Giovanni Brass was born in Milano on Sunday, 26 March 1933, but was raised in Venice. His grandfather, painter Italico Brass, gave the youngster the nickname of Tintoretto, which was itself the nickname of painter Jacopo Robusti (1518–1594). (Incidentally, Gore Vidal, in a TV special called Artful Journeys: Vidal in Venice, referred to Tintoretto as the Cecil B. De Mille of Venetian painters.) Anyway, Tintoretto was soon shortened to Tinto. Tinto’s father was a noted and well-to-do lawyer, and Brass originally planned to pursue that same career. He completed his university law degree and practiced for three months, but then moved to Paris in 1957 and got a job as a projectionist at the Cinémathèque Française, where he also apprenticed to film archivist/curator Henri Langlois through 1960.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he created many avant-garde films, such as Nerosubianco, L'urlo, and La Vacanza. He is best known for his erotic epics, Salon Kitty, The Key, and Caligula, which was a collaboration with celebrated author Gore Vidal, Franco Rossellini (nephew of the Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini), and Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione. However, many consider Caligula to not be a true Tinto Brass film because post-production was not handled by Brass. In spite of this, it contains many of Brass's trademarks and remains his most widely-viewed work (and the highest-grossing Italian film ever released in the United States). After Caligula became a huge international box office hit, Tinto was hired to shoot a spy thriller Snack Bar Budapest. Afterwards, he decided that he should focus on erotica, in a way to rebel against the hypcracy of censors, explaining that sex is a normal part of life and we should just deal with it. His most famous erotics are: Miranda, Paprika , Cosi Fan Tutte, L'uomo Che Guarda, Fermo Posta, Monella, Trasgredire.
