Tintoretto Picture Study Aid and Art Prints

To read more about Charlotte Mason picture study and to see the other Picture Study Aids I have available, click here.

Beautiful colours can be bought in the shops on the Riato, but good drawing can only be bought from the casket of the artist’s talent with patient study and nights without sleep.
Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto)

If you’re wanting to add a 16-century Renaissance artist to your picture study time, Tintoretto is an excellent choice! This Venetian artist is known for his dramatic lighting and rich colors and is an enormous part of art history in Venice.

An interesting fact that has stuck with me and was shared by one of my professors in college about the Renaissance and Mannerist Venetian painters was their use of color and light. He explained that because the city is built on canals and light is always reflecting off the water, the light in Venice is different. The colors there seem to glow, and that reflection gives the light a much more dramatic effect. And in many ways, the art of Tintoretto personifies these characteristics of this ancient, multi-island city.

Unlike other well-known Renaissance artists whose work can be found throughout many different countries and continents, because of the nature of Tintoretto’s commissions – primarily in buildings within Venice – you can still see much of his work in situ, or in their original settings. There is something awe-inspiring about standing in front of a work of art that you know has been in the same spot, in the same room, since the artist painted the last stroke. Tintoretto was, and remains, Venetian through and through.

I’m happy to announce that I am now offering a Tintoretto Picture Study Aid and art prints available in both download and print form! This 32-page Picture Study Aid includes summaries of the early life of the Venetian Renaissance painter Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti – 1518-1594), key topics about seven of his artworks (see below), and seven printable versions of the paintings (without artist names or titles) with the PDF (or professional art prints with the printed book). AmblesideOnline friends, please note that while there is some overlap with the AO selections, these are not all the same as the pieces chosen for the AO Artist rotation next year.

The pieces covered include:

Creation of the Animals (1550-1553)
Saint George and the Dragon (ca. 1555)
St Mark’s Body Brought to Venice (ca. 1562-1566)
Crucifixion (1565)
Doge Pietro Loredan (ca. 1567-1570)
Christ in the Home of Martha and Mary (ca. 1580)
The Annunciation (ca. 1583-1587)

You can also find books for further reading about Tintoretto in the Living Art Book Archive.

I include a brief overview of Charlotte Mason picture study at the beginning of the file; however, I have also written posts here on the blog about why it is important and how we do it in our home and homeschool co-op.

You can get your copy at the link at the end of the post!

Caveats

This guide is by no means an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece, which is intentional. I tried to keep it all very simple in the spirit of there being:

…no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman.
CHARLOTTE MASON (VOL 6 PG 216)

This Picture Study Aid is meant to offer basic information about the artists as well as ready answers should your student ask about a particular aspect of a piece and the explanation isn’t readily evident. Ms. Mason emphasized not focusing on strict academic discourse when doing picture study but rather simply exposing students to the art itself:

His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.
CHARLOTTE MASON (VOL 6 PG 43)