The Venetian painter Jacopo Robusti, known as Il Tintoretto—the little dyer, after his father’s profession—is said to have aspired, in his work, to combine “il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Tiziano”: he’s even supposed to have written the phrase on the walls of his studio. The Tintoretto scholar Frederick Ilchman interprets this as “the drawing of Michelangelo and the paint handling of Titian,” while others translate colorito as “coloring.” Whichever meaning we choose, there’s no doubt that the combination resulted in theatrical, seductively hued paintings filled with muscular bodies that move and gesture to diagram and animate the space they occupy—a distinctive approach that defines Tintoretto. Just how distinctive can be judged from a series of spectacular exhibitions covering just about every aspect of the virtuoso painter’s achievement, organized, along with conservation projects and publications, to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of his birth—a wealth of festivities that began last year and will continue well into this, in many different places.

Why two years of extended celebrations? Tintoretto died in his native city on May 31, 1594. He was, the record tells us, seventy-five. Since no documentation survives to provide exact information about his birth date, we must conclude that he was born either in 1518 or in 1519. This fortuitous lack of precision has justified honoring the master’s five-hundredth birthday not only in 2018 but also through much of 2019. In Venice this past fall and winter, “Il Giovane Tintoretto,” at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, organized by