Tintoretto, one of the great Venetian masters of the sixteenth century, is renowned for his compositional innovations. The painter also worked as a stage and costume designer for the Compagnie della Calza. As a result, he selected and combined elements of other disciplines in his pictures. / This thesis focuses on the fusion of the arts in Tintoretto's imagery. A comprehensive analysis of this interdisciplinary aspect reveals the subtlety of Tintoretto's creative mind. The challenge is to discover Tintoretto as a stage designer who conceived pictures as theatrical performances. Instead of the traditional preparatory sketch, he built a miniature stage in order to visualize the scene in tangible forms existing in light and space. The design of the setting, the gestural choreography of his personages and the distribution of lighting were analysed and then translated into painted illusion. With this unusual methodology, Tintoretto invented forceful mise-en-scenes which induce the spectator to perceive the imaginary as real. A substantial knowledge of stagecraft also enabled him to bring to vibrant life the dramatic episodes of the Bible on canvas. Through such artfully constructed theatrical illusion, Tintoretto not only re-creates a vision for his audience, but above all, conveys the depth of his spiritual experience.

xiii, 142 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Tintoretto's four-painting Passion cycle in the Sala dell'Albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice has generated dramatic and affective responses from artists and critics since its completion in the late 1560s. While scholars have addressed the cycle's formal qualities that stimulate such responses, the context surrounding the cycle has not been fully explored. The city was a refuge for reformers and the printing center for potentially heretical writing in the sixteenth century. Tintoretto maintained relationships to members of the reformist poligrafi, and the Passion cycle responds to the mystical theologies propagated in widely disseminated works from Ignatius of Loyola's officially sanctioned treatise, Spiritual Exercises, to the more controversial work of Don Benedetto and Marcantonio Flaminio, the Beneficio di Cristo. This thesis constructs a strong relationship between Tintoretto' s work in the Sala dell'Albergo and contemporary mystical and evangelical reformative theology and activity in the city. / Committee in Charge: Dr. James G. Harper, Chair; Dr. Lauren G. Kilroy; Dr. Kate Mondloch

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Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, canvas substituted panel or wall as the preferred support for painting in Venice, moving from the periphery to the core of artmaking. As it did so, canvas became key to the artistic processes and novel pictorial language developed by painters like Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Sixteenth-century critics associated canvas with painting in Venice, a connection that has persisted to become a veritable trope of Venetian art history. Despite this, we have hitherto lacked a convincing account of Venetian canvas supports and their impact. This dissertation, by examining the adoption, development, and significance of canvas in Venetian art over the period 1400 to 1600, attempts to provide one. Approaching canvas from multiple perspectives, this project offers a deeper understanding of what early modern canvas was at a material level, how it was made and supplied to painters, and its catalyzing role in early modern Venetian art. By tracing precisely how canvas operates within paintings, focusing on lodestar examples whilst drawing on extensive and intensive object-based research carried out on a large corpus, this thesis demonstrates how actively canvas participated in the elaboration of the pictorial poetics of mature Cinquecento art in Venice. It argues that we owe the existence of this distinctive artistic idiom in no small part to the twist of a yarn, the roughness of a thread, the thickness of a stitch. Canvas was critical to both the making and the meaning of these pictures. The wider aims of the project are twofold: on the one hand, to model a methodology that integrates approaches such as visual, textual, and sociocultural analysis with technical art history and conservation-informed comprehension of the materially altered nature of art objects; on the other, to contribute to an account of the history of an art form—the canvas picture—that still occupies a central role in the global art world today.