“La lunga attesa dell’angelo” (the long wait of the angel) is Melania G. Mazzucco’s latest novel; it tells about the last part of Jacopo Robusti’s life, also known as great Venetian painter Tintoretto. Exitus: two frames define this crucial moment, first the fever begins and then it leads fast to death. Such grievous experience is described by the ego-narrator, which is the painter himself, time is defined day by day through the 15 chapters comprising the book, and through the invocations to God, often repeated during the recollection of his life.

Shadows and darkness mark the novel since its very beginning: “darkness falls. The curtains are drawn, candles should be turned on” the memory of the painter shimmers and bursts, a bare unflattering confession, the portrait of a genius, liar and cheater, dominated by ambition and passion. The novel is an historical one, the product of a long research: even minor characters are derived from careful reconstruction of available references.

Tintoretto’s documentary biography by the same author will shortly be published. In the novel, several topics are addressed; between them is a cogent insight into the difficult existence of women, as witnessed by all presented characters.

Simplicity and dedication of Faustina, the painter’s wife, she gave him seven children. Sparkling like white wine, she represented the glue of the family. She was always very remote from the art world and from the pedagogical choices of Jacopo for their daughter, nonetheless without her nothing would have been possible. The story of Cordelia from Germany is also very significant: the daughter of a typographer, she sought refuge in Venice after the death of her father and started a living as paramour.

Tintoretto had with her his beloved daughter Marietta. After letting people believe she had gone back to her native land, Cordelia died alone from syphilis at the Misericordia, leaving her infant daughter to Jacopo. We also learn the story of another prostitute, Adriana, she drowned and Tintoretto felt responsible for her death. We can’t forget the stories of Tintoretto and Faustina’s two daughters, destined to the Sant’Anna convent when they were still very young. According to the father, such decision was taken to spare his daughters from the hard life destiny had put aside for them, but this choice inevitably prevented them from fulfilling their dreams and in some cases even from the possibility to have any.

The painter’s beloved natural child, Marietta is a main character in the novel. We see her dressed as a boy, with trousers and short hair, working in the father’s workshop where she remained for over fifteen years. Scintilla, as the painter called her, followed him wherever he went for his commissions and jobs, in the Doge’s Palace halls, in the Scuola di San Rocco or at the slaughterhouse to get a horse.

She developed a strong and very determined nature, becoming a very appreciated artist: her fame spread to many European courts, but she never left Venice. She learned to paint with brush or pencil before she could even write; well aware of her freedom and of the conditions of women in Venice, she developed a gentle and lively grace. Marietta was completely in love with her father, she desired only his love, glory and attention. As to him Jacopo was literally obsessed with her, at some point he had to suggest her to marry in order to stop insistent rumours. Tintoretto’s children constitute a very strong topic throughout the novel, concentrated on their destiny and on the Painter’s thoughts about them.

Jacopo would look at them as if wax to be moulded, white pages, unprimed canvas, or maybe, as the artists asks himself, “raindrops on the window pane, they come from the same cloud but each one of them slides down following its own direction”. Tintoretto had dyed the silk bedding for Marietta’s cradle himself and he had made her toys, small wax animals, in between them the beloved camel couldn’t be forgotten. Tintoretto never showed such dedication for his other seven children. Of all his sons, only his artistic heir Dominico remained close to the sick old father.

The dreaming searcher of Unicorns, Zuane had died very young and far away from home under unclear circumstances. The beloved Marietta too had died right after Iacometto, his small nephew, leaving an overwhelming emptiness in Tintoretto; the other three daughters were in the convent. Only his son Marco, dissolute and cardsharp came home on May 31,1594, on the fifteenth day of fever, at the end of the novel, just in time to see the great painter die in his arms. Along the story, several aesthetic considerations are made, while Tintoretto’s difficult and tormented artistic career is analyzed: his difficult relationship with Titian, the worship for Michelangelo and his formation as autodidact, stealing here and there from other artists.

Nothing was ever easy for the son of a fabric dyer and he always felt as a stranger between other artists who lived in the city. Even at last, after the success and his 650 paintings, Tintoretto lamented his failures, what he had not achieved, the things he had not done for his family and children and the pointlessness of all his frantic behaviour.

The second half of Venetian Sixteenth century is the setting, vividly presented and recalled: the fear of the war, the victory over the Turkish in Lepanto and the following celebrations, the dreadful tragedy of the Plague with its ominous images: the lagoon is described as a ghostly swamp where huge pyres burn and vessels are turned into lazarets. We recall Manzoni, when Jacopo runs around from one side to the other of the infested city looking for a pharmacist.

Venice is literally deserted except for the quarter of San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, inhabited mainly by fishermen, too poor to try to escape. At the end of August the great Titian died because of the disease, and right after, when the unfortunate moment seemed finally over, the Doge’s Palace burnt, together with the great works of many artists such as the “Last Judgement” and the “Battle of Lepanto” by Tintoretto.

Characters are also showed during cheerful moments of celebration, such as the Bull Run in San Felice, the arrival of Japanese Ambassadors and the convivial fish dinner party on a boat in the sea. Once the book is finished, one is driven by the desire to walk through Venice, looking for the works of Tintoretto, captivated by the novel’s atmosphere.

Starting point is Cannaregio’s far edge, where Jacopo’s father had his dyer shop, dyed cloths hanged to dry on this strip of land looking onto the northern lagoon. Such were the young painter’s sails to desire, the place where his artistic inspiration blossomed. Afterwards one may stop by the parish of Santa Maria dell’Orto, in the small palace where Jacopo lived with his children and died.

On the façade is a Romanic high relief portraying Hercules that Tintoretto himself chose as decoration, one might then admire Palazzo del Cammello where for quite some time Jacopo had is workshop. Afterwards the road leads to Madonna dell’Orto church, where the doors of the ancient Organ portray his slender and fair Scintilla as Mary walking up the steep stairs leading to the Temple’s door, with a light dress speckled with golden dust.

Another walk should be made in Dorsoduro to San Trovaso church, in the chapel belonging to Milledonne, where one can admire “Sant’Antonio’s temptation”, partly remade because of the fire of the painter’s house provoked by his son Marco. The saint disturbingly resembles the painter, captivated by the female body looking like Marietta. In the Academia galleries are kept a few paintings produced for the Scuola di San Marco.

But deserving a particularly long visit is the artist’s main achievement, the Scuola di San Rocco. Marietta was still very young when Tintoretto put her portrait on the ceiling in order to win the competition. Jacopo worked in the Scuola for an extremely long time, forgetting his dearest and nearest and using most of his energies. Other itineraries could be in San Marco quarter, to the Marciana library or Patriarcale Palace to look at the cycle of Santa Caterina, once in the namesake church, to which his daughter also worked.

Our journey in search of Tintoretto could end in San Giorgio Maggiore, in front of the “Deposition in the sepulchre”, the last work of the painter, started and finished for Marietta, a true conversation with his dead children. At first the painting was packed, but then when the transportation had to be postponed because of the painter’s sickness he brought it to the island, Tintoretto’s last time in the lagoon, a muggy morning on May 21, 1594.

Along this Venetian journey we do not encounter his daughter’s works, the ego-narrator says that Marietta loved portraits, some of them known by contemporaries are now lost, others have been recognized by the critics as Marietta’s, but apparently in Venice nothing is left and everything speaks of her father.