13 S IGNED WORKS So far, there are two works attributed to Marietta on the basis of a signature. The first is a drawing on a sheet that was sold at auction at Christie’s in 2021.17 On the verso is a male head seen from below, executed in black and white chalk, with the inscription “Questa testa/ si è di ma[no] de/ madona Marietta” (fig. 2). The contours of the head and the salient passages of the face are captured in black chalk. The handling of the lines is loose and shows a confident but not yet fully professional hand. A few touches in white chalk invest the head with a sculptural quality. The young artist dispensed with hatching and any further definition of the area around the eyes, the nose, and the mouth, contenting herself instead with capturing the most characteristic elements in just a few lines. The conspicuous inscription across the lower part of the sheet can be read as evidence of her self-assurance or – if we subscribe to the argument that it was written by Tintoretto – of her father’s pride.18The model for Marietta’s early drawing was a cast of a Roman marble head from the time of Hadrian in the Grimani Collection (cat. 22). Believed to be a portrait of the Emperor Vitellius, the third of the four emperors who ruled in AD 69, the head was discovered in Rome in 1505 during excavations sponsored by the Venetian cardinal Domenico Grimani and displayed in the Sala delle Teste in the Doge’s Palace in Venice between 1525 and 1593, where privileged artists could study it and make plaster casts from it.19 Tintoretto had one such cast in his workshop. It is mentioned in the will of his son Domenico, drawn up in 1630.20 Some 25 drawings of or after this plaster cast from Tintoretto’s workshop have come down to us. They testify to its importance as a workshop prop used to train young artists and as a model, which Tintoretto himself drew repeatedly and incorporated into his compositions (fig. 3).21 The second signed work, whose attribution to Marietta is contested, is the double portrait of an elderly gentleman with a long beard and a boy (fig. 4).22 Drawing on Ridolfi’s assertion that the artist had painted a portrait of Marco de’ Vescovi with a long beard and his figliuolo, Erika Tietze-Conrat, writing in the early 20th century, considered this painting, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, to be a work by Marietta Robusti.23 However, it is not clear from Ridolfi’s text whether he was referring to a double portrait or two separate likenesses. A signature can be made out in the lower left of the composition on the side of the chair: a “65”, an “M”, and a “3”, which, however, can also be read as a stylised “R”.24 Today, the painting, dated 1565, is attributed to Jacopo Robusti, although Tietze-Conrat’s suggestion to read the initials “M” and “R” for Marietta Robusti would appear tomake sense – especially if it is indeed the family portrait of the de’ Vescovi mentioned by Ridolfi that remained in their house, not least because, as father of Faustina, Marco de’ Vescovi was Tintoretto’s father-in-law.25 However, if we were to maintain that Marietta was born around 1554, then we would also have to be willing to accept this accomplished painting as the work of an eleven-year-old Fig. 3 JACOPO ROBUST I , CALLED T INTORET TO Study of a Bust of Vitellius (recto), 1533–1594, charcoal, heightened in white on blue paper, 304× 207 mm London, British Museum, museum number 1885,0509.1658
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