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| Jacopo Tintoretto Portrait of Doge Niccolò da Ponte (detail) ca. 1580 oil on canvas Palazzo Pretorio, Prato |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Portrait of Doge Niccolò da Ponte ca. 1580 oil on canvas Palazzo Pretorio, Prato |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Portrait of a member of the Foscari Family 1555 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple ca. 1540 oil on canvas Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple (detail) ca. 1540 oil on canvas Fondation Bemberg, Toulouse |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple ca. 1550-55 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Virgin and Child with St Augustine, St Catherine of Alexandria, St Mark and St John the Baptist ca. 1549-50 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto and workshop Dream of St Mark ca. 1585 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery 1550 oil on canvas Palazzo Barberini, Rome |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto St Mark's Body brought to Venice ca. 1562-66 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto St Mark's Body brought to Venice (detail) ca. 1562-66 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Tarquin and Lucretia ca. 1578-80 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Tarquin and Lucretia (detail) ca. 1578-80 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Judith and Holofernes ca. 1577 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Jacopo Tintoretto Cain and Abel ca. 1550-53 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
"Born in Venice in 1518 or 1519, Jacopo Robusti took his professional name of Tintoretto, "the little dyer," from his father's occupation (tintore in Italian). His 17th-century biographers Carlo Ridolfi and Marco Boschini recount that Tintoretto spent a brief period in Titian's workshop, from which he was dismissed because of Titian's jealousy or his own prickly personality.
Throughout his career, Tintoretto was the subject of controversy. While he was praised for his power and inventiveness, detractors often complained that his paintings looked unfinished. Typical is the grudging admiration accorded him by Giorgio Vasari, who recognized his extraordinary talent and creative imagination but fundamentally disapproved of his failure to follow the rules, and in particular of his rapid technique: "In the matter of painting, Tintoretto is swift, resolute, fantastic, and extravagant, and the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced, as may be seen from all his works and from the fantastic compositions of his scenes, executed by him in a fashion of his own and contrary to the use of other painters. Indeed he has surpassed even the limits of extravagance with the new and fanciful inventions and the strange vagaries of his intellect, working at haphazard and without design, as if to prove that art is but a jest."
In portraiture, Tintoretto favored an understated model based upon prototypes developed by Titian. The sitters who most engaged him are men in their maturity and, in particular, in old age, depicted with unsparing but sympathetic candor. Tintoretto's clientele was extremely varied. While he executed works for wealthy and powerful patricians, the Venetian state, and the city's richest confraternities – and even a small number for princely patrons outside of Venice – he never abandoned the poorer confraternities and less prominent churches that had been among his earliest patrons. His aggressive marketing techniques often rubbed his peers the wrong way; intensely ambitious, he regularly agreed to execute works for discounted prices or even at cost."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC