On the red-brick façade of the house where Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto, lived and worked for the last twenty years of his life, there is one more inhabitant that almost no one notices: a small figure of pale stone resting on a bracket between the windows, halfway up the wall. It is a naked Hercules, leaning on his club, worn by the centuries but still in his place. Tradition has it that the painter himself placed it there.