20 - Domenico Robusti Tintoretto (Italian, 1560-1635) A young woman presenting a basket of fruits oil on canvas (fragment) Unframed: 122 x 69 cm. (48 x 27 in.) Sale; Sotheby’s, Monaco, 23 June 1985, lot 238 (as Attributed to Domenico Robusti Tintoretto); Where purchased by the present owner. Property from a Distinguished U.K. Private Collection Domenico was the son and pupil of the eminent Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594). He managed the family workshop during his father’s final years (c.1580-94), playing a major role in the execution of numerous large-scale cyclical commissions, such as the decoration of the Council Chambers of the Doge’s Palace (notably the huge Paradise in the Hall of the Greater Council), and the so-called Fasti Gonzagheschi (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), a sequence of history paintings commissioned by Guglielmo Gonzaga (1538-1587), Duke of Mantua, to celebrate the glories of his dynasty. In collaborative works of this kind, Domenico was bound to integrate his own personal style with that of his father and the workshop style in general. Yet from the time of his early maturity he also received autonomous commissions, and while generically ‘Tintorettesque’, these show a number of distinctive stylistic characteristics, including a taste for more inky shadows than those of his master, and for a low-life naturalism that reflects the influence of the rival family workshop of the Bassano. With his aptitude for sharply-observed detail he also quickly became highly successful as a portrait painter. As head of the Tintoretto workshop after the death of his father in 1594, Domenico ensured that it continued to flourish until his own death in 1635. The attribution of the present 'Young woman' to Domenico is supported by its stylistic resemblance to other works, by or generally accepted as by him. A telling comparison is with the 'Dream of St Mark' of c. 1585 (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice), one of a series of large-scale canvases painted by Jacopo and his team for the Scuola di San Marco in Venice over a period of twenty years or more. By the 1580s Jacopo’s own treatment of draperies was more broken, with the folds more consistently indicated with diagonal slashes of white, as in several of the canvases he painted in this decade for the Lower Hall of the Scuola di San Rocco. Here instead, the drapery falls into broader, more simplified planes of colour. The same may be said of the tall ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ (El Escorial), which was commissioned from Jacopo for the retablo of the high altar of the Escorial, but executed by Domenico and dispatched to Spain in 1583. This last work also serves to give an idea of the likely subject and composition of which the ‘Young woman’ originally formed part. The Escorial Adoration includes a very similar figure of a young woman, forming part of the group of shepherds in the foreground, looking up towards the Virgin and the Christ Child placed deeper into the picture space. Around her are other rustic figures and farm produce (in this case pigeons rather than a basket of fruit), evidently intended as humble gifts to the Holy Family. Even more significantly, the figures in the upper tier are placed on a platform of straw, which provides the background the woman’s head – exactly as in the present work. The composition of the Escorial Adoration had an immediate precedent, albeit on a broader format, in the related subject of ‘Adoration of the Magi’ in the Scuola di San Rocco, completed by Jacopo in 1582, but in which Domenico may well have had a hand. This composition is already in two tiers, and it already includes a young woman, kneeing with a basket, looking upwards at the Christ Child. Another related composition is Domenico’s ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ in the Courtauld Galleries, London, probably dating from only slightly later. In this case, because of its domestic scale (75 x 86 cm.) and horizontal format, the scene is shown with a high rather than low viewpoint. But it again includes the figure of a young woman in the immediate foreground, looking towards the Christ Child placed deeper into space, and again with a basket of fruit, apparently apples, and other genre-like details inspired the work of the Bassano family. All this suggests that the present fragment dates from about the same time: that is to say, the mid-1580s, which although still in the lifetime of Jacopo, was the period in which Domenico’s powers of observation and execution were at their freshest and most vigorous. The scale of the figure implies that its original context was public rather than private, and that it was probably part of a church altarpiece. It is impossible to know the reason why the original canvas was cut down: perhaps it was damaged by fire or water, and this figure was all that could be salvaged. Or perhaps the painting would be more marketable in the form of attractive individual fragments than as a whole large altar