Aretino and Tintoretto

A portrait sitting has gone alarmingly wrong. Tintoretto holds a pistol upright and presses his other hand against his visitor’s chest. Pietro Aretino, wrapped in purple and fur, opens his hands and looks upward, while the empty canvas waits beside them. Ingres’s Aretino in the Studio of Tintoretto turns an encounter between painter and critic into a compact drama about fear, reputation and the power to control another person’s image. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s painting dates from 1848, when Ingres returned to a subject he had first painted in 1815. ^[1]

The joke behind the pistol

The weapon is part of a practical joke with an unusually sharp edge. In the story recorded in an artist’s note published by Henri Delaborde, Aretino has spoken badly of Tintoretto. The painter meets him, invites him home and offers to paint his portrait. Once his visitor is seated, Tintoretto suddenly produces a pistol from beneath his clothing. Aretino, convinced that the painter means to take revenge, cries out and asks what he intends. Tintoretto calmly explains that he wants to measure him. He proceeds from head to foot, announcing that Aretino is two and a half pistol-lengths tall. ^[2]

The disproportion is the joke: the painter has treated a deadly object as an ordinary studio implement, while the critic has had time to imagine the worst. According to the same account, Aretino recovers himself, rebukes Tintoretto for his outrageous behaviour and subsequently stops speaking ill of him. The episode ends in friendly relations. That ending matters. Ingres has chosen the instant before the frightened man understands what is happening, giving the viewer knowledge that the apparent victim lacks. ^[2]

Delaborde published the note in 1870, after Ingres’s death. It explains the narrative Ingres was working with; it does not establish that the encounter happened in Renaissance Venice. The museum likewise leaves the episode’s historical truth open. ^[1][2] The painting works as a pointed anecdote even if the event belongs to artists’ lore. Ridolfi’s seventeenth-century Tintoretto biography tells of a dagger; Paul Hayes Tucker presents the pistolese/pistolet translation story as a possible explanation for Ingres’s pistol. ^[3]

We should therefore resist turning the picture into evidence of a real attempted shooting. The pistol gives the threat an immediately recognisable shape, but its role in Ingres’s recorded story is theatrical. Its barrel rises between the two men, close enough to Aretino’s face to command attention, without being aimed at him. The painter’s steady hand on his chest is almost as unsettling: a gesture that could belong to arranging a sitter has become a means of holding him still.

How Ingres makes the confrontation visible

Two bodies, two kinds of control

Aretino occupies the left side of the painting, hemmed in by a red chair and the figure standing before him. His palms turn outward and upward. His fingers remain spread, offering no defence and holding no object. The head inclines backwards, and his eyes look above the painter’s face. These small changes of direction make him seem to withdraw even though there is little room to move.

Tintoretto presents a broad, dark back to the viewer. One foot stands on a low wooden platform, the other on the floor; his raised knee creates a diagonal beneath the cloak. He has the more active stance, yet his upper body appears controlled. Against Aretino’s open hands, Tintoretto’s hands have definite jobs: one carries the pistol, the other makes contact. The encounter can be read through posture before its literary source is known.

The museum compares Aretino’s pose to Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, the miraculous wounds associated with Christ’s Crucifixion. ^[1] The upward glance and exposed palms give the fright an unexpectedly solemn register. Yet the purple robe, gold chain and sumptuous chair keep the figure firmly within a world of material comfort. The resulting mixture makes the scene hover between alarm and comedy. Aretino looks far more ceremonious than the humiliating situation warrants.

Colour carries the action

The darkest mass belongs to Tintoretto’s cloak. Its wide sweep brings his shoulder and extended arm together, setting off the small pale collar and the light stockings below. Aretino’s robe is also dark, but purple emerges within it, crossed by a pink tie and the gold curve of his chain. The grey fur lining catches the light beside his exposed palm. Ingres uses these differences within darkness to keep the two bodies legible.

Red upholstery spreads around Aretino at the left edge, while a smaller red cushion reappears at the lower right. Between them, the wooden floor and furniture form a restrained brown setting. The face and hands consequently hold attention without needing a bright background. Look especially at the chain: it drops in a heavy loop across Aretino’s chest, directly below the place where the painter touches him. The critic’s finery becomes part of the vulnerable body being inspected.

Objects that prolong the pause

The cap on the floor is easy to overlook. It lies near the front edge, its pale interior turned towards us. Gloves and a white cloth rest on the arm of the chair, while another white cloth hangs beside the waiting canvas. Accessories of formal appearance surround a visitor who seems to have lost control of the occasion.

At the back, an onlooker peers through a partly opened door. We can see the face and a hand, but the small figure remains separate from the main action. The doorway introduces a second viewpoint within the room: someone else has caught sight of the extraordinary sitting. A framed portrait hangs higher on the wall, adding another face above the living ones. The painting encourages us to notice observers as well as protagonists.

A studio assembled from pictures

The large blank canvas takes up much of the right side. Its uninterrupted surface makes the encounter especially strange. There is no portrait yet for the critic to judge, and no painted likeness for the sitter to inspect. The two men have become the spectacle that the canvas was supposed to produce.

Behind them stands a larger picture containing a crowd and an interior. Tucker identifies it as Tintoretto’s altered Marriage at Cana, and sources the protagonists through Titian’s Portrait of a Gentleman, formerly called Aretino, and probably Tintoretto’s Louvre self-portrait. ^[3] The room is thus assembled from art. Aretino’s convincing presence should not be confused with a secure likeness of the writer.

The edges of the canvases help organise a room that might otherwise seem crowded. The tall, pale rectangle on the right balances the dark fall of Aretino’s robe on the left. Its sloping side cuts across the picture behind, letting us understand one surface as nearer than the other. Below, the easel’s splayed legs open a second space alongside the cramped encounter. The painter commands the centre while his equipment occupies almost an entire side of the image.

Ingres’s own remarks help explain the seriousness of this traffic with earlier art. In the notes gathered by Delaborde, he recommends keeping prints and sketches after the masters close at hand, to cultivate judgement and help one understand new things. ^[2] Such advice gives borrowing an active purpose. Here the inherited material has been arranged into an encounter whose awkwardness and comic timing remain immediately readable.

Returning to the subject in 1848

The Met identifies the later version as a commission for Marcotte Genlis. ^[1] Delaborde independently records an 1848 repetition with variants and names Marcotte Genlis as its owner when exhibited in 1855. He also distinguishes it from the earlier composition. ^[2] This is a fresh painted object with its own history, separated from the first treatment by more than three decades. Tucker contrasts the earlier wooden panel with this canvas, noting darker clothing, a cord replacing the belt and simplified furnishings. ^[3]

In the 1848 painting, those elements contribute to a very concentrated action. The pink cord draws the eye across Aretino’s middle before the robe drops towards the floor; the plain chair arm supports the abandoned gloves; the small lit doorway remains visible behind the sitter. Each object is easy to locate, while the darkness around the central figures keeps them close together. Tucker illustrates a Bayonne pencil-and-watercolour, a Montauban nude study dated about 1848 and a composition drawing possibly traced after the earlier painting. ^[3] The distinctions matter: a nude study and a possible tracing need not belong to the same stage. Ingres’s drawings offer a wider view of how an image could be studied, preserved and revisited.

Ingres addressed repetition directly in a statement dated 1859 and preserved by Delaborde. He acknowledged the complaint that he returned to old compositions too frequently. His answer was that affection for their subjects made them worth improving through repainting or retouching. He also admitted limits, considering it absurd to try remaking his Martyrdom of Saint Symphorian. ^[2] This later explanation should not be mistaken for a surviving brief for the Aretino commission, but it establishes the artistic value he could attach to revision.

The companion picture: Aretino before imperial power

Aretino in the Studio of Tintoretto was conceived with a companion, Aretino and the Envoy of Charles V. Delaborde pairs the earlier compositions and records 1848 repetitions of both. In the companion’s story, Charles V sends a gold chain after an unsuccessful expedition against Algiers, hoping to buy the writer’s silence. Aretino accepts the gift while expressing contempt for its smallness. ^[2]

The pairing changes the scale of the studio joke. A man who can embarrass an emperor is suddenly made helpless by a painter. Read together, the subjects offer two methods of managing criticism: a gift meant to purchase silence, and a frightening performance that makes the critic reconsider his conduct. Their humour depends on Aretino’s power over others as much as on his momentary loss of composure.

The 1848 Envoy is now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, which records it as oil on canvas, 43 × 34 cm, accession 2013.1.1. The museum acquired it in December 2012 with institutional support and a public subscription involving 1,536 donors. Charles V acts through his messenger; he is not physically represented. ^[4]

Delaborde describes a significant alteration in that companion: the earlier Aretino stood with one hand at his hip, weighing the chain in the other; the repetition seated him, leaning back in his chair. ^[2] Revision could thus change the writer’s whole performance. The companions were opportunities to rework a character and a relationship, beyond preserving an attractive arrangement.

Ingres, Aretino and the Envoy of Charles V, 1848. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 2013.1.1. The separate companion painting. ^[5]

Exhibitions, criticism and the route to New York

Delaborde places the earlier studio picture at the Cercle des Arts in Paris around 1839–40, then in the Collot collection and with Schroth following the 1852 sale. Those details concern the earlier work. For the 1848 repetition, he records the 1855 exhibition and its reproduction in outline in the volume associated with Magimel. ^[2] The same anecdote therefore circulated through separate paintings, public exhibition and a printed rendering. Its reception cannot be reduced to a single unveiling. Tucker reports Ary Scheffer’s 1848 objection to repeated subjects for a prospective purchase, and Théophile Silvestre’s 1855 attack on Ingres’s reuse of compositions and older art. ^[3] Such responses invite us to look closely at what a revised composition changes.

In the notes published by Delaborde, Ingres also allows criticism a constructive role. He recommends weighing friends’ observations in light of their taste and habits, and suggests that freely expressed opinions can be useful. ^[2] The pistol story should therefore not stand for his entire attitude towards judgement. Its vindictive pleasure coexists with a more practical recognition that another person may see a fault.

Later ownership passed through the Marcotte family and Bessonneau collection before Robert Lehman bought the painting in 1954. ^[3] It entered the Met with the Robert Lehman Collection in 1975. ^[1] Its small dimensions invite a close encounter today: the hand against the chest, the fallen cap and the waiting canvas can each redirect the story as we look.