Tintoretto spent his life in Venice and most of his work are still in the churches or other buildings for which they were painted. In 1539 he established independently, paintings composed in a traditional Venetian manner with the figures arranged parallel to the picture plane and unlinked by any strong movement or variation in the arrangement (The Adoration of the Golden Calf, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, c. 1545).

                           Battle

His early masterpiece is the Miracle of the Slave,1548, in which many of the qualities of his maturity, particularly his love of foreshortening, begin to be distinguishable. To help him with the complex poses he favoured, Tintoretto used to make small wax models which he arranged on a stage and experimented with them using spotlights for effects of light and shade and composition. This method of composing explains the frequent repetition in his works of the same figures seen from different angles. He was a formidable draughtsman and, according to Ridolfi, he had inscribed on his studio wall the motto `The drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian'.

  Book of  Tintoretto

Jacopo Tintoretto is an ambiguous figure in the history of art. His radically unorthodox paintings are not readily classifiable and although Venetian by birth, his claim to be truly of the Venetian School has long been in doubt. As a youth, he was quickly ejected from the workshop of the great Titian, accepted then, as now, as the apogee of Venetian painting. In the long career which nonetheless followed, Tintoretto increasingly abandoned the humanist narratives and sensual color values which typified the work of Titian and the venerable Venetian Renaissance tradition. Critics and writers such as Vasari, Boschini, Ruskin and Sartre have all placed Tintoretto in total opposition to the established artistic practice of his time. But this view offers an over-simple and ahistorical answer to the question of Tintorettos relation to tradition. Tom Nichols offers an important re-assessment of Tintorettos place in art history. Far from rejecting existing artistic practice, Tintoretto began by seeking to create an up-to-date manner of painting and an artistic manner which, for all its originality and sophistication, made its first appeal to the shared emotions of the widest possible viewing audience.