Allegory of Vigilance

This late Allegory of Vigilance, painted around 1590, reflects the type of allegorical subject popular in Venetian decorative programs for palaces and public buildings. Now in the Birmingham Museum of Art, the painting demonstrates Tintoretto's continued engagement with symbolic imagery in his final years. Tintoretto executed numerous mythological paintings for the Doge's Palace and patrician collections, demonstrating mastery of a genre requiring learned iconographic knowledge and the sensuous figure painting that was the Venetian tradition's special strength. His mythological paintings combine rapid assured draftsmanship with the Venetian celebration of the female body in natural settings. The combination of classical subject matter, Venetian light, and dynamic composition gives his mythological pictures a distinctive vitality that sets them apart from Veronese's more measured allegories and the more purely sensuous mythologies of Titian.

The allegorical figure is rendered with the fluid, almost sketchy brushwork characteristic of Tintoretto's late manner. Warm Venetian tones predominate, with the figure emerging from a shadowed background.