Conservation Work on Tintoretto’s Crucifixion Unveils Hidden Draughting Grids

The conservation of Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Crucifixion (1565), one of the most celebrated masterpieces of the Venetian Renaissance, has revealed groundbreaking insights into the artist’s working methods. The discovery of extensive draughting grids beneath the painting’s surface challenges long-held assumptions about Venetian artists’ reliance on improvisation and adds to growing evidence that preparatory drawings were a common practice in Venice, just as they were for their Florentine counterparts.

The restoration project, spearheaded by Save Venice, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving Venice’s cultural heritage, has not only rejuvenated the visual impact of this monumental work but also shed light on the meticulous techniques Tintoretto employed to create his masterpiece.

The Masterpiece of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Venice’s Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a 16th-century confraternity building in the city’s San Polo district, is home to over 50 religious paintings by Tintoretto. This extraordinary series, executed between 1564 and 1587, adorns the walls, ceilings, and stairwell of the Scuola, making it one of the most significant achievements of the Venetian Renaissance.

At the heart of this collection is The Crucifixion, an 11-meter-long panorama featuring more than 80 figures. Widely regarded as Tintoretto’s magnum opus, the painting dominates the Sala dell’Albergo, a small upper-level boardroom where it was designed to inspire awe.

For the past two years, this masterpiece has been hidden behind scaffolding as conservators undertook a €650,000 treatment to remove discoloured varnish and repair previous restoration efforts. The results of this meticulous work have not only restored the painting’s depth and vibrancy but also uncovered fascinating details about the artist’s process.

Revealing Tintoretto’s Working Methods

One of the most striking discoveries during the restoration was the presence of an elaborate network of draughting grids used to organise the composition and transfer figures from preparatory drawings onto the canvas. These grids, executed in charcoal, were found to cover the entire surface of the painting, with additional smaller grids used to render minor figures with precision.

This finding challenges the traditional view that Venetian painters, unlike their Florentine counterparts, relied primarily on improvisation and colour rather than systematic design principles.

According to Caterina Barnaba, a conservator from Conservazione Beni Culturali (CBC) who worked on the project, the grids reveal Tintoretto’s methodical approach despite his reputation for rapid and improvisational work. “The confirmation of grids is a big deal,” says Frederick Ilchman, Chair of Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Chair of Save Venice. “Tintoretto was quite methodical, despite his speed and improvising nature.”

Challenging the Disegno vs. Colorito Divide

The use of draughting grids aligns Tintoretto more closely with the Florentine tradition of disegno—the meticulous planning and preparatory drawing process that was central to artists like Michelangelo. During the Renaissance, Florentine painters were known for their rigorous use of preparatory sketches and grid systems to transfer designs to their final surfaces. Venetians, by contrast, were thought to prioritise colorito—the use of colour and brushwork to bring a painting to life.

However, recent scholarship has increasingly questioned this rigid distinction. John Marciari, head of the department of drawings and prints at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, notes that Venetian artists likely used preparatory drawings more often than previously believed. “When you needed a drawing, you made a drawing,” Marciari explains. “If you needed to scale a figure up using a grid system, you did, but you didn’t do it every time.”

The discovery of a complete grid beneath The Crucifixion adds weight to this evolving understanding. While only a handful of Tintoretto’s preparatory drawings survive today, the existence of such an extensive grid suggests that many more drawings would have been created to plan this ambitious composition.

Restoring Depth and Vibrancy

In addition to uncovering Tintoretto’s use of grids, the restoration has dramatically improved the painting’s visual impact. Layers of oxidised, yellowed varnish—applied during a previous restoration in the 1970s following Venice’s catastrophic 1966 flood—were removed, restoring the painting’s original depth and colour balance.

“The painting was obscured by an oxidised, very yellowed varnish,” Barnaba explains. The treatment also corrected faulty retouching from earlier restorations, allowing viewers to once again appreciate the work’s intricate details and dramatic perspective.

For example, the trompe l’oeil parchment inscription in the lower-left corner, which had appeared yellowish-brown, now shines in vivid white. The restored depth of perspective also highlights Tintoretto’s innovative use of an elongated format, designed to draw viewers into the scene and encompass their entire field of vision.

A New Perspective on Tintoretto’s Genius

Tintoretto’s use of grids does not diminish his reputation as a master of improvisation and colour. Instead, it reveals the dual nature of his artistry—balancing methodical preparation with dynamic execution. Ilchman points to Tintoretto’s compositional use of colour to unify the painting, such as the alternating hues in the clothing of two figures hoisting the penitent thief to Christ’s left. One wears a pink turban and blue tunic, while the other wears a pink tunic and blue sash. This interplay of colours helps to harmonise the vast composition, demonstrating Tintoretto’s brilliance in both design and execution.

Looking Ahead

The fully restored Crucifixion will return to public view later this spring, with the CBC’s findings to be presented at a conference in May. Visitors will not only see the painting’s renewed vibrancy but also gain a deeper appreciation for Tintoretto’s innovative techniques and the complexity of his artistic process.

As one of Tintoretto’s earliest works for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, The Crucifixion set the stage for the artist’s decades-long association with the confraternity. Completed when Tintoretto was in his mid-40s, the painting astonished viewers from the start and continues to captivate audiences today.

Through this restoration, we are reminded that beneath Tintoretto’s dynamic brushwork and bold use of colour lay a carefully planned framework—a testament to his genius as both a visionary and a craftsman.

Rewrite as a book review for a blog: New book explores the art of three artists whose work is beset by demons The author looks at the defining features and similarities of work by Hieronymus Bosch, Max Beckmann and William Kentridge Christoph Irmscher 3 February 2025 Share “Bosch’s art gave form to every viewer’s imagined enemy in every here and now”: Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (around 1500), in its open state. The side panels depict Adam and Eve before the fall and then souls writhing in hell. The central panel depicts a world in which “No one says ‘No’" Album/Oronoz “Bosch’s art gave form to every viewer’s imagined enemy in every here and now”: Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (around 1500), in its open state. The side panels depict Adam and Eve before the fall and then souls writhing in hell. The central panel depicts a world in which “No one says ‘No’" Album/Oronoz Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, Duke of Alba (1507-82), the Spanish crown’s henchman in the Netherlands, wanted nothing more than to lay his hands on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. The magnificent triptych, which Bosch (born around 1450, died 1516) completed around 1500, is unique even in the painter’s own oeuvre. With closed wings, it shows the newly created world as a dark island drifting in an ocean of pale grey. When open, though, light breaks through and a carnival of colour unfolds before the viewer’s eyes, the effect mainly of the triptych’s central panel: throngs of nude humans frolicking, as if their lives depended on it, riding horses, pigs, birds and other creatures, hiding inside shells and other bizarre receptacles, munching on giant pieces of fruit, cavorting with sea monsters—and sticking flowers up someone’s backside. In Art in a State of Siege, Joseph Leo Koerner memorably sums up the panel’s main narrative: “No one says ‘No’ in this garden.” But Doomsday is right around the corner, although the two side panels—one depicting Adam and Eve before the fall, the other, souls writhing in hell—can do little to offset the impact of that delicious central panorama of sinful pleasures. No wonder that at least one Bosch scholar, Wilhelm Fraenger (1890-1964), referred to frequently by Koerner, thought that Bosch’s work was not an indictment but a celebration of lust, inspired by the Adamites, a secret Christian sect originally from North Africa who were convinced that humans should follow their desires. Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (around 1500), in its closed state © Fine Art Images/Heritage-Images A professor of art history at Harvard University, Koerner is also a lively, engaging writer. He tells us that, in the early 16th century, copies of Bosch’s fantastical pictures circulated all around Europe. Some of them were fakes, roasted into deceptive authenticity over the forgers’ fireplace. But the Duke of Alba would accept no substitutes. When, in 1567, his men invaded the Nassau palace of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, the head servant refused to tell them where the painting was hidden. Koerner quotes a contemporary account of what happened next: “They hoisted him on high with a weight of 100 pounds hanging from his feet until his hands touched the pulley, then they added weight of 150 pounds.” Just in case, they also burned the man and broke his limbs. Who needs hell when people can inflict such pain on each other? The duke got his prize; Bosch’s unconcerned sinners are now frolicking at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Art in a State of Siege, based on the author’s E.H. Gombrich lectures at London’s Warburg Institute in 2016, is a captivating, often challenging work. Koerner is as intent on taking possession of Bosch’s painting intellectually as the Duke of Alba was desirous of owning it in the flesh. “Bosch’s art gave form to every viewer’s imagined enemy in every here and now,” writes Koerner. In his opinion, the siege mentality he finds expressed there—portraits of humankind on the brink, made for fretful onlookers—may serve as a key for understanding other works of art, notably the haunting Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) by the German Modernist painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950), as well as the animated drawings of the South African multimedia artist William Kentridge (born 1955). Sigmund Freud believed that we spend our lives in a permanent state of siege ... an opinion Koerner appears to share Writing about triptychs, Koerner hands us his own. He has, he suggests, a different relationship with each of the three artists discussed in his three chapters. While Bosch has been the subject of his scholarly curiosity for decades, Beckmann’s Self-Portrait, in the collection of Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, often serves as the centrepiece of Koerner’s museum tours for visitors and students. And when the author, many years ago, went to his first Kentridge exhibition, the South African’s works on paper reminded Koerner of images created by his father, a Viennese-born artist and Holocaust survivor. Art in a State of Siege includes a reproduction of Henry Koerner’s striking The Skin of Our Teeth (1946, the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln), which depicts naked Boschian figures digging through the rubble of a bombed-out apartment. Sigmund Freud believed that we spend our lives in a permanent state of siege, beleaguered not by actual devils but by those of our own making: an opinion Koerner appears to share, although his demons are those created by other people; Bosch lived in a world dominated by military sieges, with Constantinople (Istanbul) falling to the Ottomans in 1453, just around the time he was born; Beckmann saw his art condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazis; and Kentridge came of age in the living hell of South African apartheid. Beckmann’s vivid triptych Departure (1932-35, Museum of Modern Art, New York), finished after the Nazi takeover of Germany, contrasts a central panel featuring a king and his entourage adrift on a blue ocean with side panels portraying humans in distress, blindfolded, gagged, and bound. Calling Beckmann’s works “a beacon for endangered souls”, Kentridge has, for several decades, carried with him a postcard reproduction of the German artist’s oil on canvas Death (1938). As laid out in the book’s introduction, Koerner’s idiosyncratic method, bouncing between centuries and countries, and shuttling back and forth between art, history, politics and literature, draws inspiration from the art historian Aby Warburg’s “image atlas”, which Warburg compiled after his three-year confinement in a psychiatric clinic: creative collages of pictures from very different sources pinned to large panels. The connections and constellations Koerner proposes in his book may not always be self-evident: there is no detour he will not take, no dark tunnel he will not enter. But the results are invariably enlightening. For example, Fraenger’s friendship with the jurist and Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) leads Koerner to include several revelatory pages on the traumatic wartime experiences of Schmitt’s correspondent Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), the conservative writer and extoller of apocalyptic masculinity, who also turned to Bosch for analogies. Art in a State of Siege, leisurely, expansive and stunningly erudite, is not the work of a besieged writer. Nor is it a book written for besieged or impatient readers. There are no definite rewards beckoning at the end, no comforting generalisations that timeless art might proffer relief to a mind in distress. Let us remember that Bosch’s triptych spoke to Nazis as well as to their victims: to Schmitt, who used his theory of the “state of exception” to justify, as perfectly constitutional, the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich; and to Beckmann, whom that same Reich catapulted into exile. Among the artists and thinkers discussed in Koerner’s book, Hieronymus Bosch, I believe, has the last laugh. It has been said that the famous Tree-Man pictured in a side panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights could be Bosch’s self-portrait. And why would an artist who painted on wood and whose adopted last name (an abbreviation of his native city, ’s-Hertogenbosch) meant “a wood” in Dutch, not sometimes wish that he were a piece of wood too, a tree perhaps—firm, stable, rooted in a world of chaos and turmoil? Granted, in Bosch’s triptych the ambiguous Tree-Man is stuck in hell. But if one takes a second look at that creature, as he thrusts his bottom into the viewer’s face, it might seem that Tree-Man is “mooning” us. And over his lips plays, ever so slightly, the ghost of a smile. • Joseph Leo Koerner, Art in a State of Siege, Princeton University Press, 408pp, 32 colour & 103 b/w illustrations, $37/£30 (hb), published 4 February/ 4 March • Christoph Irmscher is a critic and biographer

MonicaGPT-4o

Book Review: Art in a State of Siege by Joseph Leo Koerner

What do a medieval triptych of frolicking sinners, a self-portrait of a German Modernist in a tuxedo, and the animated drawings of a South African multimedia artist have in common? In Art in a State of Siege, Joseph Leo Koerner explores the art of Hieronymus Bosch, Max Beckmann, and William Kentridge, revealing how their works are united by a shared obsession with humanity’s demons—both real and imagined.

Based on Koerner’s E.H. Gombrich Lectures at London’s Warburg Institute in 2016, the book is a sprawling, erudite examination of how art responds to existential crises. It is not a light read, nor is it intended to be. Instead, it is an ambitious, richly layered meditation on art, history, politics, and psychology, drawing connections across centuries and continents.

Bosch’s Carnival of Chaos

Koerner opens his triptych of analysis with Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500), a work as enigmatic as it is mesmerizing. The central panel of the triptych is a riot of color and surreal activity: nude humans cavort with animals, ride sea monsters, and engage in bizarre pleasures, all in a world where, as Koerner memorably puts it, “No one says ‘No.’”

But this carnival of indulgence is flanked by doom. The left panel depicts Adam and Eve before the fall, while the right panel plunges us into hell, a realm of grotesque punishments. Bosch’s work has long been debated—is it a moral warning, an indictment of sin, or a celebration of unbridled desire? Koerner leans into the ambiguity, arguing that Bosch’s art reflects the siege mentality of his time, when military conflicts and religious anxieties dominated Europe.

Koerner recounts the dramatic history of Bosch’s triptych, including the Duke of Alba’s brutal efforts to seize it during the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands. The painting’s violent provenance underscores Koerner’s thesis: Bosch’s work is a mirror for humanity’s darkest impulses, from the imagined sins of its figures to the very real tortures inflicted by those who sought to possess it.

Beckmann’s Portrait of Defiance

From Bosch’s medieval world, Koerner leaps forward to the interwar period and the German Modernist Max Beckmann. In Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927), the artist confronts the viewer with a piercing gaze, his formal attire a stark contrast to the chaos brewing in Weimar Germany. For Koerner, this painting epitomizes Beckmann’s role as an artist under siege—both personally and politically.

Beckmann’s work, including his triptych Departure (1932–35), reflects the trauma of a society unraveling under the rise of Nazism. His figures are often blindfolded, bound, or gagged, their suffering serving as a haunting counterpoint to Bosch’s frolicking sinners. Koerner sees Beckmann’s art as a “beacon for endangered souls,” a defiant response to the Nazi regime that condemned his work as “degenerate” and forced him into exile.

Kentridge’s Animated Shadows

The final chapter of Koerner’s book turns to William Kentridge, a contemporary South African artist whose multimedia works grapple with the legacy of apartheid. Kentridge’s animated drawings, with their fragmented, shadowy figures, evoke a world haunted by violence and systemic injustice.

Koerner’s personal connection to Kentridge’s art adds depth to his analysis. The author recalls how Kentridge’s works on paper reminded him of images created by his own father, Henry Koerner, a Viennese-born artist and Holocaust survivor. This intergenerational link underscores the book’s central theme: art as a response to trauma, a way of grappling with the demons that besiege us.

A Method of Connections

Koerner’s approach is as ambitious as his subject matter. Drawing inspiration from Aby Warburg’s “image atlas,” he weaves together art, history, politics, and literature, creating a tapestry of ideas that is as rich as it is challenging. His method is not linear but associative, bouncing between centuries and disciplines to uncover unexpected connections.

For example, Koerner’s discussion of Bosch includes a detour into the writings of Ernst Jünger, a conservative thinker who turned to Bosch’s imagery to describe the apocalyptic masculinity of wartime. Similarly, his analysis of Beckmann and Kentridge is enriched by reflections on Freud’s theory of the “state of siege”—the idea that we are perpetually beleaguered by internal and external forces.

While these digressions can be demanding, they are also deeply rewarding. Koerner’s insights are invariably illuminating, offering new ways of understanding not only the artists he examines but also the broader cultural and historical contexts in which they worked.

Art as a Mirror of Humanity

Koerner’s book is not a comforting read. He does not offer easy answers or uplifting conclusions. Instead, he reminds us that art’s power lies in its ability to reflect the complexities of the human condition. Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights spoke to both victims and perpetrators of violence, just as Beckmann’s and Kentridge’s works resonate with those grappling with oppression and exile.

In the end, Koerner suggests that art’s value lies not in its ability to resolve our anxieties but in its capacity to confront them. Among the artists discussed, Bosch may have the last laugh. Koerner speculates that the Tree-Man in The Garden of Earthly Delights, often thought to be a self-portrait, might be Bosch’s way of “mooning” us—mocking our attempts to impose order on a world that is inherently chaotic.

Final Thoughts

Art in a State of Siege is not for the faint of heart. It demands patience, curiosity, and a willingness to follow Koerner into dark and labyrinthine territory. But for those who take the journey, the rewards are immense.

Joseph Leo Koerner has crafted a book that is as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally resonant, a testament to the enduring power of art to illuminate the human experience. Whether you are drawn to Bosch’s fantastical visions, Beckmann’s defiant portraits, or Kentridge’s haunting animations, this book will leave you with a deeper appreciation for the artists who dared to confront the demons of their time—and ours.

Joseph Leo Koerner, Art in a State of Siege, Princeton University Press, 408pp, 32 colour & 103 b/w illustrations, $37/£30 (hb), published 4 February/4 March

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

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