Aretino in the Studio of Tintoretto

By 1848 revolution was again in the streets of Paris, and Ingres, close to 70 and no friend of upheaval, turned to a small private scene set three centuries earlier in Venice. The story came from an old life of Tintoretto. Worn down by the barbs of Pietro Aretino, a satirist whose pen even princes feared, the painter invited the critic to sit for a portrait, then produced a pistol and used it to take his measurements, as if at gunpoint. Aretino froze, arranged here in the pose of a saint receiving the stigmata, before he understood it was a joke, and a little revenge. Ingres had painted this subject once before, in 1815. He made this second version in Paris for his friend the collector Marcotte.