In 1995 Robert Echols made a huge splash in Tintoretto scholarship by boldly erasing a body of work from the artist's oeuvre, which Rodolfo Pallucchini, in his authoritative 1950 study La Giovinezza del Tintoretto, had attributed to Tintoretto's early career, prior to the Miracle of the Slave, from 1548, with which the painter, apparently, had finally arrived at his trademark style. Instead, Echols argues, most of these paintings should be attributed to Giovanni Galizzi, an obscure Bergamasque painter who allegedly provided incompetent imitations of Tintoretto's style, which he seems to have studied while working in what may have been a loose relationship in the latter's studio. Echols thus cleaned up Tintoretto's oeuvre, fabricating the image of a uniform and coherent painter working throughout his entire career exclusively in the monumental style of the Miracle of the Slave.
While much discussed in private, it took until 2015 for Echols's sweeping argument to be addressed at a public conference, the proceedings of which have now been published. To be sure, several essays deal with questions of iconography and patronage, but a large part engages with Tintoretto's mode(s) and technique, his workshop organization, and chronology, making the volume a significant contribution to this fundamental controversy and, hence, to the analysis of Tintoretto's identity as an artist, just in time for his 500th anniversary, celebrated in numerous exhibitions all over the world.
In the first essay, Michel Hochmann critically reviews Echols's argument, basically agreeing with it while pointing to some inconsistencies and adding biographical information to Giovanni Galizzi. In addition, Hochmann alludes to methodological issues concerning workshop organization and collaboration that are omitted from the straightforward Morellian comparison of formal characteristics undertaken by Echols. It is, however, Michele Di Monte who raises fundamental theoretical concerns about art history's traditional approaches to attribution. Presenting (hilarious) structuralist formulas that art historians (subconsciously) use, Di Monte points to some ideological fallacies that inform their choices. Ultimately, Di Monte deconstructs the naïve optimism that underlies such decisions, which are always prone to fitting the artist into a prefabricated schema. In fact, while paying lip service to Tintoretto's style's pluralism and his deliberate switching between modes, scholars like Echols exclude certain modes simply on the basis of quality and taste, the weakest criteria on account of being the least historical and, thus, most ideological.
Guillaume Cassegrain prefers to circumvent the entire issue by arguing that Tintoretto's style was deliberately eclectic. He draws attention to the banner allegedly decorating Tintoretto's studio, which stated the artist's intention to combine the colorito of Titian with the disegno of Michelangelo. According to Cassegrain, this eclecticism was a programmatic strategy through which Tintoretto aligned himself with certain poligrafi who opposed the hierarchy of literary styles deriving from the call for purity established by classicists such as Pietro Bembo. (In his essay, Tom Nichols seems to agree, though he considers the eclecticism Tintoretto had in common with the poligrafi a characteristic of the painter's Mannerist approach.) Ultimately, though, Cassegrain's thesis is just as ideological as those of the connoisseurs identified by Di Monte. In the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre and other materialist writers, he fashions Tintoretto's style as a subversive statement of resistance to the dominant order, a somewhat problematic line of argument because it runs the risk of reducing Tintoretto's paintings to polemics and politics. However, Cassegrain's argument has the merit of being inclusive rather than exclusive, and, importantly, of assigning a positive value to the eclecticism, which Echols and others consider to be below Tintoretto, attributing it to the limited skills of a minor painter.
In a suggestive essay, Bernard Aikema turns against the notion that the style of these paintings even is eclectic. Focusing on the Ecce Homo in São Paolo, Brazil, he underlines their quality and proposes a new explanation for their formal appearance. With their bright colors and the arrangement of space in horizontal layers, Aikema argues, they emulate the style of Paolo Veronese, who became Tintoretto's rival after arriving in Venice, in the 1550s. Aikema also identifies obvious weaknesses in Echols's argument—such as characteristics that cause him to reject certain paintings but that appear in other works he accepts—and points to the fact that assistants usually imitate the style of the master and thus dissimulate their own aesthetic concerns, making it unlikely that these paintings, which contemporaries accepted to be Tintoretto's, were not by him. Aikema therefore calls for a systematic investigation of Tintoretto's workshop, similar to the projects he has ventured and fostered for Titian and Veronese.
Indeed, one of the most eye-opening essays of the volume is Alessandro Gatti's report of the restoration of the Crucifixion in Padua. The painting is Echols's primary test case, which he uses to identify all the characteristics of the body of works that, according to him, have been erroneously attributed to Tintoretto. Gatti, however, demonstrates that the painting agrees in every detail with Tintoretto's highly idiosyncratic, multiple-step working process of the 1550s. Moreover, X-rays reveal substantial changes from the underdrawing to the final painting, many of which are responsible for the awkward appearance of several figures and the lacking elegance of, for instance, the horses in the background, which Echols considers to be unworthy of Tintoretto. But even here the painting corresponds to Tintoretto's traditional working method. As Sonnenburg and others have underlined in previous analyses of Tintoretto's procedure, the master prepared his paintings so carefully that assistants only had to add the final layer of paint. As a consequence, what we see often may actually not be by Tintoretto's hand, even though he conceived the painting with great care. Is it acceptable in such instances to eliminate a painting from Tintoretto's oeuvre? This is ultimately a philosophical question, in part dealt with by Di Monte. But a research project such as the one suggested by Aikema would certainly facilitate the discussion.
By virtue of its title, Günter Brucher's Tintoretto und sein Umfeld, the fifth volume of his history of Venetian painting, promised to offer a step in this direction. However, it includes no discussion whatsoever of Tintoretto's circle or workshop. Even more perplexing is the fact that Brucher seems unaware of even the most fundamental literature. To cite just one blatant omission, Brucher does not mention Echols's article. This omission is particularly stunning because Brucher is interested in questions of chronology and focuses on visual analysis and description, while conveying almost no interest in issues of iconography and social context. In and of itself, this approach could be valuable, and it is to Brucher's credit that he, for example, draws attention to Tintoretto's ornamental design—namely, the tendency to emphasize the plane as opposed to the receding space. However, most of Brucher's descriptions are inconclusive and support no thesis. What is more, they are less precise and stimulating than those of Theodor Hetzer or, more recently, Astrid Zankert, Stefan Neuner, and Wolfram Pichler. Thus, in contrast to the conference proceedings, very little may be gained from Brucher's study.
