Martin Gayford visits the greatest one-artist show on Earth

For a good deal of this autumn, I was living in Venice. This wasn’t exactly a holiday, I’d like to point out, but a suitable place to work while beginning a new book. The result was, though, that week after week, when I had finished writing, I went for a stroll around the neighbourhood, Dorsoduro, which very quickly came to feel like home. One thing I realised as I wandered around, between buying the groceries and admiring the view, was just how crammed the city was with works by Tintoretto.

There must have been well over 70 within a few minutes of the apartment where I was staying. There are other painters who are rightly classed as ‘Venetian’ — Titian, Veronese, Giorgione and the Bellini family among them. But none is so absolutely centred on the place as Jacopo Robusti (1518–94), otherwise known as the Little Dyer, or Tintoretto. He was born and bred in the city, as the others, except for the Bellinis, were not (Titian came from the foothills of the Alps, Giorgione from Castelfranco, Veronese, as his name suggests, from Verona).

Tintoretto did much of his work for his fellow townsfolk, specialising in providing paintings for the Scuole — a Venetian institution that was very roughly speaking part charitable organisation, part social club, part religious association. The more humble of these dedicated altars in parish churches, perhaps with a Tintoretto masterpiece or two attached; the more affluent had their own headquarters.

One of the largest and wealthiest was the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, housed in an opulent building that I found myself walking past, and sometimes into, several times a day. Inside, there is a cycle of more than 50 Tintoretto canvases, covering the walls and two ceilings and amounting, without any exaggeration, to one of the most spectacular one-artist shows on Earth.