L’Adorazione dei pastori di Jacopo Tintoretto “una stravagante invenzione”

“As if during an aurora borealis, the fiery sky lights up the interior through the ruined roof and blazes in at the small background window; light darts all over the room, transfiguring everything. Through the manifestation of this light, which has no precise source – it’s as unrestrained as grace, lumen de lumine – the humble stall is transformed into the brightest of dwellings, where every object and presence takes on an ulterior meaning alluding to a different dimension while visibly remaining the same.”
This slim volume contains the text of a lecture on Tintoretto’s Adoration of the Shepherds given by Adriano Mariuz in December 1989. One of the fascinating aspects of the essay is the deliberately colloquial tone, also found in Mariuz’s work on Grünewald and the Isenheim altarpiece, due to be published in 2011.
Here Tintoretto’s Adoration of the Shepherds turns out to be a key moment in the development of figurative art from Giorgione to Caravaggio. The closely linked text and illustrations eschew superfluous words or images, which makes for a very condensed and compelling read. This is Mariuz as an iconologist in an early writing from the time when he also interpreted the Giorgione frieze at Castelfranco Veneto.