Workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto

Behind this label is an address. Jacopo Tintoretto lived and worked in a house on the Fondamenta dei Mori in Venice, and the shop he ran there was a family firm. His son Domenico, born in 1560, became its most dependable hand. Domenico's younger brother Marco worked alongside him, and their sister Marietta had a reputation of her own for portraits until she died in 1590, at about 30.

The way they worked is documented. The shop modelled small figures in wax and clay, dressed them, and set them inside little rooms built from cardboard, with a lamp outside a window so the light fell in. Figures were also hung from the ceiling to be drawn steeply from below. Assistants learned the violent foreshortening Venetians expected from a Tintoretto out of those boxes, before they were trusted with a canvas.

The catalogue separates five degrees of distance from a master, and each one means something exact. Workshop of is a picture made inside that studio, in his lifetime, under his eye. Attributed to is a museum leaning towards his own hand and stopping short of saying so outright. Follower of is a painter in his manner who never belonged to the shop, imitator of is someone later taking the style up deliberately, and copy after is a repetition of a composition already known. The Prado files its Judith and Holofernes under the workshop line, after generations of reading it as an early Jacopo.

Domenico kept the business going after his father died in 1594, and it was still his in 1635, the year he died.