Tintoretto (in English often shortened into Tintoret), a great Italian painter, so called from the fact of his father being a dyer (Tintore), but whose real name was Jacopo Robusti, was born at Venice, 29th September 1518. He studied for a short time under Titian, but appears to have been for the most part self-taught. His motto was 'The design of Michaelangelo and the colouring of Titian'; and his aim was obviously to combine the dignity of the Florentine with the romanticism of the Venetians; but, though in the estimation of most of his contemporaries he succeeded, there has subsequently been diversity of opinion as to his merits. One of Ruskin's 'five supreme painters,' he was unquestionably a great master of composition, drawing, and colour; his conceptions are often grand and his chiaroscuro startlingly effective. But he was strangely unequal; some of his earlier pictures are very carefully finished, but his later ones are dashed off with a fatal haste that justifies the epithet Il Furioso, and the remark of Annibal Caracci, that 'if he was sometimes equal to Titian, he was often inferior to Tintoretto.' His portraits are generally admirable. Many of his pictures are of prodigious size. Of the innumerable pictures in the galleries that are attributed to him not a few are by other hands. Venice contains many undoubted specimens of his art; there are a number in England, including 'St George and the Dragon' in the National Gallery at London. Other famous pictures from his hand are 'Belshazzar's Feast, and the Writing upon the Wall' (fresco, for the Arsenal at Venice), 'The Tiburtine Sibyl,' 'The Last Supper and the Washing of the Disciples' Feet,' 'The Crucifixion,' 'The Worship of the Golden Calf,' 'The Last Judgment' (the last two immense pictures 50 feet high, and very splendid in conception), 'St Agnes restoring to Life the Son of a Prefect,' 'The Miracle of St Mark,' 'The Resurrection,' 'The Slaughter of the Innocents,' and the largest picture on canvas by any great master, the 'Paradise' (1558) of the Ducal Palace at Venice, 34 feet high by 74 long, and con- taining over 100 figures. Tintoretto, who ranks as the head of the later Venetian school, died 31st May 1594.
See, besides the general histories of painting, Crowe and Cavalcaselle's Titian (1876), Ruskin's Stones of Venice (1851-53), Osler's small monograph (1879), and the large one by F. P. Stearns (New York, 1895).