Marietta Robusti was born around 1560 in Venice, Italy. She was the daughter of the Venetian painter Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti). Considered the favorite of his seven children, she was his eldest daughter and often called "la Tintoretta" (translated as "little dyer girl", after Jacopo’s father’s occupation as a tintore, or dyer). She had three brothers and four sisters.
Robusti's artistic training consisted of serving an apprenticeship in the collaborative environment of her father’s workshop, where she probably contributed to her father’s paintings with backgrounds and figure blocking.
Robusti worked in her father's workshop. Especially renowned for her portraits of aristocratic Venetians, she painted in the same flamboyant style that characterized her father's work. As her talents were a close match to his, it has proved consistently difficult for experts to distinguish their hands.
Marietta's portraiture received acceptance and fame by the 1580s. Although both Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II and King Philip II of Spain invited Robusti to be a painter in their courts, her father, reluctant to part with her, urged her not to accept the invitations.
She died most likely in childbirth, four years after her marriage, in 1590, and was buried in Santa Maria del’Orto in Venice, Italy.
Marietta Robusti one of very few known women artists of the Renaissance period. Very few canvases attributed to Robusti have survived, while several may simply have been incorporated into her father's oeuvre.
Her most notable work was the "Portrait of a man with a boy" (1585, Kunsthistorisches Museum). Once considered among her father's best portraits, it was attributed to Robusti in 1920 on the basis of the ‘M' signature found on the work.
Marietta Robusti was married to Mario Augusta, a Venetian jeweler and silversmith, who agreed to live in the family home, because her father could not be parted from her.
