According to Ridolfi, he gained some experience by working alongside artisans who decorated furniture with paintings of mythological scenes, and studied anatomy by drawing live models and dissecting cadavers.

At some time, possibly in the 1540s, Tintoretto acquired models of Michelangelo's Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night, which he and his workshop studied in numerous drawings made from all angles on blue paper.

Tintoretto helped Schiavone at no charge with wall paintings, and in many subsequent instances, he also worked for nothing, and thus succeeded in obtaining commissions.

[12] One of Tintoretto's early pictures still extant is in the church of the Carmine in Venice, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (c. 1542); also in S. Benedetto are the Annunciation and Christ with the Woman of Samaria.

For the Scuola della Trinità (the scuole or schools of Venice were confraternities, more in the nature of charitable foundations than of educational institutions) he painted four subjects from Genesis.

Two of these, now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, are Adam and Eve and the Death of Abel, both noble works of high mastery, which indicate that Tintoretto was by this time a consummate painter—one of the few who have attained to the highest eminence in the absence of any recorded formal training.

But a new analysis of the work has revealed it as one of a series of three paintings by Tintoretto, depicting the legend of St Helena and the Holy Cross.

Realizing that the commission presented him with a singular opportunity to establish himself as a major artist, he took extraordinary care in arranging the composition for maximum effect.

The painting represents the legend of a Christian slave or captive who was to be tortured as a punishment for some acts of devotion to the evangelist, but was saved by the miraculous intervention of the latter, who shattered the bone-breaking and blinding implements which were about to be applied.

Unwilling to be overshadowed by his new rival, Tintoretto approached the leaders of his neighbourhood church, the Madonna dell'Orto, with a proposal to paint for them two colossal canvases on a cost-only basis.

[21] Depicting the Worship of the Golden Calf and the Last Judgment, the 14.5 metres (47.6 feet) tall paintings (both c. 1559–60) were widely admired, and Tintoretto gained a reputation for his ability to complete the most massive projects on a limited budget.

[23][2] Between 1565 and 1567, and again from 1575 to 1588, Tintoretto produced a large number of paintings for the walls and ceilings of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.

[25] In 1564, four finalists—Tintoretto, Federico Zuccaro, Giuseppe Salviati, and Paolo Veronese—were invited by the Scuola to submit modelli for a ceiling painting on the subject of Saint Roch in Glory to decorate the hall called the Sala dell'Albergo.

Instead of a sketch, Tintoretto produced a full-sized painting, secretly installed it on the ceiling, and presented it as a fait accompli on the day of the competition.

[26] The development of fast painting techniques called prestezza allowed him to produce many works while engaged on large projects and to respond to growing demands from clients.

Disregarding some minor performances, the scuola and church contain fifty-two memorable paintings, which may be described as vast suggestive sketches, with the mastery, but not the deliberate precision, of finished pictures, and adapted for being looked at in a dusky half-light.

Other works (destroyed by a fire in the palace in 1577) succeeded—the Excommunication of Frederick Barbarossa by Pope Alexander III and the Victory of Lepanto.

In the Sala dell'Anticollegio, Tintoretto painted four masterpieces—Bacchus, with Ariadne crowned by Venus, the Three Graces and Mercury, Minerva discarding Mars, and the Forge of Vulcan, which were painted for fifty ducats each, excluding materials, c. 1578; in the hall of the senate, Venice, Queen of the Sea (1581–84); in the hall of the college, the Espousal of St Catherine to Jesus (1581–84); in the Antichiesetta, Saint George, Saint Louis, and the Princess, and St Jerome and St Andrew; in the hall of the great council, nine large compositions, chiefly battle-pieces (1581–84); in the Sala dello Scrutinio the Capture of Zara from the Hungarians in 1346 amid a Hurricane of Missiles (1584–87).

[32] He set up his canvas in the Scuola vecchia della Misericordia and worked indefatigably at the task, making many alterations and doing various heads and costumes direct from life.

They tendered a handsome amount; he is said to have abated something from it, an incident perhaps more telling of his lack of greed than earlier cases where he worked for nothing at all.

[34] There are reflections of Tintoretto to be found in the Greek painter of the Spanish Renaissance El Greco, who likely saw his works during a stay in Venice,[35] and studied them well enough that they influenced his painting style.

[36] His early biographers write of his intelligence and fierce ambition; according to Carlo Ridolfi, "he was always thinking of ways to make himself known as the most daring painter in the world.

[38][2] Faustina and he had many children, of whom three sons (Domenico, Marco, and Zuan Battista) and four daughters (Gierolima, Lucrezia, Ottavia, and Laura) survived to adulthood.

[26] After the completion of the Paradise Tintoretto rested for a while, and he never undertook any other work of importance, although there is no reason to suppose that his energies were exhausted if he had lived a little longer.

[41] His paintings emphasize the energy of human bodies in motion and often exploit extreme foreshortening and perspective effects to heighten the drama.

The result is described by art critic Arthur Danto as having "the edginess of a feminist joke" as "the princess has taken matters into her own hands ... George spreads his arms in a gesture of male helplessness, as his lance lies broken on the ground ...It was obviously painted with a sophisticated Venetian audience in mind.

"[43] A comparison of Tintoretto's final The Last Supper—one of his nine known paintings on the subject—[44] with Leonardo da Vinci's treatment of the same subject provides an instructive demonstration of how artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance.

In the restless dynamism of his composition, his dramatic use of light, and his emphatic perspective effects, Tintoretto seems a baroque artist ahead of his time.

[45] Modern critics have often described his portraits as routine works,[46] although his skill in depicting elderly men, such as Alvise Cornaro (1560/1565), has been widely admired.

The exhibition features nearly 50 paintings and more than a dozen works on paper spanning the artist's entire career and ranging from regal portraits of Venetian aristocracy to religious and mythological narrative scenes.