ABSTRACT
I once had a student, an artist, who became interested in Tintoretto’s Rape of Lucretia in the collection of the Art Institute in Chicago. The course was on Renaissance art, so I told her the painting would be an appropriate topic for a paper. I started her off by giving her the major references; she read Ridolfi and several modern monographs. But her project was a real surprise. She produced an artist’s book, into which she had pasted pages from the texts I’d recommended, and then smeared gesso over them so they couldn’t be read. On every other page she had painted details from Tintoretto’s painting. There were only two details in the book, repeated over and over: the contours of Lucretia’s knee, enlarged so the bend of her kneecap became an abstract landscape, and her pearl necklace, which Tintoretto depicted just as it broke, scattering pearls over her dress and onto the ground. In my student’s book, each pearl was enlarged to the size of a page, and there were strange visual puns between the curves of Lucretia’s
kneecap and the asymmetrical pearls. That was all that had ever interested my student in the painting, in Tintoretto, and in the Renaissance. She didn’t claim to understand Tintoretto: for her, pearls and knees were the only comprehensible parts of Tintoretto and the only useful and meaningful parts of the painting. I showed her the passage in Daniel Arasse’s book The Detail, about the pillow that Tintoretto also depicted falling in mid-air, but she was not interested in pillows or even in the contemporary literature on details. For her, the Renaissance was comprised of pearly kneecaps and knobbykneed pearls, and she did not know, or care, about anything beyond them.
