An Allegory of Autumn and Winter

This panel was recognised by Pallucchini as an early work by Tintoretto, who was one of the most precocious of Venetian cinquecento painters. At the outset of his career he roused the jealous enmity of Titian, the master of his choice. The influence of Bonifazio Veronese and of Andrea Meldolla, lo Schiavone are evident in this panel, but the drama of its lighting and its rapid spontaneity reveal the force and originality of Tintoretto's own personality. Pallucchini and Rossi propose a date of 1543-4 and thus place the picture with other panels of comparable scale, the Jupiter and Semele of the National Gallery, London, no. 1476, and two other mythological scenes, Latona and Apollo and Diana with the Children of Niobe, in the Courtauld Institute, Princes Gate (Seilern) Collection (Pallucchini and Rossi, nos. 48, 59 and 60, fig. 78, 76 and 77 respectively). Previously Pallucchini had proposed a rather later dating, in the early 1550s for both this and the National Gallery pictures, associating these with the remarkable series of Old Testament scenes at Vienna that are similar in scale (ibid., nos. 48-54, figs. 57-72), which probably antedated them, and the ex-Bromley-Davenport Contest of Apollo and Marsyas (Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; ibid., no. 82, figs. 103 and 105), which may be marginally later in date. This panel presumably had a pendant and originally formed part of the decoration of a cassone or other piece of furniture. The dramatic chiaroscuro of the panel anticipates that of works of later decades by the artist and indeed exemplifies a key facet of Tintoretto's genius as a narrative painter, the lucidity of his compositions and their instinctive dynamism.