Tondo’87 – 6

Emilio Vedova was an Italian abstract painter who is considered the main follower of Tintoretto in the 20th century. The exhibition by Germano Celant at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in 2013 has demonstrated their close links. Vedova, who had referred to Tintoretto since he was young, later wrote that the artist was one of his identifications in his understanding of space, directing rhythms and magmatic energy of passions and emotions.

This connection between the modern painter and the late Renaissance master — who is often referred to as mannerist — is not accidental. Tintoretto’s name was re-actualized in the early 20th century by Max Dvořák, a member of the Vienna School of Art, whose focus always turned to watersheds in the history of art. The art of Tintoretto was consonant with the expressionist search for formal elements, since the line and light were the artist’s main tools in designing space. Inasmuch as we see the world by the medium of light, it acts as the main vehicle for emotion.

In the mid-20th century the figure of Tintoretto was the subject for Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom the Venetian master embodied existential anguish — he was both behind his time (as the last native-born artist on a scene ruled by a cosmopolitan elite) and ahead of it (as the ideal artist for a rising bourgeoisie that was still timid to declare itself amidst the pomp and decorum of the ducal republic). Sartre called him the first film director in history for his ability to master the space and to create a narrative on canvas.

By the mid-1980s, Emilio Vedova began a period of intense research stimulated by the use of the circle. It was a sort of challenge for his artist’s vision and contrasted his lacerated, asymmetrical and ever-shifting universe that he created on canvas. He drew inspiration from the ancient concept of the circularity of time. The series of Vedova’s circular canvases represent his ethical and political conception of art, according to which the mission of the artist was to record and at the same time to re-transmit the eternal clash of situations that incessantly agitate the whole world: wars, injustice, oppression, etc. The form of the circle was the way to go beyond the limits of the pictorial expressive medium through the combination of space and time.

The circle also recalls the shape of the windows of Venetian churches — for example, Tintoretto’s favorite Santa Maria dell’Orto. Vedova’s painting inspired by Tintoretto’s palette and enclosed in this shape brings to mind Sartre’s words that “Tintoretto is Venice, even if he does not paint Venice.” The same way Robusti once broke the laws of linear perspective, Vedova shows the spontaneity, contradictions and openness of creative process. His works are painted in a free gestural way. Both artists master not individual characters but entire elements — and in case with Vedova’s Tondo, also the element of time.

EMILIO VEDOVA (1919, Venice, Italy — 2006, same) is the main Tintoretto “emulator” in the 20th century. In 2013 curator Germano Celant organized an exhibition at Scuola Grande di San Rocco to illustrate the artistic dialog between Vedova and Tintoretto. After years of being absorbed in expressionism, in 1942 Emilio Vedova joined the Corrente movement, which formed an opposition to totalitarian art. In 1946 he founded the New Italian Secession movement in association with other artists. In 1948 he debuted at the Venetian Biennale. In 1960 he won a Grand Prize for Painting, in 1954 he won a fellowship that allowed him to spend 3 months in Brazil, and in 1997 he received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement. He taught art in Salzburg, Venice, and a number of universities in the United States.