CARITAS
Tintoretto and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice
Foreword by Franco Posocco
Imprint: Resource Publications
I love Venice. Therefore, I love Tintoretto. Therefore, I love the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. I have been visiting all three for many years and was planning to do so again this year, 2020. However, those plans did not work out this year. So I thought that I would do a virtual tour of the Scuola to which Tintoretto dedicated a lifetime's work. The purpose was to record my personal responses to the paintings and to organize these responses into some sort of coherent order. The result printed in this booklet is offered as one person's informal guide to encourage readers to visit this amazing collection of a lifetime's work in one accessible location: the work of one of the world's greatest artists in one of the world's most beautiful and amazing cities, Venice.
As a further incentive, the collection culminates in what many regard as the world's greatest-ever work of art: Tintoretto's Crucifixion. The book's glory is the beautiful high resolution color images donated by the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.
Brian Leslie Bishop is a retired teacher of English and world literature. He has a master's degree in theology. He has had two books published by Wipf and Stock: The Continuing Dialogue: An Investigation into the Artistic Afterlife of the Five Narratives Peculiar to the Fourth Gospel; and The Beauty of Holiness: Giotto's Passion Frescoes as a Prelude to the Artistic Afterlife of The Supper at Emmaus.
“The Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice counts among the most impressive places of art in the whole of Italy. Brian Bishop has written an empathetic, informative, and in-depth guide to Tintoretto’s works which will benefit the visitor and contribute to the appreciation of one of Italy’s great artists.”
—Gesa E. Thiessen, Trinity College, Dublin
“Brian Bishop has now provided the visitor with an exceptionally accessible, and user-friendly, companion on what can so easily, through contemporary, post-Christian eyes, seem little more than a physically demanding, and not always intelligible, exercise in visual theology. He not only writes with enviable clarity and lightness of touch, yet with a vivid awareness of the complex credal and civic politics of post-Tridentine Venice. Tintorreto himself would have surely welcomed this, and so indeed should today’s visitors.”
—Graham Howes. author of The Art of the Sacred
“Brian Bishop is that rara avis—an amateur art historian who knows his subject by long acquaintance, deep learning, and committed passion. But he is also no mean theologian and that puts him out ahead of the commentators and pundits in getting inside Tintoretto’s imagination. The result is this fascinating monograph which should be—like a visit to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco—on the top of the list for the discerning visitor to Venice.”
—David Stancliffe, former Bishop of Salisbury