Jacopo Tintoretto
NG 16 
Saint George and the Dragon

Nicholas Penny, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

c.1555

Oil on canvas, 158.3 × 100.5 cm

Support

The fine tabby‐weave canvas has an average thread count of 18 per centimetre in the warp and 16 in the weft.¹ It has been paste‐lined on to a similar but heavier tabby‐weave canvas. The stretcher is of varnished pine with crossbars.

Cusping is apparent on all four edges of the original canvas and especially so at the sides. Thus the original dimensions are unlikely to have differed significantly. The edges are ragged but largely concealed by putty of three different types, corresponding to three campaigns of restoration, but an unpainted border remains visible in some areas, notably at the lower left.

Materials and Technique

The canvas was given a thin gesso ground. Extensive underdrawing has recently been revealed by infrared reflectography (fig. 2). Every aspect of the composition was drawn with a brush on the gesso with the exception of God the Father. There were several notable differences from the image that was finally painted. The towers of the city walls were drawn crowned with domes and with the ramparts populated by spectators. The saint’s head was placed in a higher position. The princess was positioned higher on the canvas and her head was turned more in profile. The most radical change is in the left foreground where the corpse was more prominent and in an entirely different pose. Tintoretto began to paint this figure but then replaced it with the smaller one. In both cases a grid was employed to transfer the drawing of the figure and can be seen in the underdrawing. This grid is also apparent on the paper in the case of the drawing for the figure in the final composition, which has survived and is discussed below.²

The princess’s dress is painted with ultramarine mixed with varying proportions of lead white. Azurite was used for some of the other blues (notably in the sea). Malachite mixed with white lead and with lead‐tin yellow, or verdigris with lead‐tin yellow, are the chief paint mixtures in the landscape: a verdigris was also employed alone as a glaze in the darkest areas. The princess’s cloak is painted with red lake.

X‐radiography suggests that the tree trunk on the left was an afterthought. A branch, or trunk, was originally painted inclining in the other direction – as is, in fact, easily discerned in a raking light. Other trees or branches may have been tried out and cancelled here. The figures, on the other hand, seem not to have been changed in their essentials, although the drapery folds were improvised on the canvas, and the fingers of the princess’s right hand were modified. A small addition breaking the clean sweep of the princess’s raised cloak was painted over the dark green behind her and has now darkened. The tail of drapery above her right leg may also have been an afterthought.

Conservation

During its first twenty years in the Gallery the painting was varnished, probably more than once, with mastic varnish mixed with oil.³ In 1853 a tendency for the original canvas to detach itself from the lining canvas was observed in several parts of the painting. It was revarnished in 1862 and relined in 1866.

No further treatment was recorded until 1940, when slight damage to the surface caused in transport to storage in North Wales at the beginning of the Second World War received attention and cleaning tests were carried out. The painting was ‘polished’ by ‘Holder’ in the spring of 1942 and by ‘Vallance’ in July 1945. A detailed examination of the painting was conducted in June 1945, preparatory to cleaning and restoration, but permission to proceed was not given until December 1961. The work was carried out between February and July 1962.

Condition

The painting has been flattened and abraded in some areas, but the original impasto is reasonably preserved and, in general, where the paint is thickest – in parts of the horse’s rump, some of the pink of the princess’s cloak, her flesh – the picture can be described as in good condition. Areas which have most obviously suffered from abrasion include the dark green of the foliage on the bank to either side of the tree stump, Saint George’s floating cloak, which now reveals an orange underlayer (presumably the glue‐darkened gesso ground), and the figure of God the Father in the sky, which was thinly painted in ultramarine and pink and is now more ghostly than was intended. Originally it would have been more obvious that it picked up the pink and blue of the foreground and middle distance. Salient points of the canvas weave are exposed in several places, but in some areas – for instance in the clump of trees on the right and in the spines of the dragon’s left wing – the thinly gessoed ground was left untouched by the artist.

The ultramarine of the princess’s dress may have blanched a little and the shadows in the skirt are no longer as deep as they must once have been. The back‐plate of Saint George’s armour is unconvincing in shape and has an oddly scrubbed look which is perhaps only partly intended. Most importantly, the raised part of the princess’s cloak looks washed out, the effect of increased transparency. The critic Thomas Griffiths Wainewright in 1821 admired the way that ‘the robe of Sabra [the Princess], warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved from the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf’.⁴ Although Wainewright knew little of the history of pigments (Prussian blue had not yet been invented in the sixteenth century), he certainly knew the colour vermilion. However, the tiny quantity of vermilion recorded by Plesters in one sample of the drapery is not considered significant and Wainewright perhaps used the term loosely for red.

Alterations to the Painting: Discoveries in Cleaning

Although the canvas is rectangular, the painting is arched. It must have been originally displayed in a frame with [page 143][page 144]spandrels, as it has been since 1962. The two top corners were left unpainted, save for a thin coat of black pigment. At a later date they were overpainted with clouds, in a creditable imitation of Tintoretto’s rapid and loaded brushwork. Much of this remains, concealed from view. The change was presumably made to adapt the painting as a gallery picture.

During cleaning in 1962 the turbulent character of the strip of landscape beyond Saint George became much more evident, and the hypothesis was advanced that it represents a foaming river. However, there seems to be no bank on the far side and there is no continuity between the ‘river’ and the lake into which it would surely have been intended to flow. More probably it was originally intended as a grassy slope. Forms reminiscent of water are found elsewhere in the painting: the earth behind the princess to the right has the swirling lines of a stream, and the sheer walls of the fortress have the sheen of a waterfall.

Attribution and Date

The painting has always been acknowledged as an entirely autograph work by Tintoretto. Modern scholars have generally regarded it as ‘early’ or, more precisely, as a painting of the artist’s first maturity – that is, of the 1550s. Osmaston in 1915, however, regarded it as a late work and Cecil Gould dated it ‘not earlier than the 1560s’, arguing that the lighting on the trees was typical of his work in 1565.⁵ It is possible to sense that Joyce Plesters, in her account of the relatively orthodox technique used in this painting, would have preferred to assign it to an earlier period than Gould.⁶

The assurance with which space is created and intervals are employed for dramatic effect distinguishes it from the artist’s securely dated paintings of the late 1540s – notably the Last Supper of 1547 (still in S. Marcuola, Venice), and the Miracle of Saint Mark of 1548 now in the Accademia – where the compositions are crowded, but it retains the intense local colour characteristic of those early works. The brilliance is sometimes present in the shadows (as in the red drapery), sometimes in the middle tones (as in the blue), sometimes in the lights (as in the greens), so that it is ‘as if the colours emitted light on their own accord rather than received it from an outside source’.⁷ This is an effect never found to the same degree in his paintings dated after 1560. The landscape in NG 16 includes some delicate passages similar to those in the Susanna in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which is generally agreed to have been painted around 1555–60.⁸

The Saint and his Cult

The Canon of Pope Gelasius I (elected 492‐d. 496) lists Saint George among the martyrs justly revered by the faithful. He was said to have been a native of Cappadocia, and to have suffered under the Emperor Diocletian, at Nicomedia. By the sixth century the saint’s tomb was located at Diospolis (Lydda) in Palestine and ‘he had acquired the inheritance of veneration’ previously accorded to the pagan hero Perseus.⁹ His cult was strong throughout the eastern Mediterranean. It was brought, together with his relics, to Western Europe by the crusaders: Eastern Europeans (Greeks and Slavs) who had long venerated George ensured that he was especially popular in Venice, where many of his relics were collected, as he also was in the rival city of Genoa and in England.

In later medieval art Saint George was generally represented killing the dragon which, according to legend, inhabited the lake outside the city of Lydda (or, in some accounts, Silene). The people of Lydda, having depleted their flocks, had taken to feeding the monster with human beings. George arrived in time to save the only daughter of the king. After subduing the dragon, he bade the princess lead it to the city, where 20,000 people were then baptised in consequence of his prowess. Jacopo da Voragine, relating this episode in the Golden Legend, mentions that some sources say that George slew the dragon on the spot.¹⁰ He also concedes that some authorities had expressed some scepticism about this legend. There is indeed no early source for this exploit which may have originated in a misinterpretation by the crusaders of an allegorical relief of the Emperor Constantine.¹¹ It was much [page 145][page 146]favoured not only in the visual arts but in vernacular texts, some of which were printed.¹²

Although earlier Venetian paintings of George and the dragon are familiar (especially that by Carpaccio), the subject was most common in relief carvings in stone, many of which, mostly dating from the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, may still be seen in the city.¹³ For Tintoretto the most noteworthy of these would have been the relief commissioned from Pietro da Salò for the façade of the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in 1551 (fig. 1) and probably completed by the end of March 1552. It has been plausibly proposed by Roland Krischel that Tintoretto took from this relief the idea of showing the horse with both front legs raised directly above the dragon, which turns its head back, only to be pierced in his open jaws by George’s lance. He also notes how Tintoretto, like Pietro da Salò but unlike other artists, shows the lance held on the further side of the horse’s neck. The differences are also notable, and Krischel points out that Tintoretto positions the lance in such a way that it can be read as a horn projecting from the forehead of his mount, which, being white, thus seems converted into a unicorn.¹⁴

Saint George was also depicted as one of a series of standing figures aligned with other saints. In such cases his normal attributes were the dragon and a banner with a red cross on a white field. Tintoretto was commissioned to paint George and Louis of Toulouse together (they were the name saints of his patrons) for the offices of the Magistrati del Sale in Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice in 1552 (fig. 3). He included as a third figure the princess riding on the back of the dragon – she is silhouetted against his white horse and reflected in his breast plate. This departure from convention was evidently controversial: it was deplored by Dolce in his Dialogo of 1557 (like many other commentators since, he supposed that Tintoretto had included a third saint in this comic position).¹⁵

The Subject and its Treatment

Connoisseurs were excited by the daring character of this composition when it was exhibited in London in 1821. ‘The ordonnance of this highly desirable performance is very characteristic of the school of Rubusti,’ wrote Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, noting that the horizon is placed ‘two‐thirds up the picture’ and the figures are grouped in such a manner as to ‘shoot obliquely across the canvas from the base to the horizon’.¹⁶ The unorthodox treatment of the subject was also apparent to William Young Ottley in his Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery with Critical Remarks on their Merits of 1832:A very masterful performance, in which, boldly departing from the usual routine, the painter has represented the battle of the Saint with the Dragon, in the middleground of his picture; and has allotted to the Princess, whom he delivered, a prominent situation in the foreground.The figure of St George is seen in a back view, and is full of spirit: he has just thrust his lance into the extended jaws of the monster; whose former prowess is evinced by the dead body of one of his victims, which is represented, under the horse, a little nearer the spectator. That of the Princess is finely conceived, and very animated. She hears the yells of the dragon, and the din of the combat; and overcome by terror, rushes forward with extended arms. Her dress, a dark blue, relieves her figure, from the light background; and her red mantle, floating behind her, gives increased energy to her action, and augmented effect to the bold fore‐shortening of her body.¹⁷ To this account it is necessary to add Cecil Gould’s observation that ‘in Renaissance representations of St George and the dragon the princess is most usually shown either on her knees in prayer or else running away. In the present picture Tintoretto has combined the two actions: the princess has suddenly dropped to her knees during flight.’¹⁸ It is perhaps more likely that Tintoretto may, rather, have intended to show her rising from her knees in excitement. Gould also noted that the appearance of God the Father in the clouds was an innovation. It may perhaps have been suggested by the way that the hand of God was frequently introduced by Byzantine artists – a convention with which Tintoretto must have been familiar (see fig. 4).¹⁹

Most earlier representations of the subject had a horizontal format and it must have been the need to compress the narrative into a vertical one suited to an altarpiece that prompted Tintoretto’s novel idea of placing the princess in the foreground. Other painters employing a vertical format had elevated her on a ledge of rock in the middle distance. This is the arrangement in Marco Basaiti’s altarpiece of 1520 for S. Pietro in Castello (now in the Accademia, Venice), and Paris Bordone’s high altarpiece for S. Giorgio dei Frati Minori in S. Francesco in Noale (Treviso) of c. 1525 (now in the Pinacoteca, Vatican).²⁰ The only artist who had previously given the princess such prominence was Cosimo Tura on the organ shutters now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Ferrara.²¹ Since he needed to divide his narrative into two vertical parts he allowed the princess to dominate the left‐hand shutter and placed George and the dragon on the right.

More remarkable than the prominence of the princess is Tintoretto’s decision to place the saint in the middle distance: ‘approchons: ce soldat de Dieu n’est guère visible,’ wrote Jean‐Paul Sartre in his Marxist essay on the painting, proposing that it was Tintoretto’s aversion to the aristocratic world of chivalry that prompted this: ‘Georges, c’est l’ennemi personnel du peintre.’ Rather in contradiction to this he also asserted that because ‘les goûts du Tintoret sont plébéiens’ he relished the idea of dispatching the dragon with one decisive blow – the worker smartly bangs in a nail (‘bref le travailleur enfonce un clou’), as if it was noble or knightly to falter and dally.²²

Michael Kitson, in a radio talk given in October 1963, observed how the division of the action makes it possible for us to suppose that what we see is what the princess imagines, or prays for: ‘the curious way in which the saint, the dragon, and the corpse are bound together in an enclosed oval, seen over the princess’s shoulder, would support this interpretation – though we must not assume that Tintoretto consciously intended the picture to be read in this way.’²³

The Painting as an Altarpiece

Although a few other paintings did sometimes have an arched shape (the painting of Saint George and Saint Louis of Toulouse mentioned above is a case in point), it is nevertheless reasonable to presume that the painting was intended as an altarpiece. The artist’s ‘bold departure’ from convention becomes more remarkable given this. For an altarpiece it would be small, but not very much smaller than Tintoretto’s Assunta formerly in San Stin (now in the Accademia, Venice),²⁴ and it is not hard to find altarpieces of similar size in Venetian churches.²⁵ However, had the painting been made for a church in Venice it must have been quickly removed from its location, or was perhaps never accepted for such, otherwise Venetian guidebooks of the early seventeenth century would have mentioned it. Ridolfi, in his life of Tintoretto published in 1642, does, however, mention that Tintoretto made ‘an altarpiece of St. George killing the dragon’ for the chapter house of SS. Giovanni e Paolo that had been removed and replaced by a copy.²⁶ Such an altarpiece would probably not be as large as those in the main body of the church.

The fact that the painting is first recorded in a Venetian palace in the seventeenth century suggests that it may always have been kept in a private domestic setting, probably originally in a private chapel – the sixteenth‐century chapel in Palazzo Grimani, for example, must have had an altarpiece of similar size. Humfrey notes that ‘from time to time the maintenance of chapels at home was expressly forbidden by the patriarch, for fear that the nobility would neglect the city’s churches; yet these very proscriptions imply that the rule was frequently infringed.’²⁷ The relegation of Saint George to the middle distance would surely also have disqualified the painting for public worship. For, although it was increasingly common for altarpieces to be narrative paintings, generally representing the martyrdom of a saint, these were so contrived that the saint was clearly visible in the foreground as a focus for prayer.

The Saint George Altarpiece in S. Giorgio

NG 16 is unlikely to have been acceptable for an altarpiece in a church, but the composition was adopted, in reverse, by an unknown assistant of Domenico Tintoretto for a major altarpiece about twelve feet (4 m) tall in S. Giorgio Maggiore (fig. 6).²⁸ Here too the princess is in the foreground and the castle walls are in the distance (in this case the princess’s parents are visible beside the walls). The heavens also open, but instead of God the Father there is a circle of six angels from which a shaft of light is emitted, aligned with the saint’s lance. The chief difference is that in the larger painting the [page 148]saint is relatively prominent and is galloping towards us. Although this painting was greatly admired as a work of art, it was regarded as highly controversial.²⁹

The altarpiece was painted for the third altar in the left aisle of S. Giorgio, probably in 1594. At some time between then and his death in 1617 Fortunato Olmo, a monk in the Benedictine congregation of S. Giorgio, described the painting in very defensive terms in his manuscript Cronaca of the monastery and its church.³⁰ He was aware that the story of the dragon had been dismissed as a ‘favola’ by ‘il Baronio’‐ Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), known as Baronius, who was not only the greatest authority on the history of the church but enjoyed papal favour: he was appointed confessor of Pope Clement VIII, who made him a cardinal in 1596. Olmo was therefore bold to insist that the story of the dragon was an acceptable subject for an altarpiece. He objected to the weight given to surviving written evidence at the expense of tradition. And, he asked, who knows what sources unknown to us were used by Jacopo da Voragine? (This was a shaky argument, since Voragine conceded that the legends of the saint were doubtful and contradictory.)

Critics of the altarpiece seem eventually to have prevailed. In 1648 Matteo Ponzone was commissioned to paint a replacement for the large altarpiece, which was removed to the sacristy (it now hangs unframed on the entrance wall).³¹ Ponzone’s saint looks up at heaven but is not engaged in killing the dragon – which orthodox opinion now preferred to regard as a symbol – and the princess is absent. (Baronius speculated that in the earliest representations she had probably been intended as the personification of a province liberated from paganism.³²)

Olmo emphasised the importance of the relics of Saint George (an arm brought to the city from Calabria in 1396 and a portion of his head, acquired in 1462), of which his monastery was guardian, and no one would have denied that George should be venerated as patron saint not only of the monastery but also of the whole city (‘come di tutelare e protettore non solo delllsola, ma della Città di Venezia ancora’). But some embarrassment over his previous prominence is clear from the fact that the high altar of Palladio’s new church – the great sculptural ensemble by Girolamo Campagna, completed in 1591 – was dedicated not to Saint George (as had formerly been the case) but instead to the Trinity, and also from the fact that Saint George’s altar was not more richly appointed than that of his co‐titular, Saint Stephen.

Tintoretto and the Counter Reformation

Baronius was not the first to cast doubt on the legend of Saint George and the Dragon. Giovanni Andrea Gilio in his Dialogues published in 1564 had listed it first among the stories which were popular but ‘falzi, favolosi & apocrifi’.³³ Although there are reasons why Tintoretto’s painting would not have been acceptable as an altarpiece, at least in a church, and although the altarpiece which it did later inspire was indeed clearly controversial, it may, paradoxically, have been the case that Tintoretto himself was responding to the aversion reforming churchmen felt at the promotion of a fable, or at best an allegory, to the same status as a properly authenticated miracle or martyrdom, or an episode of the Gospels. For the emphasis in NG 16 is given to someone whose prayers are answered by God; the saint is reduced to an agent of the divinity, almost to a symbol for divine intervention.

That Tintoretto really was alert to the theological issues involved becomes more plausible if we can find evidence that other artists or patrons in the same period were anxious to avoid the conventional representation of Saint George killing the dragon. Moroni in the central panel of his great polyptych of the mid‐1570s above the high altar of S. Giorgio, Fiorano al Serio, showed the kneeling princess as a contemporary lady, with no crown, looking up in gratitude at the saint, who is wearing Roman armour and holding a shattered lance. Moroni was as averse to depicting action as Tintoretto was attracted to it, but his emphasis on supplication and intercession (reinforced by a prominent inscription below) might be said to parallel Tintoretto’s.³⁴

Evidence of patrons who wished to avoid the traditional image of Saint George may be deduced from the case of S. Giorgio in Braida in Verona, which was rebuilt in the mid‐sixteenth century. The previous high altarpiece had probably been a painting by Francesco Caroto of George killing the dragon, which was subsequently transferred to a church dedicated to that saint at Marega di Bevilacqua. Veronese and other artists in the 1550s made designs for a new altarpiece showing violent combat with the dragon but when, in the following decade, Veronese was commissioned to undertake the painting he was given a completely different subject: the saint praying before his martyrdom for the salvation of onlookers who have appealed to him. In the heavens above are the Virgin and Child, other saints and angels, and the three theological virtues.³⁵

In Antwerp in 1590 Maarten de Vos did erect an altarpiece with Saint George and the Princess but the allegorical nature of the latter was inescapable, as if to anticipate the argument of Pierre Coton and Molanus in their influential treatises on religious imagery published in 1612 and 1617 that the story is acceptable if we clearly understand that the princess stands for the Church.³⁶

Previous Owners

The earliest known record of Tintoretto’s painting can be found in Ridolfi’s life of Tintoretto included in his Maraviglie of 1648 (it is not included in his separate life of the artist in 1642, unless it is identical with the painting said there to have been in SS. Giorgio e Paolo). He writes that ‘Signor Pietro Corraro Senatore’ had ‘un gratiossisimo pensiero di San Giorgio, che uccide il Drago, con la figliuola del Rè, che impaurita sen fugge, e vi appaiano alcuni corpi de’ morti di rarissima forma’ (‘a most delightful sketch of St. George killing the dragon with the king’s daughter who flees in terror and also including some corpses very finely disposed’).³⁷ There is in fact only one corpse but such an error is easily made. It may also be objected that NG 16 is not a sketch, but given the size of painting generally associated with Tintoretto the [page 149]assumption is understandable, and it was repeated by more recent authors.³⁸ Boschini in 1660 describes a painting of the same subject in the possession of the same family in his Carta del Navegar Pittoresco:
L’è un San Zorzi a cavalo bravo, e forte,
Che de ficon va con la lanza in resta,
E amazza el Drago, e la Rezina resta
Libera dal Spavento, e dela morte. Questo a Casa Corer fè corer tuti.³⁹
(There a Saint George on a mount strong and brave
Quick as a flash, his lance in its rest,
Slaughters the dragon, and so puts to rest
The terror of the Queen whom from death he saves. And this all career to see in the Correr palace.) That this painting is identical to the one in the National Gallery is further suggested by Boschini’s marginal note that the picture was almost a miniature – relative, that is, to the rest of Tintoretto’s œuvre. How famous the picture really was is hard to tell, given Boschini’s love of hyperbole and of puns. Ridolfi records no other paintings in the Correr collection but Boschini mentions a number of modern gallery pictures. These are likely to have been purchased or commissioned around the mid‐century by Pietro’s son Giacomo Correr (1611–1661), who became a procurator of St Mark’s in 1649. The collection has been studied by Linda Borean, to whose researches the following paragraphs are indebted.

Pietro Correr (1582–1651) of the Santa Sofia branch of his family was a distinguished servant of the state, successively Capitano of Cividale, Belluno, Treviso, Bergamo and Verona; inquisitor in the Levant; and then Capitano of Padua and of Brescia. The painting would presumably have been in his ‘casa dominicale’ at San Polo (which, he declared in his will, he had often had it in mind to embellish and enlarge). In 1649, two years before his death in September 1651, he had the pleasure of seeing his only son, Jacopo, known as Giacomo, elected procurator of St Mark’s de supra (a post that cost him 25,000 ducats).

Giacomo had a gallery of some one hundred paintings in his apartments in the Procuratorie Nuove in St Mark’s square Square , including the notable modern works mentioned by Boschini, but also many sixteenth‐century paintings. An inventory of this collection was compiled after his death, when it was scheduled to be sold (in accordance with his wishes). However, a ‘retrato antico’ and a ‘san Zorzi’ which had been in the ‘camera sopra il rio’ were recorded in a document of 3 February 1662 by his son‐in‐law as the property of the family and thus inherited from Pietro. The Saint George was evidently taken back to the palace in San Polo: a ‘san Zorzi senza soaza’ in the ‘camera prima sopra la canal’ appears in an inventory of 10 January 1662, compiled in connection with the return of the dowry of Jacopo’s widow, Marina Pisani. The high valuation (100 ducats) confirms the identification, although it is odd that the artists responsible for the inventory (Giuseppe Heintz and Nicolo Renieri) did not record Tintoretto’s name. The absence of a frame can be explained by the picture’s recent move. The painting presumably remained with the family – that is, with Antonio Correr, a kinsman whom Jacopo’s only child, Elisabetta, had been obliged to marry in 1650, and then with Vettore Correr, another kinsman, whom she married in 1676.⁴⁰

A painting which claimed to be the one mentioned by both Ridolfi and Boschini was included in a large and important sale at Prestage’s, London, on 2 February 1764 as ‘an undoubted picture’ by ‘Giacomo Tintoretto’, with dimensions (5 ft 3 in. × 3 ft 3 in.; 160 × 99 cm) very close to those of the National Gallery painting. It was said to come from the Cornaro family but this was presumably an error, the Corner/Cornaro being a more celebrated patrician family than Correr/Corraro.⁴¹

The title‐page of the sale indicates that it included the entire collection of the ‘noble family of Grassi’ and ‘many bought of the noble families of Cornaro, Corraro, Rezzonico, Mozenigo, and sundry others’, so the Corraro family is acknowledged as a source. Unfortunately, the annotated copy of the catalogue does not indicate the buyer of the Tintoretto.⁴² The reference to the Grassi does, however, provide a clue as to the identity of the consigner because Pietro Gradenigo recorded in his diary for 31 January 1762 (1763 in the modern calendar) that a certain Monsieur Dublin who was ‘seeking all over the world for sumptuous furnishings for a royal court’ (‘un tale Monsieur Dublin che gira il Mondo per provedere arredi costosi per una corte reale’) had purchased a hundred select pictures from the gallery of the ‘nobiluomini fratelli Bortolo, Paolo e Giovanni Grassi’ and also the splendid tapestries depicting the deeds of Charles V from the Grassi palace.⁴³ Dublin had perhaps also made a tempting offer to the Correr family.

The painting next emerges in the collection of the Revd Holwell Carr, by whom it was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1831. He owned it by 1821, when it was exhibited at the British Institution.⁴⁴

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright recalled that it had formerly belonged to ‘R. Westall Esq.’, that is, to Richard Westall RA (1765–1836).⁴⁵ This artist enjoyed considerable success as a painter in oils and watercolour and as an illustrator. His career probably reached a climax in 1811 when Richard Payne Knight commissioned the Grecian Marriage from him for a thousand guineas. But in July 1815 his debts necessitated the sale of his entire property.⁴⁶ He had already been active as a collector and dealer, and he had sold a group of old master paintings at Phillips on 8 and 9 March 1813, including a Samson and Delilah by Tintoretto acquired by Samuel Rogers, and a scene of the doge of Venice in procession, also attributed to Tintoretto, which was bought by Lord Aberdeen (see p. 244). He particularly prized Tintoretto’s Raising of Lazarus, which he had acquired for 50 guineas by March 1814 and had offered to the Marquess of Stafford for 2,000 guineas. It only fetched 79 guineas in the sale of 1815, which took place on 6 July, despite the care he had taken in cleaning and restoring it and the lavish frame he had had made for it.⁴⁷ It was acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, having passed through the Holford and Rothermere collections.⁴⁸[page 150]Westall turned increasingly to picture dealing after this but not with much success, or at least not with enough, for he was reduced to seeking relief from the Royal Academy and from former patrons.⁴⁹ The other big sale in his name was at Phillips on 11 and 12 May 1827 but we know that he consigned 13 lots to Christie’s for their sale of 25 June 1825 and Wainewright, who seems to have been a friend, puffed several pictures (a portrait by ‘Moroni’, a delicate Schiavone and a ‘Raphael’) to be seen in his house in June 1822.⁵⁰ Tintoretto’s Saint George and the Dragon was lot 34 of Westall’s sale on 14 April 1832, so either he in fact owned another version of the painting or, conceivably, he had sold the original to Holwell Carr and was now selling a copy.

Provenance

See above. Almost certainly the property of Pietro Correr by 1648. By descent to Pietro’s granddaughter and her husbands. Probably sold by the Correr family around 1762. Sold at Prestage’s, London, 2 February 1764, lot 143. Apparently in the possession of Richard Westall before 1821 and perhaps sold by him between 1815 and that date. By 1821 in the possession of the Revd W. Holwell Carr, by whom it was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1831.

Drawing

There is a drawing in black chalk or charcoal with white heightening in the Louvre (no. 5382) which is preparatory for the corpse (fig. 5). The nude body is undraped and there is [page 151]a suggestion of the fingers of the man’s right hand emerging from behind his back, by his left hip (an area covered with drapery in the painting). A line by the left foot suggests that the artist already knew that the body would lie on a bank by the shore. The sheet of paper was not large enough for the figure’s outstretched left forearm and hand, studies for which were drawn separately below. The drawing is squared. The horizontals are not parallel with the lower edge of the sheet but are calculated in relation to that of the painting.

Version

There is a related painting in the Hermitage, similar in size but rectangular in format and more orthodox in composition with the princess in the middle distance (fig. 7). It is less unified in dramatic conception, with some relatively weak areas such as the foreground corpse recalling, rather distantly, the slave in Saint Mark rescuing a Slave (fig. 1, p. 196). But there are some brilliant passages, such as the calligraphic flourish of the dragon’s tail, and the painting is in somewhat better condition than NG 16. When given to Tsar Alexander I in 1806 it was attributed to Veronese. Waagen attributed it to Jacopo Tintoretto in 1864. Gould dismissed it as a pastiche made by the workshop. Fomichova catalogued it as workshop of Tintoretto.⁵¹ Artemieva has made a good case for it as a work by Tintoretto executed at the same date as the National Gallery painting, which she places in the late 1550s.⁵² This may be correct, but an alternative explanation is that it is a small and brilliant rehearsal for the S. Giorgio altarpiece by Domenico, executed in an imitation of his father’s early style, and not only based on NG 16 but recalling in the fleeing [page 152]figures Jacopo’s painting of the Removal of the Body of Saint Mark from Constantinople (fig. 2, p. 133).

Engraving

NG 16 was engraved by George Corbould for Jones’s National Gallery, but with God the Father replaced by a celestial light.⁵³

Exhibitions

London 1821, British Institution (46); Madrid 2007 (26).

Frame

The painting is shown in a frame with a deep hollow and rich foliate corner embellishments in Frederick Mackenzie’s view of the collection when it was still housed in Pall Mall during the early 1830s. This must be the frame that it had when in Holwell Carr’s collection and perhaps also when in Westall’s possession. It is likely to have been replaced in the early twentieth century, although no record of the replacement seems to have been retained. After the painting was cleaned and restored in the summer of 1962, Cecil Gould commissioned Arnold Wiggins (then of 25 Chiltern Street, London W1) to adapt for it a curious tabernacle frame (fig. 9) which he had removed from Titian’s Schiavona. The job was completed by 7 December 1962. The spandrels, the consoles above the capitals, the plinth mouldings and some other mouldings were created by Wiggins. The violent and grotesque figures in the friezes consisting of elastic athletes often with legs turned into vegetal scrolls (fig. 10), the busts in the projections of the entablature, and the simplified and elongated Corinthian capitals are all original features and can be matched in two surviving Spanish frames of the sixteenth century: one was sold at Sotheby’s, London, on 8 July 2005 (lot 33) (fig. 8); the other is around the Deposition by Pedro Machuca in the Prado (no. 3017).⁵⁴ In addition, motifs on all these frames are included in the elaborate carved and gilded ecclesiastical shelving, perhaps intended for the display of relics, to be seen in Vizcaya, the house built near Miami for James Deering between 1913 and 1916, over the design of which the decorator Paul Chalfin presided. This shelving also has a Spanish provenance.⁵⁵

Notes