RIDOLFI, Carlo
Venezia, Guglielmo Oddoni, 1642
In 4to, pp. (16), 93, (3), last blank; a xilography with a printer’s mark with a Tintoretto portrait; contemporary boards.Full edges copy. A possession note manuscript, “Est Joannis De Martinis”. Dedication to prince Francesco Erizzoand to Venetian Senate.
First edition
The first biography of the venetian painter, who trained on Michelangelo and Titian example, keeping by the first the drawing direction, and by the second the colour’s one, a sort of law that he was said to had written on a wall in his office.Carlo Ridolfi was biographer, some year later, also of Paolo Veronese, and an authority as an artistic historian on Veneto; he follows in a very particular way the rise of Tintoretto until San Rocco and beyond, weaving his personal and artistic affairs to a wider vision on Veneto’s artistic contemporary scene. With a specific attention to engravings of reproduction used by Raffaello and later as a disclosure mean for style and images, a mean knowingly employed by the painter, the author also speaks (p. 33 and 39) of printed translations that Agostino Carracci (but other Flemish painters too) made of the major Tintoretto’s works, developing a unique technique that allowed the engraver to reproduce on paper, by burin’s signs, the extraordinary colour and light effectst hat distinguish Tintoretto’s paint. It’s a source still important for the biography of the artist.
Cicognara 2358; Schlosser p. 482.
