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Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Robusti; 1518 - May
31, 1594) was one of the greatest painters of the
Venetian school and probably the last great
painter of Italian Renaissance.  For his
phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il
Furioso. He had a passion for special lighting
effects, making wax figures of his subjects and
experimenting by placing them before differently
angled spotlights before painting them. As a
result, certain figures reappear in different
works, though they are depicted in different
angles and with different lighting, thus
prefiguring baroque art.

==The years of apprenticeship==

He was born in Venice in 1518, though most
accounts say in 1512. His father, Battista
Robusti, was a dyer, or tintore; hence the son got
the nickname of Tintoretto, little dyer, or dyer's
boy, which is Englished as Tintoret. In childhood
Jacopo, a born painter, began daubing on the
dyer's walls; his father, noticing his bent, took
him round, still in boyhood, to the studio of
Titian, to see how far he could be trained as an
artist. We may suppose this to have been towards
1533, when Titian was already (according to the
ordinary accounts) fifty-six years of age. 

Ridolfi is our authority for saying that Tintoret
had only been ten days in the studio when Titian
sent him home once and for all. The reason,
according to the same writer, is that the great
master observed some very spirited drawings, which
he learned to be the production of Tintoret; and
it is inferred that he became at once jealous of
so promising a scholar. This, however, is mere
conjecture; and perhaps it may be fairer to
suppose that the drawings exhibited so much
independence of manner that Titian judged that
young Robusti, although he might become a painter,
would never be properly a pupil. 

From this time forward the two always remained
upon distant terms, Robusti being indeed a
professed and ardent admirer of Titian, but never
a friend, and Titian and his adherents turning the
cold shoulder to Robusti. Active disparagement
also was not wanting, but it passed unnoticed by
Tintoret. The latter sought for no further
teaching, but studied on his own account with
laborious zeal; he lived poorly, collecting casts,
bas-reliefs, &c., and practising by their aid. His
noble conception of art and his high personal
ambition were evidenced in the inscription which
he placed over his studio Il disegno di
Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano
("Michelangelo's design and Titian's color"). 

He studied more especially from models of
Michelangelo's Dawn, Noon, Twilight and Night, and
became expert in modelling in wax and clay method
(practised likewise by Titian) which afterwards
stood him in good stead in working out the
arrangement of his pictures. The models were
sometimes taken from dead subjects dissected or
studied in anatomy schools; some were draped,
others nude, and Robusti was wont to suspend them
in a wooden or cardboard box, with an aperture for
a candle. Now and afterwards he very frequently
worked by night as well as by day. 

==Early works== 

The young painter Schiavone, four years Rohusti's
junior, was much in his company. Tintoret helped
Schiavone gratis in wall-paintings; and in many
subsequent instances he worked also for nothing,
and thus succeeded in obtaining commissions. The
two earliest mural paintings of Robusti - done,
like others, for next to no pay - are said to have
been Belshazzar's Feast and a Cavalry Fight, both
long since perished. Such, indeed, may be said to
have been the fate of all his frescoes, early or
later. The first work of his which attracted some
considerable notice was a portrait-group of
himself and his brother - the latter playing a
guitar - with a nocturnal effect; this also is
lost. It was followed by some historical subject,
which Titian was candid enough to praise. 

One of Tintoret'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 Trinity
(the scuole or schools of Venice were more in the
nature of hospitals or charitable foundations than
of educational institutions) he painted four
subjects from Genesis. Two of these, now in the
Venetian Academy, are Adam and Eve and the Death
of Abel, both noble works of high mastery, which
leave us in no doubt that Robusti was by this time
a consummate painter - one of the few who have
attained to the highest eminence by dire study of
their own, unseconded by any training from some
senior proficient.

==Saint Mark paintings==

Towards 1546 Robusti painted for the church of the
Madonna dell Orto three of his leading works - the
Worship of the Golden Calf, the Presentation of
the Virgin in the Temple, and the Last Judgment
now shamefully repainted; and he settled down in a
house hard by the church. It is a Gothic edifice,
looking over the lagoon of Murano to the Alps,
built in the Fondamenta de Mori, still standing.
In 1548 he was commissioned for four pictures in
the Scuola di S. Marco - the Finding of the body
of St Mark in Alexandria (now in the church of the
Angeli, Murano), the Saint's Body brought to
Venice, a Votary of the Saint delivered by
invoking him from an Unclean Spirit (these two are
in the library of the royal palace, Venice), and
the highly and justly celebrated Miracle of the
Slave. This last, which forms at present one of
the chief glories of the Venetian Academy,
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. 

These four works were greeted with signal and
general applause, including that of Titian's
intimate, the too potent Pietro Aretino, with whom
Tintoret, one of the few men who scorned to curry
favor with him, was mostly in disrepute. It is
said, however, that Tintoret at one time painted a
ceiling in Pietro's house; at another time, being
invited to do his portrait, he attended, and at
once proceeded to take his sitter's measure with a
pistol (or a stiletto), as a significant hint that
he was not exactly the manto be trifled with. The
painter having now executed the four works in the
Scuola di S. Marco, his straits and obscure
endurances were over. He married Faustina de
Vescovi, daughter of a Venetian nobleman. She
appears to have been a careful housewife, and one
who both would and could have her way with her not
too tractable husband. Faustina bore him several
children, probably two sons and five daughters.

==Scuola di S. Marco==

The next conspicuous event in the professional
life of Tintoret is his enormous labor and profuse
self-development on the walls and ceilings of the
Scuola di S. Marco, a building which may now
almost be regarded as a shrine reared by Robusti
to his own genius. The building had been begun in
1525 by the Lombardi, and was very deficient in
light, so as to be particularly ill-suited for any
great scheme of pictorial adornment. The painting
of its interior was commenced in 1560. 

In that year five principal painters, including
Tintoret and Paul Veronese, were invited to send
in trial-designs for the centre-piece in the
smaller ball named Sala dell Albergo, the subject
being S. Rocco received into Heaven. Tintoret
produced not a sketch but a picture, and got it
inserted into its oval. The competitors
remonstrated, not unnaturally; but the artist, who
knew how to play his own game, made a free gift of
the picture to the saint, and, as a bylaw of the
foundation prohibited the rejection of any gift,
it was retained in situ, Tintoret furnishing
gratis the other decorations of the same ceiling. 

In 1565 he resumed work at the scuola, painting
the magnificent 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. 

==Scuola di S. Rocco==

Robusti next launched out into the painting of the
entire scuola and of the adjacent church of S.
Rocco. He offered in November 1577 to execute the
works at the rate of 100 ducats per annum, three
pictures being due in each year. This proposal was
accepted and was punctually fulfilled, the
painters death alone preventing the execution of
some of the ceiling-subjects. The whole sum paid
for the scuola throughout was 2447 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
Tintoret commenced his numerous paintings in the
ducal palace; he then executed there a portrait of
the doge, Girolamo Priuli. Other works which were
destroyed in the great fire of 1577 succeeded -
the Excommunication of Frederick Barbarossa by
Pope Alexander III and the Victory of Lepanto. 

After the fire Tintoret started afresh, Paul
Veronese being his colleague; their works have for
the most part been disastrously and disgracefully
retouched of late years, and some of the finest
monuments of pictorial power ever produced are
thus degraded to comparative unimportance. In the
Sala deilo Scrutinio Robusti painted the Capture
of Zara from the Hungarians in 1346 amid a
Hurricane of Missiles; in the hail of the senate,
Venice, Queen of the Sea; in the hall of the
college, the Espousal of St Catherine to Jesus; in
the Sala dell Anticollegio, four extraordinary
masterpieces - Bacchus, with Ariadne crowned by
Venus, the Three Graces and Mercury, Minerva
discarding Mars, and the Forge of Vulcan which
were painted for fifty ducats each, besides
materials, towards 1578; in the Antichiesetta, St
George and St Nicholas, with St Margaret (the
female figure is sometimes termed the princess
whom St George rescued from the dragon), and St
Jerome and St Andrew; in the hall of the great
council, nine large compositions, chiefly
battle-pieces. 

==Paradise==

We here reach the crowning production of Robusti's
life, the last picture of any considerable
importance which he executed, the vast Paradise,
in size 74 ft. by 30, reputed to be the largest
painting ever done upon canvas. It is a work so
stupendous in scale, so colossal in the sweep of
its power, so reckless of ordinary standards of
conception or method, so pure an inspiration of a
soul burning with passionate visual imagining and
a hand magical to work in shape and color, that it
has defied the connoisseurship of three centuries,
and has generally (though not with its first
Venetian contemporaries) passed for an eccentric
failure; while to a few eyes (including those of
the present writer) it seems to be so transcendent
a monument of human faculty applied to the art
pictorial as not to he viewed without awe nor
thought of without amazement. 

While the commission for this huge work was yet
pending and unassigned Robusti was wont to tell
the senators that he had prayed to God that he
might be commissioned for it, so that. paradise
itself might perchance be his recompense after
death. Upon eventually receiving the commission in
1588 he set up his canvas in the Scuola della
Misericordia and worked indefatigably at the task,
making many alterations and doing various heads
and costumes direct from nature. 

When the picture had been brought well forward he
took it to its proper place and there finished it,
assisted by his son Domenico for details of
drapery, &c. All Venice applauded the superb
achievement, which has in more recent times
suffered from neglect, but fortunately hardly at
all from restoration. Robusti was asked to name
his own price, but this he left to the
authorities. They tendered a handsome amount;
Robusti is said to have abated something from it,
which is even a more curious instance of
ungreediness for pelf than earlier cases which we
have cited where he worked for nothing at all.

==Death and pupils== 

After the completion of the Paradise Robusti
rested for a while, and he never undertook any
other work of importance, though there is no
reason to suppose that his energies were exhausted
had his days been a little prolonged. He was
seized with an attack in the stomach, complicated
with fever, which prevented him from sleeping and
almost from eating for a fortnight, and on the May
31,  1594 he died. He was buried in the church of
the Madonna dell Orto by the side of his favorite
daughter Marietta, who had died in 1590, aged
thirty; there is a well-known tradition that as
she lay dead the heart-stricken father painted her
portrait.

Marietta had herself been a portrait-painter of
considerable skill, as well as a musician, vocal
and instrumental; but few of her works are now
traceable, it is said that up to the age of
fifteen she used to accompany and assist her
father at his work, dressed as a boy; eventually
she married a jeweller, Mario Augusta. In 1866 the
grave of the Vescovi and Robusti was opened, and
the remains of nine members of the joint families
were found in it; a different locality, the chapel
on the right of the choir, was then assigned to
the grave.

Of pupils Robusti had very few; his two sons and
Martin de Vos of Antwerp were among them. Domenico
Robusti (1562-1637), whom we have already had
occasion to mention, frequently assisted his
father in the groundwork of great pictures. He
himself painted a multitude of works, many of them
oh a very large scale; they would at best be
mediocre, and, coming from the son of Tintoret,
are exasperating; still, he must be regarded as a
considerable sort of pictorial practitioner in his
way.

==Style of life and assessment== 

Tintoret scarcely ever travelled out of Venice. He
loved all the arts, played in youth the lute and
various instruments, some of them of his own
invention, and designed theatrical costumes and
properties, was versed in mechanics and mechanical
devices, and was a very agreeable companion. For
the sake of his work he lived in a most retired
fashion, and even when not painting was wont to
remain in his working room surrounded by casts.
Here he hardly admitted any, even intimate
friends, and he kept his modes of work secret,
save as regards his assistants. He abounded in
pleasant witty sayings whether to great personages
or to others, but no smile hovered on his lips. 

Out of doors his wife made him wear the robe of a
Venetian citizen; if it rained she tried to indue
him with an outer garment, but this he resisted.
She would also when he left the house wrap up
money for him in a handkerchief, and on his return
expected an account of it; Tintoret's accustomed
reply was that he had spent it in alms to the poor
or to prisoners. 

An agreement is extant showing that he undertook
to finish in two months two historical pictures
each containing twenty figures, seven being
portraits. The number of his portraits is
enormous; their merit is unequal, but the really
fine ones cannot be surpassed. Sebastiano del
Piombo remarked that Robusti could paint in two
days as much as himself in two years; Annibale
Caracci that Tintoret was in many pictures equal
to Titian, in others inferior to Tintoret. This
was the general opinion of the Venetians, who said
that he had three pencils - one of gold, the
second of silver and the third of iron. 

A comparison of Tintoretto's The Last Supper with
Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper
(Leonardo)|work of the same name provides an
instructive demonstration of how artistic styles
evolved over the course of the Renaissance. 
Leonardo's is all classical repose.  The disciples
radiate away from Christ in almost-mathematical
symmetry.  In the hands of Tintoretto, the same
event becomes dramatically distorted.  The human
figures are overwhelmed by the eruption of beings
from the spirit world. commonscat|Jacopo
Tintoretto

----
1911