The 16th-century artist is painted – not quite convincingly – as a glamorous bad boy in this high-brow documentary portrait
Trying just a bit too hard to get some rock-star glamour to rub off on what’s a quintessentially high-brow package, this documentary about the Venetian Renaissance painter mentions twice that David Bowie owned a Tintoretto. He even named his record label after the painter, it seems.
Although that makes for a fun pub-quiz fact, it doesn’t necessarily strengthen the case, as claimed by the title, that Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-94) was the rebel, rebel of the lagoon. He did compete aggressively with contemporaries such as Titian and Veronese, and shocked some of the burgers at the time by placing low-born characters at the centre of his compositions instead of in spatial subsidiary to Christ, the saints and the seraphim of heaven who were the ostensible subjects of his work.