(Venice 1560–1635)
The Temptation of Saint Anthony,
oil on canvas, 171 x 199.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Franco Semenzato & C. Sas, Venice, 8 December 1982, lot 638 (as Domenico Tintoretto, with wrong measurements);
Private European collection

Literature:
P. Rossi, Per il catalogo di Domenico e Jacopo Tinoretto: novità e precisioni, in: Arte veneta, vol. 55, 1999/II, pp. 32-36, fig. 6 (as Domenico Tintoretto);
P. Rossi, Disegni della bottega di Jacopo Tintoretto, in: Arte veneta, vol. 68, 2012, mentioned pp. 57-58 (as Domenico Tintoretto)

We are grateful to Giorgio Fossaluzza for his help in cataloguing the present lot.

This work demonstrates the inventiveness and pictorial quality of Domenico Tintoretto’s advanced style of painting following the death of his father, Jacopo Tintoretto (Venice 1518-1594). It can be compared to a sizeable group of ‘disegni pennellati’ (oil and brush works on paper) in the artist’s so-called ‘British Museum album’, in which he repeatedly revisits the same subject as the present painting. The album consists of twenty drawings in which Saint Anthony is shown tempted by female figures, while another thirteen depict the saint’s temptation by monstrous creatures (see S. Mason, in: Dal Pordenone a Palma il Giovane: devozione e pietà nel disegno del Cinquecento, Milan 2000, pp. 178-179; W. R. Rearick, Il disegno veneziano del Cinquecento, Milan 2001, pp. 206-207, 236 n. 345).

The artist repeatedly explored this theme throughout his career, experimenting with the subject and composition. Indeed, the subject evidently preoccupied him to such an extent that no other theme within the entirety of his vast corpus was studied by him with equivalent intensity. The rendering of the subject verges on a brusque realism which inclines toward the ugly, almost in a deliberate refusal of beauty, and through this, the erotic passages emerge in a series of dynamic of contrasts (see W. R. Rearick, Ibid., 2001, pp. 203-207).

Another painting of the same dimensions (currently whereabouts unknown) representing Christ appearing to Saint Anthony Abbot and banishing the devils of temptation was offered at the same auction in 1982 (see P. Rossi, Ibid., 1999/II, p. 36, fig. 9).

Giorgio Fossaluzza has suggested dating the present work to the beginning of the 1600s, the period during which the artist repeatedly dedicated himself to the subject of the temptation of Saint Anthony (see C. Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, vol. II, Venice 1648, p. 259).