What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

184 WHAT PAINTING IS
canvas, or between illusion and paint. It’s not the choice, but the
narrowness of the gap: the incredible tension generated by
something so infinitesimally near to perfection. Among painters
Tintoretto is especially famous for his diaphanous figures,
floating ghostlike across vast stretches of luminous dark canvas.
They are painted so lightly, so quickly, that they almost
disappear, but at the same time Tintoretto painted so loosely, and
with such broad strokes, that is never possible to forget that they
are merely paint. COLOR PLATE 14 is from a corner of a
Tintoretto painting. 18 The looseness of his hand is apparent on
the right, where some fabric from another garment meets the
lavender robe. Its dark brown stripes do not fold neatly under
the lavender, but come up at odd angles. One goes too far, and
another doesn’t quite make it. Each one is given a quick spot of
Lead White for accent. Behind is an orange Realgar field, now
mostly chipped off. The lavender robe itself is a marvel; it
reminds me that Tintoretto was named after his father, a dyer of
fabrics. It was painted with hanging, curling gestures, not unlike
the motion where I lift my hands after washing dishes, and bring
them down in the air to shake the water off. The paint comes
down from above, rapidly, and then swerves to the left, and it
does so repeatedly, each time leaving a thin white veil over the
darker Ultramarine. The motions are loose, and they are not
aligned to one another. At the center left there is a particularly
dense pair of strokes, one above the other. The white paint has
been squeezed out to the sides of the brush, making sharp
borders. Those marks, in turn, ran over others that did not make
the sharp turn, but continued straight down. One is visible where
it crosses the shadow below, and another in the shadow at the
upper left. They are slightly drier, and so they look more
granular where they skip over the weave of the canvas. Both of
them continue under the two curving marks. And those granular
straight marks lie on top of yet other marks. At the far top left,
there is a shadow, a curve of white, and another shadow, parts of
the deepest layer that is still visible. One of the granular white
strokes begins to cross the shadow at an angle.
On the left half of the detail, it is possible to do some sleuthing
and find at least these three layers. But Tintoretto is elusive. The
central passage is entirely enigmatic. The brushstrokes fall like
silk ribbons, one over another with no breaks. Each time the
brush passes, it carries a slightly different color: there are hints of