The Abduction of Helen, c.1578 Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto (c.1518-1594)

Jacopo Tintoretto - Battle of Corsairs

This subject has been variously interpreted; the painting itself was brought to Madrid by Velazquez, who had been ordered by King Philip IV to collect the most beautiful works to be found in Italy (1649-51). A suggested identification with a Battle painted by Tintoretto for Ercole Gonzaga in 1562 is belied by the stylistic evidence; this is a much later work. Behind it is a long experience in the composition of masses in motion and the distribution of light effects, such as those adopted by Tintoretto in the great canvases in the ground-floor of the Scuola di S. Rocco. Similar problems, sharing the same iconographic points of departure, are resolved by the painter in the series of the Annals of the Gonzaga and in many commemorative canvases in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

All evidence dates the work around 1580. However, while in the series of the Annals and in the Palazzo Ducale, Tintoretto employed considerable studio assistance, this battle of corsairs gives the impression that the hand of Jacopo predominated.

The control - still Renaissance in character - that we find even in Tintoretto's most uninhibited compositional fantasies can be noted in the contained quality of the gestures, which is very far from the rhetoric that will be typical of the Baroque. The quality of the technique is high, as seen in the transparency of the flesh of the woman captive in the foreground. Profoundly skilful is the relationship between foreground and background, where figures are reduced to incandescent filaments. Admirable above all is the strict register of the light effects.

It is perhaps useful to recall that the taste for epic descriptions, for battles, which in the succeeding century became a true and proper genre, had its enthusiastic pioneers: it was in 1581 that Tasso published his celebrated poem, Gerusalemme Liberata.