Marietta Robusti Tintoretta

She was the daughter and disciple of Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto, she was known in her time as a "buona ritrattista" (good portraitist) both inside and outside Venice. There is a lack of information to use as a starting point to reconstruct her life and artistic activity as happens with her brother Marco. Two of her drawings are preserved in the Rasini collection in Milan. She is also attributed a portrait of a woman in the Uffizi Gallery (Florence), another one in the Contini collection (Florence), and a third one belonging to the collections of the Prado Museum ("Venetian Lady," P400). It is probable that "Self-portrait" (n. 245) and a "Portrait of an Old Man with a Young Man" (n. 37) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna are by her due to the similarities with the stylistic features in the scarce artistic production that has been attributed to her. It is probable that Marietta collaborated with her father on works like "The Miracle of Saint Agnes" in the church of Madonna dell'Orto in Venice, where the same type of heads appear as in two representations of the Virgin, one in the Cleveland Museum and another one in the Detroit Institute of Art. The same hand is identified in two more works attributed to Tintoretto: the "Baptism" (Murano) and the "Virgin in Glory with Two Saints and Two Doges" (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice) (Dizionario enciclopedico dei pittori e degli incisori italiani. Dall'XI al XX secolo, 1972-1983, volume XI, p. 82).

According to the biographical notes by the scholar Cristofano Bronzini, the artist was called to Spain by King Philip II, but her father did not consent. Bronzini also states that she painted the portrait of Jacopo Strada, who was an antiquary to Emperor Maximilian II, as well as her own self-portrait (Sheila Barker, "The first biography of Artemisia Gentileschi: self-fashioning and proto-feminist art history in Cristofano Bronzini’s notes on women artists," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 60, 2018:433).