Tintoretto was apparently genuinely deeply devout and unworldly, and his paintings combine this intense feeling with the immense technical and intellectual advancement of the Renaissance. On this technical level, for example, the scale of what is going on in this painting is just staggering. A very gifted artist could for example plausibly create a fake ‘original’ Van Gogh or Impressionist work by more or less anyone, but I don’t think they could seriously do that with someone like Tintoretto - it’s just far too advanced in things like composition, perspective for someone who isn’t at the heights of a Tintoretto to pull it off. The comparative technical demands to create a plausible Impressionist or Van Gogh are far less, which isn’t to say though that someone should prefer the Tintoretto. So anyway at a technical and intellectual level we’re at some kind of summit where the artist like Tintoretto are intensely involved in applying ‘secular’ expansions in knowledge like mathematics and perspective to their art.
There is generally a positive value judgement made about this progress in Western art, into greater realms of realism, and there are amazing direct feelings that can result where the viewer can have the experience of not just seeing the painting as a three dimensional space, but actually somehow having a mind altering experience of being in that space! However the pinnacle of focus for someone devout is the divine, and holy simplicity being integral to this world. One of the key enemies to this is intellectual pride, embodied in the notion of the Tower of Babel, of man through his own knowledge and advancement overthrowing heaven; and so all the intellectual advancement that a Tintoretto gloried in could easily become precisely such a temptation. There is an incredibly powerful dynamic of elements which may be wrestling with each other rather than necessarily in sync, such as the obsessive concern to create a plausible three dimensional reality, using the very advanced theories on perspective, which you could say the viewer is coercively dragged into; and then one can ask how does this fit into the highest ideal of devout feeling, which must be highest concern.
This might all sound quite abstract, and making an issue out of not much but I think it is made very clear with the painting below, Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet. Look at the ridiculous, monumental space Tintoretto has created for the scene! And why has he created such a strange environment to house the spiritual scene, with those massive arches and that endlessly receding space? Through mastery of perspective, to create the very advanced illusion of a three dimensional space, and which the viewer can not just see from apart but have the very strange and powerful experience of being sucked into. This concern far outweighs holy simplicity and resonance with the spiritual reality of the scene, which in terms of actual plausibility should be a very very different kind of room! So what kind of reality is the artist in service of? It could be said to be the intellect, the exaltation of man’s reasoning powers. Tintoretto would presumably argue, as a devout believer, that this in turn exalts God, but this painting particularly shows how unbalanced the results of such a process can easily become. It is actually be seen as a form and artistic incarnation of progress idolatry.
One final thought is it’s obvious within movements like surrealism that, given the intentionally unrealistic worlds created by people like Dali, that we can talk about strangeness, but actually here with someone like Tintoretto we may be dealing with a much deeper strangeness, where the dynamic of competing sensibilities, of the intellectual or secular and the divine, surrender and self-exaltation are wrestling far more strongly. The surface realism may conceal or mask this strangeness, but just look at this painting below! “But it’s just a realistic painting.” It’s not realistic at all!
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