Jacopo Robusti (1518 -1594). Referred to by Ruskin as Tintoret. The son of a dyer (tintore), hence the nickname with the diminutive -etto, was a painter of the Venetian school, and traditionally a pupil of Titian. Cook, Handbook to the National Gallery, including Notes Collected from the Works of Mr. Ruskin, p. 133, follows Ruskin on Tintoretto, calling him the 'last great master of the Venetian school, and the most imaginative of all painters'. He adds: 'It is only in Venice that this great master can be properly studied, and only in the works of Mr. Ruskin that any due appreciation of his powers is to be found'.
Tintoretto had a reputation as an innovator and an outsider, single-minded and independent; nevertheless he ran a successful workshop, working on the Ducal Palace, and for the Confraternities,. most notably in his work in the Scuola di San Rocco. He is described as 'eruptively creative' by Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, p. 35 8, his work is noted for its large scale, its energy, and its dramatic effects of foreshortening and of colour. His workshop slogan claimed to combine the 'il disegno di Michel Angelo ed il colorito di Tiziano', but, according to Vasari on Tintoretto, he failed to achieve this aim.
Tintoretto's Venetian Mannerism did not satisfy the neo-Classical standards of the eighteenth century, and Reynolds on Tintoretto, like Reynolds on Veronese, is scathing. Kugler's account of Tintoretto finds little to praise. The views expressed by Kugler, revised Burckhardt, ed. Eastlake, on Tintoretto in the second and third editions of Murray's Handbook of Painting in Italy so outraged Ruskin and his followers that later editions were censored and an apology printed.