Tinto Brass

Giovanni Brass was born in Milan on 26 March 1933 and grew up in Venice in a family where art and law ran side by side. His grandfather Italico Brass, a painter born in Gorizia, had settled in Venice and bought the Abbey of the Misericordia, which he used as a gallery for his own work and his collection. Seeing his grandson spend his days drawing, Italico called him Tintoretto, after the Venetian painter, and the nickname, shortened to Tinto, became the name he worked under all his life.

His father Alessandro was one of the city's best known criminal lawyers. Brass studied law, first at Padua and then at Ferrara, where he graduated in 1957 with a thesis on employment relations in film production companies. He then went to Paris, where he worked at the Cinémathèque française, and gained experience in film as an assistant to Roberto Rossellini.

Brass made his debut as a director with Chi lavora è perduto, which was well reviewed after its screening at the Venice Film Festival in 1963. In 1964 Umberto Eco commissioned him to make two short experimental films, Tempo libero and Tempo lavorativo, for the 13th Milan Triennale. Through the rest of the decade he worked in many genres, including the documentary Ça ira, the western Yankee in 1966 and the crime film Col cuore in gola in 1967, all marked by a bold, experimental approach to editing and camera work. One writer called him the Antonioni of the 1970s.

L'urlo was shown in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 1970, and La vacanza, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, won the film critics' prize for best Italian film at the 1971 Venice Film Festival. In 1972 he sat on the jury at the Berlin festival.

Salon Kitty in 1976 and Caligula in 1979 marked a shift in his work. Caligula had been conceived as a satire on power, but its producers re-edited it without his consent and added explicit scenes. Brass asked for his name to be removed, and he is credited only for principal photography. The film nonetheless became his most widely seen work.

From La chiave in 1983, starring Stefania Sandrelli, he devoted himself mainly to erotic cinema, with films including Miranda with Serena Grandi in 1985, Capriccio, Snack Bar Budapest, Paprika with Debora Caprioglio in 1991, Così fan tutte with Claudia Koll in 1992, L'uomo che guarda, Monella, Trasgredire, Senso '45 and Monamour in 2006. His later shorts included Hotel Courbet in 2009.

In 1957 Brass married Carla Cipriani, known as Tinta, the daughter of Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry's Bar in Venice. She also worked with him on the screenplays of several films. They had a daughter, Beatrice, and a son, Bonifacio. Carla died in 2006.

After her death Brass began a relationship with the lawyer Caterina Varzi, who appeared in his short film Hotel Courbet, and they married in 2017. He was politically aligned with the Italian Radicals. On 18 April 2010 he suffered an intracranial haemorrhage.

Tinto Brass died in Rome at around 10.30 on the morning of 4 November 2026, aged 93. His wife Caterina Varzi and his children Bonifacio and Beatrice announced his death, and the family said the funeral would be a strictly private ceremony. No cause of death was made public.

Brass is remembered as the master of Italian erotic cinema and one of the Italian directors best known abroad, but critics also point to the experimental, anarchic films of his early career, which were rediscovered in a 2012 retrospective at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival. In 2026 the Italian National Union of Film Journalists gave him the Premio Pietro Bianchi at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, where a restored version of Col cuore in gola opened the festival's pre-opening programme.