 Hi everybody, welcome to Barns Takeout, your daily serving of art. I'm Robin Creirin, Collections Research Coordinator at the Barns Foundation. Today we're looking at room 14 on the north wall and we're going to talk about this portrait right here. So this painting is by Tintoretto. He was a 16th century Venetian painter and he was born about 1518 or 19 in Venice and he died there in 1594. The painting was done in about the mid 16th century, we don't know the exact date. He was born, Tintoretto, was born Jacopo Robusti, but he actually went by the nickname Tintoretto, which means a little dire, and that refers to his father's profession, Tintore and Italian referring to the profession of dying. Along with Titian and Veronese, who are two artists that are also represented in our collection and which we've talked about previously in some takeouts, he was considered one of the three main big artists of the 16th century in Venetian painting. It's said that he actually spent a brief period of time in Titian's workshop who was older than him, but was dismissed because of Titian's jealousy. However, we don't know if that's actually true. After this he's also said to have largely been self-taught copying the work of other artists, especially sculpture and drawing from life, but again we don't know that this is completely true. He employed a very large workshop that included several of his children later in his life and it appears to have been collaborative in nature. This workshop practice and his ability to market himself allowed the artists to produce a vast number of commissions for Venice's churches, government buildings, private residences, and confraternities. So let's take a closer look at this painting in particular. Before we take a look at what the actual painting represents, let's talk a bit about what the nature of Venice was at the time so we can understand who this sitter might be. So social hierarchy and class distinction were a very important aspect of Renaissance Venice. Portraiture was, like this, were traditionally reserved for the nobility and were a sign of high status by virtue of the very cost of them. The nobility in Venice called themselves patricians. They constituted about five percent of the population by the end of the quattrocento, so the century prior to this. There were three legally defined groups within the city. The patricians, as I talked about, the citizens, or cittadini, and the population, or popolani. Citizens, or cittadini, as I said, were often merchants, as well as were often their noble counterparts, the patricians. In a city where water was so important to it, you can imagine that trade and mercantile activities were quite important within the city. The population, or popolani, were comprised of craftsmen, artisans, shopkeepers, and even wealthy foreigners. However, the patricians, the nobility, they were the highest rank and they were all technically politically equal to one another. All adult males were eligible to sit in the Great Council of Venice and to hold public office, but they were not equal in terms of wealth, and they could include the very rich as well as the nearly justitude. The doge, or the ruler of Venice, was elected from the ranks of the patricians. But by the mid-16th century, I said prior that the nobility were the only ones who would have had portraiture commissioned, but by the 16th century, when this was painted, even tradesmen and artisans, so members of the lowest caste, were regularly commissioning portraits of themselves. So how do we know the rank of a person? So the way that they are portrayed, or the size of the portrait, became an indication of the status of the individual. The dress of the sitter may also indicate their status. So for instance, a wealthy patrician, somebody who is very important, they may have been shown dressed in a Zimara, which is a floor-length tunic that was worn in the home, often lined with ermine fur, so a more expensive fur. They also might be shown in full length, seated, a composition that originated with portrayals of emperors and popes. We don't know who the identity of this sitter is specifically, but how can we infer from what I just talked about something about him? So the painting is a relatively good size. It's about 38 inches by 32 inches. He isn't shown in full length, but rather from just above the chest upwards. His dress is likely a Zimara, that floor-length tunic I just talked about, but it's not lined in ermine fur. It's probably lined in martin or sable fur. So if we look a little bit closer, we can see that it's a little bit darker brown in color. Let's see if we can back out a little bit. But it was still an expensive fur, and it was still something that was largely popular with the nobility. So he's probably a patrician or noble man, not the most wealthy or the highest status, but patrician nonetheless. His hair is cut short and his beard a little bit longer than you may see in some portraits is white, probably indicating his age. The composition itself follows a format that the artist and his studio used for portraiture. The sitter is portrayed in three-quarter view, so he's slightly tilted away from the viewer, but he's looking at us. He's engaging with you as a viewer. There's green drapery to the right, or on his left shoulder, behind his left shoulder. An architectural piece, kind of undefined in the middle, possibly the edge of a window, and a distant landscape over here, perhaps looking through a window. The background, which I said is comprised of three different parts, gives the picture some depth so we can understand that he's within a particular space, but it is likely a fictive space of something invented by the artist. The landscape, if it were more visible, it's somewhat hard to see right over here. Let me zoom out a little bit more. It looks like there's some clouds, possibly a mountain, hard to tell. If it were more visible, it may provide a bit of a clue to the sitter's identity based off of what is depicted there, but it also might indicate Tintoretto's workshop practice. So as I mentioned, he had a large workshop which employed assistants throughout his career, among them a number of painters from other areas of the world, some of whom were employed as landscape specialists, those who would finish that aspect of the painting after another person painted the portrait. So this type of portrait provides an interesting example of how an artist's workshop may utilize different painters to finish a work of art for its patron, but one that is still considered to be by the artist Tintoretto. I hope you enjoyed taking a closer look at this painting. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. Thank you for watching.