Tintoretto Jacopo

Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoreto, was born in 1518 or 1519 in Venice, where he spent all of his life, perhaps with small intervals of travel, and worked until his death, in 1594. Apart from a short period of only a few days at Tiziano’s workshop, we do not know if he served as apprentice under any other painter. From 1539, he began to work as an independent painter.

His early work reveals the influence of Veronese, Schiavone, Salviati, and Tiziano, while from around 1540, the effect of Michelangelo became obvious, perhaps after the artist’s travel to Rome in the same period. Notably, he had written on a wall in his workshop: “The drawing of Michelangelo and the colour of Tiziano”. Living in Venice, he combined in his paintings the colouristic splendour of the great Venetian masters, in which the memory of the mosaics of Saint Mark was still going strong, with the monumentality, the movement, and the dramatic gestures of Michelangelo’s figures.