Jacopo Robusti (late September or early October 1518Bernari and de Vecchi 1970, p. 83.31 May 1594), best known as Tintoretto ( ; ; ), was an Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school. His contemporaries both admired and criticised the speed with which he painted and the unprecedented boldness of his brushwork. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed . His work is characterised by muscular figures, dramatic gestures and bold use of perspective, in the Mannerist style.
Life The years of apprenticeship Tintoretto was born in Venice in 1518. His father, Battista, was a dyer – in Italian and in Venetian; hence the son got the nickname of Tintoretto, "little dyer", or "dyer's boy".Echols 2018, p. 39. Tintoretto is known to have had at least one sibling, a brother named Domenico, although an unreliable 17th-century account says his siblings numbered 22.Echols 2018, pp. 38–40. The family was believed to have originated from Brescia, in Lombardy, then part of the Republic of Venice. Older studies gave the Tuscan town of Lucca as the origin of the family.
Little is known of Tintoretto's childhood or training. According to his early biographers Carlo Ridolfi (1642) and Marco Boschini (1660), his only formal apprenticeship was in the studio of Titian, who angrily dismissed him after only a few days—either out of jealousy of so promising a student (in Ridolfi's account) or because of a personality clash (in Boschini's version).Echols 2018, p. 85. From this time forward the relationship between the two artists remained rancorous, despite Tintoretto's continued admiration for Titian. For his part, Titian actively disparaged Tintoretto, as did his adherents.Echols 2018, pp. 18, 85.
Tintoretto sought no further teaching but studied on his own account with laborious zeal. According to Ridolfi, he gained some experience by working alongside artisans who decorated furniture with paintings of mythological scenes, and studied anatomy by drawing live models and dissecting cadavers.Echols 2018, pp. 41, 85. He lived poorly, collecting casts, bas-reliefs, and prints, and practising with their aid. At some time, possibly in the 1540s, Tintoretto acquired models of Michelangelo's Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night, which he and his workshop studied in numerous drawings made from all angles on blue paper.Echols 2018, pp. 172–173; I. Brahms: La strada vera – Tintoretto's Drawings on Carte Azzurre and Art Theory, in: Venice in Blue (Testi e fonti per la storia della grafica), Alexa McCarthy, Laura Moretti, and Paolo Sachet (eds.), Florence, 2024, pp. 23-44. Now and afterward he very frequently worked by night as well as by day. His noble conception of art and his high personal ambition were both evidenced in the inscription which he placed over his studio Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano ("Michelangelo's drawing and Titian's colour").Nichols, Tom; Tintoretto. Tradition and Identity, Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 14.
Early works
The young painter Andrea Schiavone, four years Tintoretto's junior, was much in his company. Tintoretto helped Schiavone at no charge with wall paintings, and in many subsequent instances, he also worked for nothing, and thus succeeded in obtaining commissions.Nichols, Tom; Tintoretto - Tradition and Identity, Reaktion Books, 1999, pp. 103, 241ff. The two earliest mural paintings of Tintoretto—done, like others, for next to no pay—are said to have been Belshazzar's Feast and a Cavalry Fight. These have both long since perished, as have all his frescoes, early or later. The first work of his to attract some considerable notice was a portrait group of himself and his brother—the latter playing the guitar—with a nocturnal effect; this has also been lost. It was followed by some historical subject, which Titian was candid enough to praise.
One of Tintoretto's early pictures still extant is in the church of the Carmine in Venice, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (); also in S. Benedetto are the Annunciation and Christ with the Woman of Samaria. For the Scuola della Trinità (the scuole or schools of Venice were confraternities, more in the nature of charitable foundations than of educational institutions) he painted four subjects from Genesis. Two of these, now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, are Adam and Eve and the Death of Abel, both noble works of high mastery, which indicate that Tintoretto was by this time a consummate painter—one of the few who have attained to the highest eminence in the absence of any recorded formal training. Until 2012, The Embarkation of St Helena in the Holy Land was attributed to Schiavone. But a new analysis of the work has revealed it as one of a series of three paintings by Tintoretto, depicting the legend of St Helena and the Holy Cross. The error was uncovered during work on a project to catalogue continental European oil paintings in the United Kingdom. The Embarkation of St Helena was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1865. Its sister paintings, The Discovery of the True Cross and St Helen Testing the True Cross, are held in galleries in the United States.
Saint Mark paintings
In 1548 Tintoretto was commissioned to paint a large decoration for the Scuola di S. Marco: the Miracle of the Slave. Realising that the commission presented him with a singular opportunity to establish himself as a major artist, he took extraordinary care in arranging the composition for maximum effect. The painting represents the legend of a Christian slave or captive who was to be tortured as a punishment for some acts of devotion to the evangelist, but was saved by the miraculous intervention of the latter, who shattered the bone-breaking and blinding implements which were about to be applied. Tintoretto's conception of the narrative is distinguished by a marked theatricality, unusual colour choices, and vigorous execution.Echols 2018, p. 7.
The painting was a triumphant success, despite some detractors. Tintoretto's friend Pietro Aretino praised the work, calling particular attention to the figure of the slave, but warned Tintoretto against hasty execution. As a result of the painting's success, Tintoretto received numerous commissions. For the church of San Rocco he painted Saint Roch Cures the Plague Victims (1549), one of the first of Tintoretto's many laterali (horizontal paintings). These were large-scale paintings intended for the side walls of Venetian chapels. Knowing that the congregation would view them from an angle, Tintoretto composed the paintings with an off-centre perspective so the illusion of depth would be effective when seen from a viewpoint near the end of the painting that was closer to the worshippers.Echols 2018, p. 12.
Around 1555 he painted the Assumption of the Virgin, an oil-on-canvas painting for the church of Santa Maria dei Crociferi.
In 1551, Paolo Veronese arrived in Venice and quickly began receiving the prestigious commissions that Tintoretto coveted. Unwilling to be overshadowed by his new rival, Tintoretto approached the leaders of his neighbourhood church, the Madonna dell'Orto, with a proposal to paint for them two colossal canvases on a cost-only basis.Echols 2018, pp. 14–17. He had already painted the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple (), one of his major works, for the church; it repeats a subject that had earlier been painted by Titian, but in place of Titian's classically balanced composition is a startling visual drama of figures arranged on a receding staircase.Echols 2018, p. 15. Tintoretto now intended to create a sensation by painting for the Madonna dell'Orto the two tallest canvases ever painted during the Renaissance.Butterfield 2007. He settled down in a house near the church, looking over the Fondamenta de Mori, which is still standing.Nichols, Tom; Tintoretto - Tradition and Identity, Redaktion Books, 1999, p. 101.
Depicting the Worship of the Golden Calf and the Last Judgment, the tall paintings (both –1560) were widely admired, and Tintoretto gained a reputation for his ability to complete the most massive projects on a limited budget. Thereafter, Tintoretto habitually competed against rival painters by producing paintings quickly at a low cost.Nichols, T. (2003), "Tintoretto family", Grove Art Online. In about 1564, Tintoretto painted three additional works for Scuola di S. Marco: the Finding of the body of St Mark, the St Mark's Body Brought to Venice, and St Mark Rescuing a Saracen from Shipwreck.
About 1560, Tintoretto married his second wife, Faustina de Vescovi, daughter of a Venetian nobleman who was the guardian grande of the Scuola Grande di San Marco.Echols 2018, p. 53.
Scuola di San Rocco
Between 1565 and 1567, and again from 1575 to 1588, Tintoretto produced a large number of paintings for the walls and ceilings of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. The first room he painted was Sala dell'Allbergo, filled with scenes from the Passion of Christ. The subterfuge by which he won the commission has been called "the most notorious incident of Tintoretto's career".Echols 2018, p. 21. In 1564, four finalists—Tintoretto, Federico Zuccaro, Giuseppe Salviati, and Paolo Veronese — were invited by the Scuola to submit modelli for a ceiling painting on the subject of Saint Roch in Glory to decorate the hall called the Sala dell'Albergo. Instead of a sketch, Tintoretto produced a full-sized painting, secretly installed it on the ceiling, and presented it as a fait accompli on the day of the competition. Tintoretto then announced that he was offering the painting as a gift — perhaps conscious that a bylaw of the foundation prohibited the rejection of any gift.
In 1565, he resumed work at the scuola, painting the Crucifixion, for which a sum of 250 ducats was paid. In 1576 he presented gratis another centre-piece — that for the ceiling of the great hall, representing the Plague of Serpents; and in the following year he completed this ceiling with pictures of the Paschal Feast and Moses striking the Rock accepting whatever pittance the confraternity chose to pay.
The development of fast painting techniques called prestezza allowed him to produce many works while engaged on large projects and to respond to growing demands from clients. This, and his use of assistants, enabled Tintoretto ultimately to produce a greater number of paintings for the Venetian state than any of his competitors.Frederick Ilchman and Linda Borean (2009), Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, Surrey: Lund Humphries, p. 45 .
Tintoretto next launched out into the painting of the entire scuola and of the adjacent church of San Rocco. In November 1577, he offered to execute the works at the rate of 100 ducats per annum, with three pictures being due each year. This proposal was accepted and was punctually fulfilled, the painter's death alone preventing the execution of some of the ceiling subjects. The whole sum paid for the scuola throughout was 2,447 ducats. Disregarding some minor performances, the scuola and church contain fifty-two memorable paintings, which may be described as vast suggestive sketches, with the mastery, but not the deliberate precision, of finished pictures, and adapted for being looked at in a dusky half-light. Adam and Eve, the Visitation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Agony in the Garden, Christ before Pilate, Christ carrying His Cross and (this alone having been marred by restoration) the Assumption of the Virgin are leading examples in the scuola; in the church, Christ Curing the Paralytic.
It was probably in 1560, the year in which he began working in the Scuola di S. Rocco, that Tintoretto commenced his numerous paintings in the Doge's Palace; he then executed there a portrait of the Doge, Girolamo Priuli. Other works (destroyed by a fire in the palace in 1577) succeeded—the Excommunication of Frederick Barbarossa by Pope Alexander III and the Victory of Lepanto.