14 and the drawing (fig. 2) of a ten-year-old. If, however, we set her date of birth to around 1551, the attribution toMarietta becomes more feasible. On the left side of the painting, we see an old man with grey hair and beard sitting on a folding armchair.26 His upper body is bent slightly forward, and his arms rest on the sides of the chair. While his wrinkled face, grey hair, and pensive, unfocused gaze are rendered in keenly observed detail and fine brushstrokes, the execution of his hands seems less accomplished in comparison. The black skullcap seems to have been an afterthought, and we can see the forehead shimmering through the thin layer of black paint. The boy standing to the right of the old man gazes at us inquisitively. He has a lighter complexion, brown eyes, short brown hair and is shown wearing a fur-trimmed coat and a high-necked reddish-brown doublet over a frilled white shirt. Here the execution is more virtuosic. The boy’s face and direct gaze seemalive, and it looks as if this figure has been executed or reworked by a different hand. The overall palette is dark; the focus is on the two faces which, positioned at the same level, emblematise old age and the bloom of youth. Following Tietze-Conrat and Rearick, who describes this painting as too tentative for Tintoretto, the author of this essay is also inclined to recognise it as an early work by Marietta’s hand, possibly with some assistance from her father.27 THE DRESDEN DOUBLE PORTRAI T Among the paintings attributed to Marietta is a double portrait acquired in 1749 as the work of Jacopo Tintoretto (cat. 1) from the Imperial Gallery in Prague Castle for the collection of Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. An elderly gentleman, dressed in black, with brown hair and a long beard is shown sitting in a wooden folding armchair. A second, clearly younger person with a lighter complexion and blond hair, equally dressed in black, turns towards the seated figure from the right side of the composition. As the chair is turned slightly to the left, the older gentleman grips the armrest with his left hand to turn his upper body towards his interlocutor, whose right hand seems to be directing his attention at something outside the picture space. Painted primarily in shades of ochre, brown, and black, the picture is covered with a coat of yellowed varnish. The dark clothing of the two figures, relieved only by their white collars and a mere hint of their frilled shirt cuffs, seems to merge with the brown background. The only distinctive elements to emerge from the crepuscular darkness of the composition are the faces and hands of the sitters. The left hand of the standing figure close to the right edge of the picture seems somewhat out of place; it is barely defined and looks as if it had been added as an afterthought. Overall, the composition seems unbalanced, as if the picture has been cropped on the right. Formally, it shares parallels with the double portrait in Vienna discussed above. Here, too, an elderly gentleman is shown seated on the left and accompanied by a much younger person standing on the right. In the Viennese picture, the execution of the old man’s hands is summary and anatomically Fig. 4 JACOPO ROBUST I , CALLED T INTORET TO Old Man and Boy, c. 1565 Oil on canvas, 103 ×83 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 37
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