Tuesday, July 31, 2007

cannaregio no. 3399

Tucked away in the quiet neighborhood of Cannaregio is a little house that was home to one of the greatest Venetian artists of the Italian Renaissance ~ Tintoretto. No. 3399 is marked only with a tiny plaque ~ and is really not "on the map" so to speak. The morning I made my pilgrimage there the street was deserted except for a mangy little dog far more interested in picking at discarded chicken bones than paying any attention to an art-obsessed interloper. The house itself is rather nondescript, but I was fascinated by the tipsy turbaned gentleman set into the wall between nos. 3397a and 3398. What a strange, funny little man ~ and Tintoretto would have walked past him every day. Just around the corner from the house is Madonna dell'Orto, the 14th-century church where Tintoretto is buried, and which houses some of his most important canvases.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That statue has a painterly, exotic, exaggerated mannerist quality similar to the people in Tintoretto’s world – KDM