VENICE. Spanish art historians have renamed one of Italy's greatest painters. Specialists at the Prado have established that Tintoretto's family name was Comin. This revelation will be presented at a major retrospective on Tintoretto (1519-94), which opens in Madrid on 29 January.
Until now, all that was known for certain was the artist's Christian name, Jacopo. Tintoretto was his nickname, based on the fact that his father Giovanni was a dyer ("tinto" being a dyer, and Jacopo may have been short in stature). The family also had a second nickname, Robusti, and family documents suggest that this originated from the fact that Giovanni had "robustly" defended the gates of Padua against imperial troops in 1509.
The revelation that Tintoretto's family name was Comin (the word means the spice "cumin" in the local dialect) is the result of research following publication of an article in a Spanish journal two years ago, written by Fernando Checa, a former director of the Prado. Checa mentioned an unpublished letter by a 17th-century Spanish aristocrat, the Marqués del Carpio, who quoted from a previously unknown genealogy of the Tintoretto family.
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