Artist Name Generator

Most of the famous ones are not names

Here is a question nobody thinks to ask. Why have you never met a second Tintoretto?

Surnames repeat. There are thousands of people called Rossi and Caliari and Merisi walking around Italy. Yet the great names of the Renaissance appear exactly once each in the whole of art history, and they never turn up again.

Because they were not names. They were nicknames, and each one was worn by one person.

Caravaggio is a town near Bergamo. The painter was Michelangelo Merisi, and he is called by the place he came from. Veronese was Paolo Caliari, from Verona. El Greco was simply the Greek, which is what the Spanish called a painter from Crete who would not stop being foreign.

Some were affectionate. Verrocchio means true eye. Some were cruel. Guercino means squinter. Botticelli means little barrel. Uccello means bird, because the man could not stop painting them. Bronzino was the bronze one. Fra Angelico was the angelic friar, which is a great deal to live up to before breakfast.

These are the same four categories that produce every European surname: a place, a trade, a father, or something the neighbours noticed. The difference is that a painter's nickname never got the chance to become hereditary. It stayed attached to one man, and then to his pictures.

Why there is only ever one Tintoretto

A surname is inherited and therefore shared. A nickname is earned and therefore unique.

That is why the Renaissance workshop system produced the strangest naming problem in the history of art. The master had a name that meant something. His sons, his daughter and his assistants worked in his shop, painted in his manner, and finished his commissions.

Tintoretto's workshop was enormous, and his son eventually ran it. It turned out competent pictures in the old man's style, and some of them, as one museum puts it rather delicately, have on occasion been mistaken for the work of the elder Tintoretto.

So the unique name and the shared hand pull against each other. Nobody else can be called Tintoretto. Quite a few people painted like him, in his room, on his canvases, under his name.

Which is where the whole modern apparatus of attribution comes from.

The painter who advertised his father's trade

His name was Jacopo Robusti. His father was a tintore, a cloth dyer, in Venice.

Tintoretto means little dyer. Dyer's boy.

Now consider what he did with that. He was working in a city where Titian was the reigning god of painting, in an art where patrons were dukes and confraternities and the church. He had every reason to invent something grander. Painters did, constantly.

Instead he took the diminutive of his father's trade and put it on his work for fifty years. He did not conceal a low origin. He advertised it, and one scholar reads his mature commitment to painting the poor and the ordinary as flowing from exactly that identity.

There is also a joke in it that only becomes visible later. The little dyer became famous, above all, for his colour.

A name is a position. He chose his, and it was a stranger and braver choice than a beautiful one would have been.

In no other trade is the name the price

Two identical canvases hang in a gallery. One is by the master. One is by a competent hand in his workshop, painted the same year, from the same drawings, with the same pigments.

They are not worth the same, and it is not close.

This is why museums speak in a very careful ladder of phrases. A work is by an artist, or it is attributed to them, or it is from the workshop of, the circle of, the school of, the follower of, or after. Each rung is a claim about the name, made by people whose profession is deciding, and each rung moves the value.

Nowhere else does this happen. A chair is a good chair or a bad one. A song is good or bad in your ears before you learn who made it. But a painting's worth, in money and in attention, hangs off a name that a scholar attaches or removes.

Which puts an odd weight on the small nicknames above. The little dyer, the squinter, the bird, the boy from Caravaggio. Somebody's father's trade is now a line in an auction catalogue.

What happened when artists got surnames back

Look at the modern names in this list. Rodin. Degas. Kahlo. Sherman. Abramović. Ai Weiwei.

Ordinary names, most of them. Nobody nicknamed them.

Something was lost and something was gained. The Renaissance nickname told you where a painter came from before you saw a picture. It positioned him. Rodin tells you nothing at all, and it does not have to, because by the nineteenth century the work travelled in exhibitions and photographs and the name could be filled in afterwards.

So the modern artist's name works the way a brand does. It starts empty and accumulates. And it can be defended in a way a nickname never could, because it belongs to a person rather than to a rumour about their father.

The one thing that has not changed is the ladder. Whatever the name is, somebody eventually has to decide whether it belongs on the canvas.

How these artists were selected

The artists come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, drawn from painting, sculpture, photography and performance across several centuries. One is chosen at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about artists' names

Why are Renaissance painters known by one strange name?

Because those are nicknames rather than surnames. They come from a birthplace, a father's trade, a physical feature or a habit, and because a nickname is earned rather than inherited, only one person ever carries it.

What does Tintoretto mean?

Little dyer. His father was a cloth dyer in Venice, and the painter, whose given name was Jacopo Robusti, kept the diminutive as his professional name for his whole career rather than inventing something grander.

Is Caravaggio a surname?

No, it is a town near Bergamo. The painter's name was Michelangelo Merisi, and he is known by where he came from, in the same way Veronese is known by Verona and El Greco by being Greek.

What does "attributed to" mean on a museum label?

That the museum believes the artist probably made it, but cannot say so flatly. There is a whole ladder of these phrases, from a firm attribution down through workshop, circle, school, follower and after, and each step down is a step away from the name.

Does the name really change what a painting is worth?

Enormously, and it is one of the strange facts of the art trade. Two canvases painted in the same room in the same year, one by the master and one by his assistant, are valued nowhere near each other. The object has not changed. The name attached to it has.

References

1. The secret names of Italian Renaissance artists. JSTOR. https://about.jstor.org/blog/the-secret-names-of-the-italian-renaissance/
2. Jacopo Tintoretto. National Gallery of Art. https://www.nga.gov/artists/1929-jacopo-tintoretto
3. Tintoretto. Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tintoretto