Marietta Robusti

They called her La Tintoretta, the little dyer, the same nickname her father carried, because generations back the family trade had been dyeing cloth. Marietta Robusti was the eldest child of Jacopo Tintoretto, one of the giants of Venetian painting, and she grew up inside his crowded workshop as one of his most trusted assistants.

As a girl, the story goes, she dressed as a boy so she could follow her father everywhere, to building sites and patrons' houses where a young woman was not expected. She learned to paint and to make music, and her portraits won real praise, admired in Venice and talked about across Europe. Writers of the time record that both the King of Spain and the Emperor asked to have her at their courts. Her father refused to let her go, and married her instead to a Venetian jeweller on the condition that she stay in the city.

She died in 1590, still young, and here the trail goes cold. Because she painted alongside her father and in his manner, almost nothing can be securely called hers today. A handful of portraits are argued over, and a self-portrait bought by a Medici cardinal in 1675 hangs in the Uffizi as the one work most scholars agree to place in her hand.