More Thoughts on San Rocco

(please excuse typos, I haven't had time to proof this)

There is more to say about the images at San Rocco, and about the space that they help to create. The depictions of the Saints are, each in its singularity, examples of humans making-do in the face of horrifying circumstances constituted by the repeated social and economic crises of the sixteenth century. As much as the saints represent lives committed to exemplary servitude and, by extension, achieving the status of cultural icon, they also represent various modes of coping. In the world of the Baroque, a world stitched together by turbulent change and socio-economic crises, there was a requisite acquiescence, one modeled on the lives of saints who endured great suffering on behalf of a specific ideology.

Dialectically, then, we might say that the Christian temporality, spatialized by the narrative of Tintoretto’s images, constructs another type of support system, one that works to do more than prop up the second floor of the Baroque house. The space created by Tintoretto’s paintings also becomes a model for the performance of Venetian citizenship. As humble, civil servants, the lower ranks of the complex aristocratic assemblage were expected to martyr themselves for the greater glory of Venice. And this is where the instructive nature of the scuola begins to shine through. The saintly images and structural security of the school, a security formed through an architechtonic unity modeled on a Christian ethos, depicted much more than a lofty ideal. The scuola’s visual structure describes a mode of everday life that Venetians were expected to emulate. AS one node in a more extensive network of scuole grandi, San Rocco actively transmitted, through visual means for all to see, the ideology of the republic.

Again, however, we must revisit the second floor. It is there that the nuanced texture of the visual transmission stands out in higher definition. Contrary to Maravall and the scholars he cites who find in the Baroque image a cinematographic quality, I believe the ceiling on the second floor presents a multiplicity and not a quick succession of images that function like a filmstrip to produce the semblance of a totality. With the film strip, the frames of the cells betray the illusion of continuity. Viewers cannot see the black frames that stitch together the image-cells. But in the scuola there is something different for viewers to consume. There, we don’t have black frames stitching the images together; rather, we find ornate scrollwork that constitutes another stratum of visual messages. The scrollwork constitutes, in fact, the subtle surface effect by means of which the paintings pop into relief. As a muted trompe-l’oeil, the seams between the images construct a visual effect that heightens the already intense colors and lines of Tintoretto’s scenery. There is the signature of Baroque visual media: an already heightened intensity raised to an even higher pitch by means of elaborate visual effects.

Thus, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco presents a visual space that speaks to two orders of the Venetian populace, simultaneously, in two distinct voices, with the same imagery, and with the same effect. The well-to-do see the saints as model citizens who actively participate in daily life and who stand out as integral society, as important as the magistrates who run the city. To model oneself after this image meant to patronize specific institutions, to support the various industries of the republic. The poor as well as the nascent middle classes also see a model of citizenship, but it is a model achieved by coping instead of patronizing; by wading through the incessant social and economic crises of the Baroque age just as the saints waded through their various trials and tribulations.