Jacopo Robusti, or Tintoretto, is to receive a signal honour for a 16th-century artist. Tintoretto, who died in 1594, has been selected for this year's Venice Biennale. A handful of his dazzling masterpieces, perhaps the most sublime of all being The Stealing of the Dead Body of St Mark that normally hangs in the Accademia Gallery in Venice, will be shown among the crowd of contemporary artists in the famous festival of new art. Why Tintoretto? He is modern, say the organisers. He breaks the rules. He is a reminder to young artists that they, too, should break the rules.
But is Tintoretto all that modern?
The Biennale is right to look from its comfort zone in the Biennale gardens back towards the city of Venice with all its historic treasures. Venice created some of the greatest paintings in history and a good number of them are still in the city, in its churches, palaces and museums. Tintoretto's works here include in situ decorations that are part of the very fabric of Venice. His most ambitious project was to decorate the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the hall of a religious confraternity that he morphed into his answer to the Sistine Chapel, a consummate expression of one man's vision in fervent and daring depictions of Biblical scenes that blaze all around you. Meanwhile, in the Doges Palace, his ethereal and overwhelming painting Paradise melts a wall into light.
Tintoretto's "modern" and subversive quality starts with his shockingly dramatic spatial effects. The Italian Renaissance developed perspective as a means to create a realistic illusion of three-dimensional space: Tintoretto stretches this idea to bursting point by using absurdly long and vast perspectives. This is taken to the most surreal effect in his painting of Venetian heroes stealing the corpse of St Mark from an eastern city, imagined as a receding palatial vista under a sky of storm and fire.
The orange light of that monstrous sky is at the heart of Tintoretto's radicalism. Light is the elixir of Venetian painting: artists in this city were born poets of light whose pictures create delicate atmospheres of warm sun, suggest stormy foreboding or the light of heaven itself. Yet compare Tintoretto's Stealing of the Dead Body of St Mark with a painting in the Frari church, Venice, of the Assumption, by his elder, Titian. Even in a visionary religious work, Titian uses light to make his painting real. By contrast, Tintoretto creates atmospheres that are enclosed and unreal. His light leads inward, to a realm of spiritual meditation.
Tintoretto was a genuinely pious man, in the age of the Counter-Reformation when Italy abounded in new religious energy. His art is a rejection of the sensual fullness of Titian. Paradoxically, this reactionary art now looks "modern" because it does indeed break the rules of the Renaissance. Similarly, Tintoretto's contemporary El Greco, whose art is also a heady mix of piety and stylistic defiance, was an inspiration to Picasso.
But Picasso was painting his revolutionary works a century ago. He really was attacking the rules, and turned to El Greco as a strange predecessor. Do artists today need telling to break rules? Surely Tintoretto is more likely to look, in the context of the Biennale, like a fiery prophet of artistic crisis.
To see this, we need to take a second look at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco whose paintings are his true artistic testament. It is true that stylistic radicalism proliferates here. But it serves a deeper purpose. The Scuole of Venice were societies of lay people who came together to do charitable works. They were at the heart of the city's social fabric. The confraternity whose building Tintoretto worked so hard to ennoble was dedicated to San Rocco, a saint believed to protect the city from plague: Tintoretto's paintings here are about uniting the community against the disease that constantly threatened European cities from the 14th to 17th centuries with complete social breakdown.
It's natural for us to remove the art of the past from its original meanings and enjoy it as a formal exercise. Picasso did that with El Greco. In vaunting Tintoretto as a subversive figure, the Biennale is doing something similar. But if you do find him intriguing, follow the Tintoretto trail to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. There you will find a conception of art as a social good, a healing and teaching vision for the people.
How does that idea of art as communal redemption square with the atmosphere of the Venice Biennale? At the Biennale, probably more than any other art event, you can see the glamour of the global art world, with collectors' James Bond villain-style yachts anchored near the Biennale Gardens, and all the fun of the vernissage. In truth it feels artificially separated from the city in which it is held, and including Tintoretto is a brilliant way of making a link between Venice ancient and modern. But art today – at the Biennale and elsewhere – rarely plays the organic part in the life of a city, a community, or a state (Renaissance Venice was all three) that Tintoretto's paintings did in their time. The Biennale is right to celebrate Tintoretto's modernity. Yet if his paintings mirror the art of today, they do this in passing. Seen whole, he tells us how limited and cynical our idea of art has become.