Book excerpt: Carlo Ridolfi's biography of Tintoretto is the single most important primary source on the life and works of the famous Venetian painter. Originally printed separate in 1642, it was later included, with minor modifications, in Ridolfi's two-volume Lives of the Venetian Painters. Combining an account of the artist's life with discussions of his major works, Ridolfi provides fascinating details about the painter's working methods and the strategy he employed in securing many of his most important commissions. Ridolfi describes the paintings with precision and analyzes accurately the unusual and recondite themes within them, but his major contribution is the image he gives us of Tintoretto as an artist obsessed with the act of painting, an aggressive competitor whose goal was not wealth, but fame. This volume also contains Ridolfi's biographical sketches of two of Tintoretto's children: Domenico, who worked with his father for many years and played an important role in the completion of his later works, and Marietta, the favorite child whose considerable artistic promise was left unfulfilled by her early death. Ridolfi's account of Marietta includes a spirited defense of the talents and abilities of women, as well as an attack on those who would place restrictions on them--features that must surely have startled his seventeenth-century readers but are sure to please his twentieth-century audience.