I have a strong memory of seeing Botticelli’s annunciation in the Uffizi Gallery last summer. Firstly the pleasure gained in having a long look uninterrupted by crowds, who preferred to congregate around the greatest hits of Venus and Primavera. This 5 foot almost square panel made in tempera was really dazzling. It left me with the feeling that the connection between a work see in the flesh and in reproduction can have degrees of separation rather than a simple, blanket acknowledgement of - obvious - difference. In this case I marvelled at the linear elements running through the work: the veil of the virgin is painted in gold, its line is startlingly graceful and potent and is held only by the ever so subtle tonal changes indicating there is a gossamer like fabric attached to it - this stopped it from floating and puncturing the whole - but only just! - so visually dramatic and daring. Also the richness of the colouring which had an amazing intensity, pressure through the palette - the greys were warm and never flat. The robes of the angel were satisfyingly heavy in depiction. Also, the pictorial intelligence of the way space is dealt with at the lower back of the angel. A gap must have presented itself to him as he painted in this figure and he solves it by painting in a sheer fabric which is simultaneously there and not there. Utterly brilliant invention which is picked up again at the front of the figure and chases down behind the left knee onto the floor - not only making perfect concrete sense but wonderful abstract sense in the displacement and touch of this lightened grey/ white passage in that zone of the painting - by weaving it through it embeds itself and never jumps out as an afterthought or non-integrated element. These artists had really figured it all out before and by the turn of their century.
Getting into the sixteenth and the move into a more “mannerist” approach, I can see how Tintoretto has assimilated this knowledge and taken things into an even more synthetic world of painterliness. His St George and the Dragon in the National Gallery London has similar pictorial touches running through it, wonderfully deft touches abound in the rendering of fabric and highlight, yet the colour has that equal “pressure” never dissipating the painting’s energy with a too heavy passage or filled in ambiguity. Tintoretto has a much broader touch (always enjoyable to draw from with a slightly blunter pencil). He is in the content of the work from an earlier point, rather than arriving at it from the subject. Botticelli is more wedded to “depiction” whereas Tintoretto has moved forwards to “indication”. The Florentine commitment to the linear contouring and establishment of form in the primary stages contrasting with the Venetian probing of form and space through colour suggestion and more cursory indicative drawing. Both artists are equally concerned with definitive believability.
* Content - a thought: the synthetic reality created through the problematicising and subsequent resolution (note - resolution is significant!) of the mechanics of making, in a media, into a coherently expressive whole (independent of perceived, or even acknowledged, subject-matter)