Elsheimer, The Baptism of Christ, 1599. Oil on copper, 28.1 × 21 cm. London: National Gallery. Photo: © The National Gallery.


Kamini Vellodi

Tintoretto’s Baptism in Elsheimer’s ethereal landscape, that collapses the span of

historical time separating these two practices with the collision of the experiment.

In Elsheimer’s eccentric, silvery foliage, we encounter a return without

resemblance and outside the form of the copy; a return as the affi rmation of

Tintoretto’s difference, and of its experimental impulse. In contrast to the well-

defi ned foreground fi gures of his Baptism, Tintoretto’s ghostly fi gures serve no

immediate function with respect to the inherited, established form of Elsheimer’s

historia. Rather, in their material frisson – which, like the fi gure of Saint Mark in The Miracle of the Slave, resists any signifying or communicative function – these fi gures,

clustering in obscure, spectral masses, impart a force and dynamism to the scene that

subverts the historia’s formal register and narratival intent.

It is these strange fi gures that return, re-formed, in Elsheimer’s supra-

natural landscape – the element that constitutes, in turn, the most experimental

component of his work (and one which, furthermore, projects the disjunction from

the narrative of the Baptism initiated by Tintoretto even further). In this curious

affi rmation of deviancy, Tintoretto’s innovations are revealed to challenge not

5 Jacopo Tintoretto, The Baptism of Christ, 1579–80. Oil on canvas, 538 × 465 cm. Venice: Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Photo: © Scuola di San Rocco.


Tintoretto’s Time

only the conventions of his own historical time, but the conventions of another

(Elsheimer’s).

Whereas the Baptism motif looks backwards to an inherited tradition of the

pictorial depiction of the Baptism, and forwards to an anticipated development of this

motif by a succession of Tintoretto’s ‘followers’, the ghostly staged fi gures and their

return in Elsheimer’s landscape slice through chronological and linear sense with the

eternally prospective gaze of the experiment.

What returns here are not the ghostly fi gures ‘in-themselves’. Rather, it is

the experimental source – the stage-method of which they are expressions –

that we encounter again. And perhaps it is no surprise to learn that Elsheimer

too practised the stage-method, that, ‘like Tintoretto before and Poussin after

him, [Elsheimer] had wax fi gures in his studio which he could move about

like puppets on a stage.’63 In repeating Tintoretto’s method, Elsheimer affi rms

the genetic principle of Tintoretto’s works, the source of an active difference

that exceeds the forms of his actual paintings. It is this excessive element of

Tintoretto’s practice that serves as the virtual reservoir for Elsheimer’s ‘new’

additions to the composition of The Baptism – his eccentric, artifi cial landscape

(this is not a landscape observed from nature). In Elsheimer’s landscape, we

experience the excessive sense of Tintoretto’s stage-method – its constructive

power to generate future forms beyond the actual forms to which it gives rise in

its own historical time.

Insofar as its return gives rise to a new form of painting, namely ‘a new

approach to the depiction of nature, by means of which Elsheimer effected a

lasting change in the vision of landscape in the seventeenth century’, Elsheimer’s

‘incorporation’ of the stage-method acts as an actualization that makes something new of the repetition of difference. Rather than returning it, as does Elsheimer’s repetition

of the Baptism motif, to painting’s established past (the form of the historia), the

return of Tintoretto’s stage-method propels painting towards a future it could

not have predicted in advance, towards a destiny that transcends the lineage of

successions.64

In Tintoretto’s return in Elsheimer, we fi nd that it is not an allegiance

to ‘established’ elements that changes the course of history, but rather the

extraction and affi rmation of the most productive, untimely and current reaches

of a dynamic past.

anthropology’, Oxford Art Journal, 25: 1. 2002, 59. Didi-Huberman

assumes this task through a theorization of anachronism, developed

via a Benjaminian reading of Warburg’s notion of Nachleben, which

is used as a challenge both to art history’s ‘euchronism’ – the

perspective of an artist and his time, that uses the source of the

period to understand a pictorial activity according to the visual

categories of its day – and to the epistemological and signifying

image of thought that accompanies it. Euchronistic consonance is,

he claims, fl awed, for ‘there is no temporal concordance’; rather, the

image is ‘an extraordinary montage of heterogeneous times forming

anachronisms’. ‘Before the image before time: The sovereignty

of anachronism’, in Robert Zijnenberg and Claire Farago, eds, Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and Out of History, Minneapolis, MN

and London, 2005, 35–8.

3 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London, New York, 2003, 130–1.

4 Whilst the engagement with art is a constant feature of the

Deleuzian philosophy, nowhere is there an explicit application of

his theory of time to the thought of art history. In Francis Bacon, Logic of Sensation, London, New York, 1981, there is a genealogical reading

of the history of painting that recovers instances of ‘modernity’ in

Notes1 By actuality I mean a reality given to perception. It is contrasted –

by Gilles Deleuze, after Henri Bergson – with the virtual, a reality

that is not actual. ‘Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual

surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images.’ Deleuze, ‘The Actual

and the Virtual’, in Dialogues, London, 2002, 148, 208. See also What is Philosophy?, London and New York, 1997, 156– 9. I am not making the

claim that Tintoretto is the only artist that can function in this way –

only that his practice occasions the debate with which I am engaging.

2 In this sense I see my work as a contribution to the problematic

raised and attended to by Georges Didi-Huberman – of

confronting the Panofskian image of thought perpetuated by art

history – in particular, its epistemological and semiotic closure,

and its complicity with a model of time premised on linear and

chronological sense. I concur with Didi-Huberman’s remark that

‘the most urgent task (as untimely and outdated today as it was in

Warburg’s epoch)… is for art history to establish its own theory

of “evolution”, its own theory of time . . . [beyond] habitual

chronologies, eternal “infl uences”, old Vasarian or neo-Vasarian

family myths.’ ‘The surviving image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian


Kamini Vellodi

the past through a focus on Bacon’s ‘recapitulation’ of the history

of painting, but this reading does not explicitly put to work the

theory of time which he develops in other texts (such as Difference and Repetition).

5 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. G. De Vere, VIII, London and New York, 1914, 101–6, quoted

in Anna Laura Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed: Documentary Survey of Critical Reactions from the 16th to the 20th Century, Ravenna, 1983, 22–3. Tintoretto’s

deviation from the norms of painting in his time is noted by several

contemporary fi gures other than Vasari, including the writers Pietro

Aretino, Francesco Sansovino and Andrea Calmo. See Lepschy,

Tintoretto Observed, 16–20.

6 Lepschy Tintoretto Observed, 23. In Tintoretto’s time, disegno was one of the

most important values of the Italian visual arts, referring both to the

manual activity of drawing through line as well as the idea of design

as the mental conception of the work. For Vasari, it was the ‘parent’

of the three arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. On Technique, New York, 1960, 205.

7 The form of painting as historical narrative, defi ned by Albert as

the ‘highest work of painting’ – a form of which Tintoretto was,

moreover, considered to be a specialist. On Tintoretto as ‘the Venetian

specialist in sacred narratives’ see Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, New Haven, 2011, 173.

8 Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge, 1998, A68/B93. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that art thinks as much as

philosophy or science – for ‘what defi nes thought in its three great

forms – art, science and philosophy – is always confronting chaos’

and making it ‘consistent’. What is Philosophy?, 197. Art thinks through

sensations. It is in the construction of (new) sensations from the

putting into relation of ‘matter-forces’ (the asignifying traits of its

material) – rather than the projection of pre-existing structures

– that it thinks. Drawing on the work of Hubert Damisch,

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between painting that uses a priori mechanisms such as linear perspective to project sensations

onto its material, and painting that allows the ascension of its

differentiated ground (matter) into sensation. In the former case,

the material includes within itself mechanisms as a result of which

the projected sensations are realized ‘according to a depth’ and

art retains a ‘semblance of transcendence’, where transcendental

refers to that which pre-exists the process of painting. In the

latter case, the material passes into sensation giving it ‘a thickness

independent of any perspective or depth’, as we fi nd in the work of

Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, and Francis Bacon. Here art is ‘aesthetic

composition’, ‘the work of sensation’. Hanneke Grootenboer

has recently taken up this problematic of painting as thought,

or what she calls ‘pensive’. See Hanneke Grootenboer, ‘The

pensive image’, Oxford Art Journal, 34: 1, 2011. Here she understands

Deleuze and Guattari to locate painting’s thought within its

‘underneath’, understanding this underneath to be exposed in

modern (including ‘abstract’) painters, rather than in the early

modern painters, who conceal their ‘underneath’. However,

this fails to rigorously uphold Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction

between transcendental depth and immanent thickness – which is

not simply a question of surface and illusory depth, but rather of

painting’s relation of process to code or law. Painting that utilizes

pre-given codes (under the name of ‘technique’ or ‘mechanism’:

whether this is perspective or the formal language of colour

symbolism in the manner of Wassily Kandinsky) subjects itself to

an image of thought given in advance, and remains transcendental.

Thus even optically ‘fl at’ painting can be transcendental. (Logic of Sensation, London and New York, 2003, 109.) Painting thinks when

it abandons such codes for a direct, experimental and ‘accidental’

engagement with its material.

9 Disegno, ‘having its origin in the intellect, draws out from many single

things a general judgment, it is like a form or idea of all the objects in

nature’. On Technique, 205.

10 Bernard Berenson writes that ‘with Tintoretto ends the universal

interest the Venetian school arouses’. The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, London, 1897, 60; The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, London, 1959, 27.

Peter Humfrey states that Venetian art goes into ‘a rapid decline after

1590’ (the death of Tintoretto). Painting in Renaissance Venice, New Haven

and London, 1995, 266. Ilchman and Echols describe Tintoretto as ‘the

last survivor of what was already coming to be recognized as a golden

age of Venetian painting’. Rivals in Renaissance Venice, Boston, MA, 2009,

227. For Vasari, Tintoretto ends the Renaissance. Lives, 509–10. For the

seventeenth-century painter-theorist, Federico Zuccarro, Tintoretto

brought an end to painting. Quoted in Lepschy Tintoretto Observed, 32–3.

David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, New

Haven and London, 1982. On Tintoretto as the representation of a new

generation, see Detlev von Hadeln, ‘Early works by Tintoretto – II’,

The Burlington Magazine, 41: 237, December 1922, 278. For Tintoretto

as the birth of later sixteenth-century art see David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice. On Tintoretto as heralding the Baroque, see Eric

Newton, Tintoretto, London, 1952. Peter Schjeldahl writes, ‘The

Baroque, which took hold two decades later, with Caravaggio,

can seem an edited ratifi cation of tendencies already developed by

Tintoretto.’ Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker, New York, 2008,

121. On Tintoretto as a modern, see Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origins of Modern Art, London, 1965.

11 There are reasons for this, to do with Deleuze’s work – the fact for

example that his own writings on art focus on twentieth-century

examples, that he proposes an ontology rather than a history of

art, and that he vehemently opposes the practice of philosophy as a

method. The work of Éric Alliez is arguably the most sophisticated

activation of the Deleuzian philosophy for a ‘counter-historical’

analysis of artistic practice. Alliez uses the work of Henri Matisse to

articulate a counter-history of modern painting in terms of a practice

of forces, against the history of the painting-form. Alliez and Jean-

Claude Bonne, La Pensée-Matisse, Paris, 2005.

12 Critical Inquiry, 30, Summer 2004, 691–701. My appeal to Panofsky,

and to Panofsky’s investment of Kant, in no way pretends to be

comprehensive. It is undertaken solely with the aim of developing

a conception of time that I believe to be dominant in art history. For

accounts of Panofsky’s relation to Kant, and to the neo-Kantianism

of Ernst Cassirer, see Mark Cheetham, Kant, Art and Art History: Moments of Discipline, Cambridge, 2001, 68–77; Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, Ithaca, NY, 1984; Sylvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Christopher S. Wood,

New York, 1991; and Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New

Haven and London, 1982.

13 Panofsky, ‘The concept of artistic volition’, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott

and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry, 8, 1981, 92.

14 Kant clarifi es his position on time in a footnote in the Critique of Pure Reason. He asks, ‘Now what are space and time? Are they actual

entities? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet

ones that would pertain to them even if they were not intuited, or

are they relations that only attach to the form of intuition alone, and

thus to the subjective constitution of our mind?’ Rejecting the fi rst

(Newtonian) suggestion, and the second (Leibnizian) view, Kant

settles on the fi nal view. B38

15 For Kant, objects in-themselves (noumena) cannot be known – we

can only know of our experience of objects as appearances (as

phenomena). Kant writes that ‘simultaneity or succession would not

themselves come into perception if the representation of time

did not ground them a priori. Only under its presupposition can

one represent that several things exist at one and the same time

(simultaneously) or in different times (successively).’ Critique of Pure Reason, B46. Panofsky’s appeal to Kant is reinforced by his reading

of George Simmel’s neo-Kantian project to ‘establish the a priori of

historical knowledge’ and his conception of historical time (in his

‘Das problem der historischen zeit’, 1916, in Brücke und Tür: Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft, ed. Michael

Landmann, Stuttgart, 1957, 3–31. See also The Problems of the Philosophy of History, New York, 1977), and to Ernst Cassirer’s understanding of

space and time as the ‘pillars’ upon which cognition and knowledge

stand, see ‘Mythischer, äesthetischer und theoretischer Raum’, in

Symbol, Technik, Sprache, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael

Krois, Hamburg, 1985.

16 Note Panofsky’s view that history is ‘a written narrative constituting

a continuous methodical record, in order of time, of important events’.


Tintoretto’s Time

foundation as well as the hallmark of the creations of Tintoretto’s

full maturity’. Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 183. Rosand reiterates

this position in a second text, written for a symposium given to

accompany the 2006 Tintoretto retrospective at the Prado, where

speaking of the same painting, he states that ‘whether or not

he actually inscribed the formula above the door to his studio,

Tintoretto had indeed combined the colorito of Titian and the disegno of Michelangelo.’ ‘Tintoretto and Veronese: Style, personality,

class’, in Falomir, ed., Symposium, 73. Eric Newton thinks that

The Miracle is ‘perhaps the only Tintoretto in which one detects a

full-scale attempt to combine Michelangelo’s sculptural drawing

with Titian’s surface-glow’. Sydney Freedberg writes of the work’s

‘Romanist plasticities and ostentation of foreshortenings with its

Venetian shuttling of lights and colours’. Painting in Italy 1500–1600,

New Haven and London, 1993, 523. For Robert Echols, The Miracle is a painting that can be described in ‘precisely’ the terms of Ridolfi ’s

motto, adding, in a recent catalogue that ‘… it was Tintoretto who

was most fi rmly committed to the Central Italian principle of

disegno and, indeed, sought to present himself as achieving the ideal

combination of disegno and colorito’. Detlev von Hadlen states that

Tintoretto ‘proceeds to achieve the synthesis of Venetian colouring

and Tuscan plastic form’, ‘Early works by Tintoretto II’, 287. Hans

Tietze also refers to ‘a fruitful union between opposing elements’

in a ‘synthesis of form and colour’ that generally characterizes the

artist’s work. Tintoretto, London, 1948, 14, 42.

26 Nichols, Tintoretto, 61.

27 Rosand, in Symposium, 73.

28 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 136.

29 Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 36.

30 This link between the historia and good drawing is made by Alberti,

On Painting, Oxford, 2011, 53. I take issue with David Rosand’s view of

this work as a narrative that is ‘absolutely clear in its discourse’. Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 136. Marcia Hall’s analysis that the work replaces

narratival logic (that found for example in the works of Vittore

Carpaccio) with ‘a theatrical event’ seems to me to be closer to the

mark – but it is not at all evident that this theatricalization is used ‘to

incite religious fervor’. 174.

31 As Maria Loh contends in her reading of Tintoretto. For Loh, who

draws upon Mieke Bal’s notion of a ‘preposterous history’ and Didi-

Huberman’s Warburgian notion of survival to substantiate her point,

Tintoretto’s ‘modernity’ consist in his unintelligibility within his

own time, coupled with his intelligibility in the following century.

By comparison, I am arguing that Tintoretto’s difference consists in

that which resists intelligibility as such. Unintelligibility/difference

is not a question of historical relativism (as Loh suggests) because

difference is not historical, even if it is retrospectively made so. Maria

Loh, ‘Huomini della nostra età’: Tintoretto’s preposterous modernity’, in

Falomir, ed., Proceedings of the International Symposium.

32 Explication of these important concepts regrettably goes beyond the

scope of this paper.

33 When he refers to the need to investigate ‘the general state of affairs

in Augsburg book printing before as well as after Jost de Negker’s

appearance on the local scene’ in order to consider the sense of

Negker’s innovations in context. Renaissance and Renascenes, 2.34 See note 1.

35 Newton, Tintoretto, London, 1952, 35.

36 Newton, Tintoretto, 13, 15, 17. Newton emphasizes this withholding

from Tintoretto of the traditional means of learning through

apprenticeship. With respect to his expulsion, he writes, ‘what

matters in the story is not Titian’s motive but the fact that a young

man of genius was left without a master in an age when the craft of

painting could hardly be absorbed without one’, 11.

37 Ridolfi , Tintoretto, 19.

38 Hall, Sacred Image, 180.

39 For example with respect to contemporary interrelations in Venice

between painting and the theatre. The work of Tom Nichols

(Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity) has been important in consolidating this

interpretation, refl ecting the interest amongst painters in early and

mid-sixteenth-century Venice in Sebastiano Serlio’s designs, as well as

Tintoretto’s personal involvement with the Poligrafi the circle of writers

and publishers in sixteenth-century Venice.

The implication is that time itself does not change – only the order of

the events that occur within it. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm, 1960, 1.

17 Panofsky, ‘Refl ections on historical time’, trans. Johanna Bauman,

Critical Inquiry, 30, Summer 2004, 698. Sylvia Ferreti states it well:

‘the scholar must bring his understanding and intuition to bear on

the possibility of leading the artistic phenomenon back to natural

time, and the two times are part of the same categorical system, as is

space, which is essential to the identifi cation of historical meaning.’

Cassirer, Panofsky and Warburg, New Haven, 1990, 217

18 Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy, Oxford, 1988, 40.

19 Note Hubert Damisch’s critique of contextualism: ‘The great question

regarding history that never stops attracting me – since it has a

relation to our contemporary situation – is, why do the works of

the quattrocento still concern us? If a work of art truly depends on a

specifi c historical context, as the social historians of art would have it,

then in order to understand it we have to transport ourselves into the

conditions that existed in a specifi c time and place. But all that makes

no sense as far as I am concerned. There is absolutely no way to look at

a work through the “period eye” as Baxandall would have us do. The

issue is that we, in our own time, look at works of the quattrocento,

and the question is, how is it that a historical work of art interests us,

given that we should only be compelled by works of our own time

which belong to the same context as we do?’ Yves-Alain Bois, Denis

Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, ‘A conversation with Hubert Damisch’,

October, 85. 1998, 10.

20 The model that dominates ‘the modern scholarly study of art’ is the

‘model of an artwork securely moored in historical time’. Alexander

Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York,

2010, 11. The recent collection of papers on Tintoretto published to

accompany the 2007 Prado retrospective of his works indicate that

historical contextualization remains a predominant vector of inquiry.

Miguel Falomir, ed., Jacopo Tintoretto: Proceedings of the International Symposium,

Madrid, 2009. The analysis of David Carrier is, in this regard, an

exception: ‘Tintoretto, always anti-classical, was a highly individual

fi gure’, that none of his works ‘could be confused with the work of

Titian or Paolo Veronese, let alone that of any other Italian artist’,

and that ‘the accompanying paintings [to the exhibition Tintoretto at

the Scuderie del Quirinal, Rome, 2012] by Jacopo Bassano, Giovanni

Demio, Parmiginiano, Lambert Sustris, Titian, Veronese – and

sculptures by Alessandro Vittoria, splendid as they are, don’t really

help in understanding his art’. ‘Lagoon prisoner’, Apollo, June 2012.

21 See footnote 7. Colorito, held to be a defi ning feature of the Venetian

school of painting, refers to the colouring process, in contrast to

colore which refers to colour as quality. David Rosand, ‘Titian and the

eloquence of the brush’, Artibus et Historiae, 2: 3, 1981, 85.

22 Carlo Ridolfi , The Life of Tintoretto and of his Children Domenico and Marietta, trans. Catherine Enggass and Robert Enggass, Paris and

London, 1984, 16.

23 Pino writes that ‘if Titian and Michelangelo were a single person, if

the drawing of Michelangelo were added to the colour of Titian, then

we would have the supreme god of painting’. Quoted in Lepschy,

Tintoretto Observed, 19. For an informative overview of this debate see

Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice, 15 – 26.

24 Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo, ed. and trans. Lloyd H. Ellis Jr, Toronto,

Buffalo and London, 2007, 261.

25 To illustrate my point I list a selection of such reiterations of

Ridolfi ’s formulation from the art-historical scholarship. In

the most recent English monograph, Tom Nichols tells us that

Tintoretto’s ‘awareness of the particular signifi cance ascribed

to artistic tradition in his day’ is ‘indicated by the report

that he pinned a notice over the door of his studio reading

‘“Michelangelo’s design [disegno] and Titian’s colouring [colorito]”’;

and that, whilst ‘it is unlikely that such a notice ever existed’, ‘it

does seem that the young painter saw himself as an heir to the

great traditions of Renaissance art embodied in the still-living

(but already God-like) fi gures of Michelangelo (d.1564) and

Titian (d.1576).’ Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, London, 1999, 14.

David Rosand refers, with respect to Tintoretto’s painting of The Miracle of The Slave, to ‘the synthesis of disegno and colorito, an aesthetic

ideal proclaimed in these very years, that would serve as the


Kamini Vellodi

40 Difference and Repetition, 136.

41 Renaissance and Renascenses, 3. See also the remark made by Nagel and

Wood that ‘the new is never truly new’, but only ‘restages the given

and creates an impression of novelty’, and ‘must comply with

conventions in order to be understood at all’. Anachronic Renaissance, 15.

42 ‘In a body, the superior or dominating forces are called active, and the

inferior or dominated forces are called reactive.’ Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Columbia, OH, 1983, 81.

43 See Mark Cheetham, ‘Kant has not been perceived as pervasively

infl uential in art history and the visual arts. Yet, for better or worse,

his ideas (or those attributed to him) are immanent to these fi elds.’

Kant, Art and Art History: Moments of Discipline, Cambridge, 2001, 1.



46 Appearances being that which is given of the object.

47 Time and space inhere only in the ‘subjective constitution of our

mind’. Critique of Pure Reason, A14/B28.

48 Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascenes, 3.

49 Which is, rather, to delimit the conditions under which I can attain

knowledge of the objects of my experience.

50 Synthesis is the basis of the Kantian overcoming of empiricism in

which thought copies the sense-impressions given to it in experience,

and rationalism, in which given concepts or ideas logically determine

our experience. For Kant, knowledge is produced through synthesis of

a priori concepts and given appearances. For an insightful explanation

of the function of synthesis in Kant’s system see Roger Scruton, Kant, Oxford, 1982, 17–19.

51 Critique of Pure Reason, B131.

52 Kant himself admits this: ‘I cannot determine my existence as that

of a self-active being, rather I merely represent the spontaneity

of my thought … and my existence always remains only sensibly

determinable.’ Critique of Pure Reason, B158.


54 For a lucid account of Deleuze’s reading of Kantian time see Christian

Kerslake, ‘Transcendental cinema: Deleuze, time and modernity’,

Radical Philosophy, March/April 2005, 130.

55 Kant adds to the passive self, which is ‘defi ned only by receptivity and,

as such, endowed with no power of synthesis’, an active spontaneity

in the understanding. ‘On Four Formulas’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, London, 1998, 34.

56 ‘On Four Formulas’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, London, 1998, 34.

57 This is not the place for an extended discussion of this complex

doctrine, which for the purposes of this paper are highly simplifi ed.

The fullest ‘exposition’ of the Eternal Return given by Nietzsche is

found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III.

58 Deleuze discusses time in terms of three syntheses (Difference and Repetition, chapter II, ‘Repetition in-itself’). The fi rst synthesis is of a

‘foundational’ time, time as the living present, produced through

the ‘contractile’ synthesis of repeated experiences (which Deleuze

articulates through the Humean notion of habit). The second

synthesis (articulated through Henri Bergson’s ontology of time)

produces a ‘pure past’ that acts as the ‘ground’ of all time, a reservoir

into which presents pass, and in which all presents virtually,

coextensively insist.

59 See ‘On the uses and abuses of history for life’, Untimely Meditations, Cambridge, 1997. Against fatalism, the eternal return proposes the

conquest of destiny that redeems things from their servitude to

purpose, and affi rms the creative potency of the chance that ruptures

causal deterministic relations. Difference and Repetition, 54–5, 162.

60 ‘On the uses and abuses of history for life’, 60. It is in this sense that

difference functions in an intensive milieu, or ‘spatium’, outside

(ontologically prior to) both the forms of time and space.

61 That is, this return is only one instance of other possible returns.

We may conceivably speak of a ‘Tintoretto-effect’ consisting of

disjunctive returns that fracture any linear narration of his ‘infl uence’

through historical time.

62 Rudiger Klessmann, Adam Elsheimer 1578–1610, Edinburgh, London and

Frankfurt, 2006, 16, 28. Claire Pace, Lives of Adam Elsheimer, London,

2007, 11.

63 Keith Andrews, Adam Elsheimer Paintings-Drawings-Prints, London, 1977, 28–9.

64 Andrews, Elsheimer, 29; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 83.

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