Tintoretto: A Great But Crafty Venetian Artist
He was not above using trickery to get his way
The name “Tintoretto” was a nickname, meaning “the little dyer” or “the son of the dyer” which was given to Jacopo Robusti (c.1519–1594) because he was the eldest of the 21 children of a Venetian dyer of silk cloth.
His father took note of Jacopo’s talent for painting at an early age. The boy had a penchant for daubing pigments on the wall of his father’s workshop in ways that were more creative than the sort of behaviour that might normally lead to a clip round the ear in such circumstances, and so, when he was about 14, his father sent him to the artist Titian (then aged 56) to see if he could be trained to make the best use of his skills.
A Difficult Apprenticeship
The story goes that Titian sent him home after only ten days in his studio, on the grounds that the work Tintoretto was producing was so much better than that of his master that Titian grew jealous and refused to have him around. This is unlikely to be the real explanation, and it is far more likely that Titian recognised that the young man’s independent style was such that he had little to teach him. Tintoretto was therefore largely self-taught.
