Tintoretto’s ‘Crucifixion’ Is Resurrected in Venice

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Venice

Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion” in this city’s Sala dell’Albergo (“board room”) of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, completed in 1565, provokes hyperbole, and not just because of its impressive size—a monumental 17 by 40 feet. In September 1845, the 26-year-old aspiring critic John Ruskin wrote to his father, in London, that he had been “quite overwhelmed” by the “enormous powers” of “Tintoret.” He was so moved by the “Crucifixion” that in his book “The Stones of Venice” he declared it “beyond all analysis and above all praise.” The art historian and Tintoretto specialist Frederick Ilchman, a curator of the 2018-19 exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of the artist’s birth, regards the “Crucifixion” as his greatest work. And one young painter recently told me that seeing the painting changed his life.

Now we can once again test those responses for ourselves. This April, a newly cleaned and beautifully lighted “Crucifixion” was unveiled, after two years of scrupulous conservation and technical analysis. It’s among the latest of the spectacular projects funded by Save Venice, the American nonprofit organization that since 1971 has made possible the restoration of more than 2,000 works of art and architecture, including, recently, Titian’s immense “Assunta” in the Church of the Frari, along with such vital albeit unsexy undertakings as desalination and the repair of roofs and foundations.

After a careful diagnostic campaign, the “Crucifixion” was painstakingly liberated from thick yellowed varnish, glue residues, compacted dust, and the remnants of retouching from early restoration programs. (There have been four previous, mainly less scientific efforts, the first in 1673.) The entire recent process, from March 2023 to April 2025, was documented with high-resolution photography and video. The enormous painting looks radiant, with its color balance restored and its spatial complexity and many once blurry details more visible.

The radical conception of the well-known biblical event, which so impressed Ruskin, is more potent than ever, with the still, muscular Christ, bowed head nearly touching the top of the canvas, occupying the center against an expanse of empty sky. (The once radiant blue has faded, alas.) He doesn’t hang limply from the cross, but with arms outstretched seems almost to levitate in front of it, as if already transcending the fact of his impending death. The half circle of radiance framing him illuminates the busy scene below. At the foot of the cross, a pile of interlocked mourning, stunned figures—the Virgin, the Magdalen, John and other intimates—all but projects from the space. An immense X of intersecting, light-filled planes emanates from the cross. Punctuated by a few silhouetted figures, one side defined by the second thief’s cross, the ample gesture creates near-symmetrical flanking zones occupied by a tangle of figures and horses, their rapidly diminishing sizes animating and deepening the space.

On opposite sides, armored soldiers and turbaned bystanders, some mounted, some on foot, crowd the huge canvas in complex relationships that Ruskin says embody “the tumult of the people.” Some, their arched backs turned to us, are in aggressive action. On the left, they collaborate to raise the cross for the first thief; on the right, his counterpart is made to lie on the cross designated for him. A resonant orchestration of interlocking curves and emphatic diagonals—a ladder, raised arms, profiles, the arched necks of horses—focuses our attention on the crucified Christ, emphasized by a flickering play of pinks, reds, transparent blues, rusts and creams, clarified by passages of warm whites and ivories. And a detail that entranced Ruskin: Just behind the first thief’s cross, an ass nibbles on withered palm leaves, a reminder of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem five days earlier. It’s an element that adds to what Ruskin describes as “the absolute truth of statement of the central fact as it was, or must have been.”

State-of-of-the-art technical studies, such as infrared reflectography, both guided the conservators and produced new information about Tintoretto’s working methods. Finding a system of grids drawn in charcoal, for example, suggested how the painting’s staggering number of figures were enlarged and transferred from preparatory sketches. The very idea contradicts Giorgio Vasari’s contention, in his celebrated book “The Lives of the Artists,” that Tintoretto “worked haphazardly, without drawing.” (Of course, the Florentine Vasari was always dismissive of Venetians.) Interesting changes could be seen, including the fact that the figures were conceived as nudes, for the most part, then dressed in the final image. There is new information about Tintoretto’s pigments, both traditional and unusual, and about his experimental techniques of layering and glazing, to expand the range of color available to him.

Decades ago, when I first visited the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, as an art-history student, I was disappointed by how dim the “Crucifixion” seemed in the poorly lighted Sala dell’Albergo. I wondered how Ruskin had managed to see everything that he itemized. Now it’s easy to share his passionate enthusiasm.

Ms. Wilkin is an independent critic and curator.