Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice

Between sacred and profane

Supper at Emmaus and biblical feasts

Biblical feasts were one of the major themes of the latter half of the sixteenth century. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and indeed Bassano have all provided monumental examples of this. The celebration of the supper at Emmaus echoes the Last Supper. It was the moment, as recounted by Luke, when the two pilgrims Christ was traveling with recognized him as he consecrated the bread and the wine. “Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him.”
Titian produced many versions of this theme for the commissioning patrons of his generation. The painting in the Musée du Louvre reflects a careful reading of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper—a long, horizontal table, a frontal view of Jesus against the backdrop of a landscape punctuated with vertical architectural elements, the posture of one of the pilgrims reminiscent of that of Leonardo’s Judas. Titian chose to portray the moment when both pilgrims realize the identity of the figure they encountered. It also provided him with an opportunity to painstakingly reconstruct the white tablecloth with its many folds and creases, the oriental carpet, and the items on the table (saltcellar, decanter, glasses, bread).
Tintoretto took up the theme of Supper at Emmaus very early on. One early version suggested that he was looking to challenge his elder but that his ability did not yet live up to his ambitions. However, a few years later in the Last Supper he produced a brilliant take on his previous attempt in the consummate skill of his eloquent poses, the focus on simplicity and everyday life, the pronounced chiaroscuro, and the vibrant energy.
Veronese’s Supper at Emmaus, now in the Louvre’s collections, offers a quite different register. It would appear to be the first of a large series of biblical feasts marked by a mixture of sacred narration and portraits of the Venetian aristocracy, even if the result here lacks complete mastery of style. Unlike Titian and Tintoretto, Veronese chose to depict the moment of Christ’s blessing of the bread; the composition is evocative of Raphael’s Transfiguration in its sense of balance and harmony.

Between sacred and profane

Portraits of family and children

During the Renaissance, having one’s children’s portrait painted was seen as a means of protection against the quirks of fate. Children would adopt their parents’ conduct, attire, and ornamentation as a mark of continuing virtue and elegance, even if they were depicted with an innocence and expressiveness befitting their tender age.
While children are rare in Tintoretto’s work, perceived rather as spectators in religious narrative paintings, Titian and Veronese produced many portraits in which aristocratic status is tinged with humor and spontaneity. This is also true of their religious painting in which they did not hesitate to use children to counterbalance a scene’s solemnity, delighting in portrayals of their boisterous energy and affection.

Between sacred and profane

Paintings of dogs

Around the mid-sixteenth century Venice saw the first portraits of dogs as protagonists rather than secondary players. The inventor of this type of portrait was probably Jacopo Bassano with his Two Hunting Dogs Tied to a Tree Stump, dating from 1548-49. From the late 1530s onward, animals—dogs in particular—would play a particularly important role in his representations of sacred scenes. Bassano saw them not only as symbols of faithfulness and purity, but he would tend to produce lifelike portraits, attentive to such details as their morphology and the rendering of their fur.
This type of representation was to fascinate Venetian artists already highly tuned to the painstaking study of nature. Titian—and Veronese to a lesser degree—would endeavor to depict an animal’s anatomy and fur, as well as their expressions, with great care and attention.