This is the follow-up volume of Erasmus Weddigen's collected writings on Tintoretto, the first of which appeared in 2000. Several of the studies were already published elsewhere, including his pioneering work on Tintoretto's concern with music, the iconographic study of the Bamberg Assunta, the essay on Tintoretto's house, and the investigation into Tintoretto's use of canvas supports (which became a veritable obsession of Weddigen). In addition, however, he penned a good number of essays specifically for this volume, which, thus, constitutes an indispensable source for students of the Venetian sixteenth-century painter.
By profession a restorer, Weddigen takes the liberties granted to an independent scholar. Nearly every text is replete with witty observations, stimulating thoughts, and suggestions for further research, all written in highly idiosyncratic, florid German. At the same time, the texts often lack a rigorous approach and can remain somewhat inconclusive. A case in point is the chapter on Tintoretto's reception of Dürer. Weddigen identifies an impressive number of cases in which Tintoretto took inspiration from the Northern artist. Yet this enumeration of instances becomes a bit tedious because Weddigen never develops a proper argument or raises larger questions as to what exactly it was that Tintoretto found in Dürer, who is hardly an obvious source of inspiration for an artist so clearly obsessed with Michelangelo and Titian.
This is all the more dissatisfying as Weddigen starts the essay by raising important questions about Tintoretto's workshop. Already in his first volume of writings on Tintoretto, Weddigen had been highly critical of Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman's attempt to assign a great number of works previously thought to be by the young Tintoretto to the workshop and, specifically, to the unknown Bergamasque painter Giovanni Galizzi. As he states in the introduction to the new volume, he remains just as skeptical, even though more and more scholars seem to agree with the two Americans. Weddigen, however, calls their checklist of attributions too schematic and even populist, since it allegedly makes no attempt to do justice to the complexities of Tintoretto and his working methods. Unfortunately, Weddigen himself remains largely on the level of polemics and provides no systematic account of Tintoretto's procedure, the role of the workshop, or the criteria that would facilitate more balanced and accurate attributions.
For example, Weddigen demonstrates Tintoretto's indebtedness to Dürer for the Padua Crucifixion, that is, precisely for the painting that served Echols as case study for his pioneering revision of Tintoretto's oeuvre. The reference to Dürer, however, provides further evidence for Tintoretto's involvement in the composition and layout of the figures which resulted from a recent restoration and technical analysis of the painting's underdrawings. Yet, since assistants seem to have painted the final layer that is visible to the observer, the Crucifixion provides an ideal case for a systematic investigation of Tintoretto's working method, his structure of the workshop, and for the fundamental question raised by Echols and Ilchman: “What Makes a Tintoretto?” Though seemingly aware of these issues, Weddigen simply calls the painting “problematic” and suggests an initial involvement of the master who, however quickly, passed the commission on to an unexperienced workshop assistant.
A strength of Weddigen are certainly his iconographical studies, based on his impressive erudition and familiarity with Tintoretto's oeuvre. In his discussion of the gesture of Christ in the House of Mary and Martha in Munich, Weddigen points out that period observers would have understood Christ's touching the small finger of his right hand as signifying the numeral one, in reference to the passage in scripture, in which Christ states: “But only one thing is needed.” This passage has been interpreted as an expression of Christ's preference of Mary's vita contemplativa over Martha's vita attiva. According to Weddigen, however, the characteristically unorthodox Tintoretto was careful to express no such preference. For the other two highlighted fingers of Christ's right hand might reference the Trinity and imply that each unit consists of a duality. Indeed, Tintoretto may have been even more unorthodox than that. He signed the painting right below Christ's feet, using the f for fecit, as if to imply that both he and Christ prefer an active lifestyle. In fact, rather than addressing Martha, Christ turns to Mary apparently in support of Martha's complaint about Mary's laziness. This discussion, then, is but one example of how thought provoking many of Weddigen's interpretations are. The book is a rich resource that will inspire Tintoretto scholarship for years to come.
