Tintoretto

This is the largest exhibition on the artist since the one held in Venice in 1937.

The Museo Nacional del Prado is organising the exhibition "Tintoretto" which will include around 60 paintings and drawings loaned from European and American museums and institutions. The exhibition will be the first monographic exhibition devoted to the artist since the one held in Venice in 1937, as well as the first on this subject to be held in Spain. It will aim to offer a comprehensive and detailed survey of Tintoretto's extensive career and is the result of lengthy research and investigation on the artist.

During his lifetime Jacopo Tintoretto was regarded as a remarkably prolific and daring painter even by his fiercest critics such as Giorgio Vasari. In the early seventeenth century, a few years after his death, his name was linked with those of Titian and Paolo Veronese as the three greatest representatives of Venetian painting. Tintoretto shared their use of a new pictorial language characterised by the “bravura” of the brushstroke and a pronounced chiaroscuro, both deployed in the service of a new type of narrative painting. In addition, he went further and created a style that fused the Tuscan with the Venetian, combining Titian’s loose handling with Michelangelo’s draughtsmanship. At the same time he perfected a highly efficient working method that allowed him to produce a large body of work. This explains the exceptionally large number of works that have survived to the present day and which are often confused with those of his pupils and imitators.

The subsequent shift in taste towards classicising academic painting resulted in the artist’s neglect and disregard. In the nineteenth century, however, Tintoretto once more enjoyed the appreciation of critics and intellectuals such as Ruskin. From then on his status as one of the great Renaissance painters has remained unchallenged. Nonetheless, Tintoretto has only been the subject of one major retrospective, held at the Ca’Pesaro in Venice in 1937, and a partial one devoted to his activities as a portraitist (Vienna and Venice, 1994). The general tendency has been to include his work in major survey exhibitions on Venetian Renaissance painting.

The present exhibition aims to fill this gap. A selection of around 60 paintings and drawings will focus in particular on his work as a painter of religious narratives – the genre in which he produced his greatest paintings. It will also include some of his most important mythological compositions and examples of his portraiture. In addition, Tintoretto was an excellent draughtsman who frequently used paper as a medium to explore his interest in effects of light as well as for compositional studies and drawings of the human body in movement. The exhibition features some of his superb studies of masterpieces of classical and contemporary sculpture, as well as preparatory drawings for a number of the paintings to be seen on display. Finally, the exhibition also aims to look at the challenging problems of attribution which the artist’s work still presents.

The accompanying catalogue will be published in Spanish and English and will include texts by the leading experts on Tintoretto and on Italian Renaissance painting. The rigour and scope of the publication will make it an essential scholarly reference point in the study of the artist and his work.

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Tintoretto