Jesus Disputing with the Doctors in the Temple

It is a large canvas painted in oil dating back to the mid-sixteenth century, whose arrival in Milan is still not entirely clear today. The canvas, disassembled from the frame and folded in four, was found by Arcangeli in 1955 in a basement of the Fabbrica del Duomo.

Jacopo Robusti, a Venetian painter with an impetuous character, the son of a fabric dyer - hence the famous nickname “Tintoretto” - was destined to revolutionize the painting of the sixteenth century.

Composition of the most brilliant that the intellectual inspiration of the Mannerists has published according to the scholar Francesco Arcangeli, the "Disputa" becomes a founding work, both in Tintoretto's individual path and in that of Italian Mannerism.

His unmistakable dramatic use of perspective and light, almost a forerunner of the Baroque, will mark his fame.

The subject of the Disputa di Gesù al Tempio enjoyed a certain success in Italian painting of the early 16th century, particularly in the Veneto and Lombardy areas.

The finding of Jesus in the Temple, also called Jesus among the Doctors, is an episode narrated in the Gospel of Luke (2,41-50). Twelve-year-old Jesus spent time in the temple of Jerusalem with the doctors of the Law, without the knowledge of his parents who found him after three days.

Everything, in Tintoretto's painting, "seems to boil, so much is the excitement that ignites in the countless figures of doctors" that open in two tumultuous wings around the figure of Jesus.

The agitation that shakes them is an astonishing metaphor of the sense of the spiritual storm that for the first time destabilizes and questions the unshakable Jewish doctrinal principles.

The huge book in the foreground, in which a doctor anxiously seeks security, the perplexed questioning of those who look at each other in silence, the decomposition of others in tormented gestures are just as many echoes of the moral turmoil brought about by the son of God." (Mariolina Olivari)

The walls are replaced by the dense juxtaposition of endless gray columns. In the background these are united by the fiery chair of Jesus, distorted in its architectural order by the dynamism of the figures that adorn it.

As you go from the foreground towards the bottom, everything loses consistency and in the end only the brush is sovereign and freely outlines what is essential.

"Perspective vertigo, unusual spatial shots, a visionary architecture, twists and spirited eddies of drapery make it a manifest picture." (Mariolina Olivari)

Arcangeli identifies a self-portrait of Tintoretto in the "face, with big eyes, astonished, with black hair ruffled on the forehead" of the young doctor on the left.

Just as he wondered if Titian was not to be recognized in the old man leaning on a stick that turns his back, and Michelangelo in the figure with the red hat sitting in front of Jesus.

The presence of the two masters, the first spectator disdainful of the innovations brought by the impetuous talent of Tintoretto and the other "divine" and distant model, make the "great struggle" of the young man in the chair become the allegory of that of art.