Study of the central portion of Tintoretto's 'Crucifixion'

No artist made a greater impression on the young Ruskin than Jacopo Robusti (1518-94), known as Tintoretto. The contrast of the Venetian master’s rich, powerful works with the refined Tuscan art Ruskin had previously been studying was dramatic, and after his first visit to the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice on 24 September 1845, Ruskin confessed to his father in a letter day that “I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret”. In the cycle of vast canvases depicting the Life of Christ, “he lashes out like a leviathan, and heaven and earth come together. M Angelo himself cannot hurl figures into space as he does, nor did M Angelo ever paint space itself which would not look like a nutshell beside Tintoret’s” .

This powerful drawing is one of Ruskin’s most concentrated and expressive copies, also reflecting the gloomy interior of the Scuola and the darkened condition of the paintings. Typically, Ruskin focuses on a small but telling detail, which he had originally described to his father – a “touch of quiet thought in his awful crucifixion – there is an ass in the distance, feeding on the remains of strewed palm leaves. If that isn’t a master’s stroke, I don’t know what is”. Again, Ruskin noted how Tintoretto had “filled his picture with such various and impetuous exertion, that the body of the Crucified is, by comparison, in perfect repose” (Works of John Ruskin V4.Pg270-71).

(Letter quoted above is from John Ruskin to his Father John James Ruskin 24 September 1845 printed in ‘Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his parents, 1845’ edited by Harold I. Sharpiro. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, (page 211-212).)