Study for a Man with a Stick and a Sponge on a Ladder

Author: Albert Elen

In 1565 Tintoretto painted The Crucifixion for the Sala dell’Albergo in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, one of his most important commissions.^[1] The large canvas measures approximately 5 by 12 metres and is crowded with people in a great variety of poses. Five preparatory drawings for individual figures in the vast composition have survived.^[2] Our drawing is generally considered to be a study for the man standing on a ladder behind the cross in the centre of the painting, dipping a sponge on a reed into a bowl (fig.).^[3] Until recently, the attribution to Jacopo Tintoretto was uncontested. However, Marciari (2018) extensively argued that, in his opinion, the drawing is neither preparatory nor autograph. He considers supposed technical shortcomings, such as a badly foreshortened right arm and limitation to external contours, as atypical of the artist’s drawing style at the time. He also points out that the squaring is on a larger scale (approximately 58 mm) than in the other preparatory drawings (approximately 35 mm) and the figure’s right leg is visible, whereas in the painting it is hidden from view behind the cross. The artist usually drew only the visible parts of the painted figure in his studies, which he made at the last moment, when the design for the composition was already established.

Marciari (2018) believes our drawing is a later copy, either by a workshop assistant or Jacopo’s son Domenico (1560-1635), from around 1590, not made after the painting but from a much earlier figure study by Jacopo that has since been lost. Indeed, the argument of the squaring is true of another preliminary drawing for the same painting, a study of a clothed figure on horseback at centre right, now in London.^[4] Moreover, the horse itself has been left out, but the two figures are stylistically very similar in details like the outstretched hand and the schematically rendered feet. The London drawing is worked out to a greater extent, less sketchy than ours. Both sheets are identically inscribed 'G. Tintoretto' by an early collector at lower right and therefore have a common source.^[5]

The reasoning that Tintoretto did not draw parts which would not be visible in the painting does not support the argument that it is a study after either the painting or a lost preparatory drawing, as why would the draughtsman take the trouble to add a right leg from his imagination? And why would the squaring also be copied? We believe it is a genuine study, made slightly earlier in the creative process, in which the artist was experimenting with convincingly representing the balancing pose of the figure. At that moment he was perhaps also meant to be visible entirely, on a ladder that was supposed to stand to the left or right side against the horizontal beam instead of behind the upright beam of the cross. The unconventional position of this secondary but iconographically necessary figure on the ladder, halfway behind the frontally viewed cross (instead of standing on the ground in front holding up the sponge on a long stick), must have been the result of the artist’s obvious decision not to distract attention from Christ’s suffering by putting the ladder in front of him or to his side, as he did a few years earlier in a The Crucifixion he painted for the church of San Severo in Venice (c.1557-58).^[6] The result is the figure balancing behind the cross with a stick that is too short and in a position too hazardous to bring the sponge to Christ's mouth and, having climbed the ladder to the top, risking a fall.