Jacopo Robusti

Jacopo Tintoretto remained in Venice for his whole life

Jacopo Tintoretto was born Jacopo Robusti on probably 29th September 1518 in Venice - other sources also give the year as 1519. The actual family name was Comin, but Jacopo's father and uncle were given the honorary name Robusti after heroically defending the city gate of Padua in a military conflict. Jacopo Robusti, however, owed his later artist's name of Il Tintoretto (the little dyer) to his father's profession as a textile dyer (Italian: tentoreto). Jacopo Robusti had a younger brother, Domenico, with whom he remained close throughout his life, and nineteen other siblings, about whom nothing more is known. The artist's training also remains largely obscure; he was probably apprenticed to a local Venetian painter with the approval and support of his father, as Jacopo Robusti never travelled far beyond his hometown of Venice, apart from an unverified journey to Rome in 1547/48. His teachers could have been Bonifazio Veronese, Andrea Schiavone and Paris Bordone; according to the artist biographer Carlo Ridolfi, Jacopo Robusti came to Titian as an apprentice, but was sent away by him after just ten days out of envy and jealousy.

Tintoretto was ambitious, highly talented and uncompromising

Jacopo Tintoretto was small in stature but possessed great ambition. His sometimes caustic and mocking nature meant that he was perceived as a rebel by those around him and was somewhat of an outsider. This did not change the fact that he was already running his own studio as an independent master by 1838. In order to be successful on the highly competitive Venetian art market, he did not shy away from hardball tactics: for a prestigious commission, he was prepared to work for the cost of materials or even completely free of charge. In this way, he even managed to beat his great rival Titian - the state painter of the Republic of Venice at the time - and win the tender for the wall and ceiling paintings of the ‘Scuola di San Rocco’. Executed entirely by his own hand between 1565 and 1587, the work comprises over fifty paintings and is considered one of Tintoretto’s key works, which shows his visionary and spiritualising style of painting in its fully developed maturity and with all its many facets.

Art in the tension field between religious and political struggles

Jacopo Tintoretto lived in an extraordinary time of tension between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Although he drew on traditional Roman Catholic themes for his religious paintings and his attitude towards the Reformation remains uncertain, there are always astonishing details that speak in favour of his non-conformist point of view. Most recently, there was uproar amongst art scholars when it was discovered that Tintoretto's monumental depiction of the Last Judgement in the Madonna dell'Orto church - which the artist held in particularly high esteem - shows the bowls of the Archangel Michael's soul scales to be empty. Contrary to church doctrine, the deeds of men therefore carried no weight for Tintoretto. For Tintoretto, painting was more than mere artistic self-realisation; it also gave him the opportunity to assert himself in society and position himself with his views and thoughts. Tintoretto's art still has a lot to tell today and is far from being fully deciphered.

Jacobo Robusti, known as Jacopo Tintoretto, died in Venice on 31st May 1594.