Corporate Colors: Bonifacio and Tintoretto at the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice

Enter Tintoretto: A Crisis over Form and Function

The change in tack from iconic images of saints and narrative scenes in favor of votive portraiture that took place around the time of Bonifacio's death should now be addressed. Paintings of the former type were gradually phased out and replaced with scenes of magistrates presenting themselves to religious figures who were generally representative of the state. The circumstances that prompted this change of heart need to be highlighted, as the transition to votive portraiture should not necessarily be seen as a relaxation of the state's antipathy to the cult of the individual.

From the late 1540s, the standard of the Camerlenghi pictures had suffered as a result of the ailing Bonifacio's delegation of more and more work to his students. His bouts of ill health and the associated decline in the quality of his work seem to have led the officers of the Magistrato del Sale (who, it is remembered, had an interest in supervising the standard of state art as one of their responsibilities) to invite the younger Jacopo Tintoretto to continue Bonifacio's decoration of their rooms a year or two before the latter's death.

Tintoretto's initial two pictures, for the first room of the Salt Office, the Saints Jerome and Andrew and the Saints George, Louis, and the Princess (Figs. 20, 21), remarkable works by any standard, seem deliberately designed to highlight the shortcomings of Bonifacio's by now labored and lackluster approach. [45] Tintoretto's manipulation of pictorial effects (for example, the trompe l'oeil treatment of Saint Andrew's cross in the Saints Jerome and Andrew or, in its pendant, the way in which the narcissistic princess is momentarily transfixed by her own reflection in the polished ebony of Saint George's armor) may have endeared the artist to his patrons because of their wit and novelty. However, their success as works of art, despite their invigorating realization of form and space, partly depends on those aspects that one can only assume their patrons ultimately found somewhat less than palatable--namely, their radical antihieraticism and ironic irreverence. These elements serve to detract attention from t he primary function of the paintings as symbols of state bureaucracy and officialdom.