Villa Artwork

Jacopo Comin, who is known to us as Tintoretto, was born in Venice in 1518. He came by the name because his father was a fabric dyer (a tintore) and the young Jacopo, who started his painting vocation by daubing colors on the walls of his father’s workshop, was given the title “little dyer,” or tintoretto. 

Tintoretto absorbed the influences of the Venetian artist, Titian, as well as the Renaissance powerhouse, Michelangelo. Tintoretto received the Venetian sense of rich, expressive color from Titian; he inherited the sense of dynamic figurative composition from Michelangelo. Tintoretto’s inventive mind added the elements of light, space and perspective, which are in great evidence in his late masterwork, The Last Supper, located in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.

In 1594, the last year of his life, Tintoretto took on the subject of the Passover meal Jesus celebrated with his apostles the night before he died. It is a remarkable re-visioning of what had been a standard approach, as painted by Leonardo da Vinci.