Tintoretto

25 February – 10 June 2012
curated by and Vittorio Sgarbi
High commissioner: Giovanni Morello
Catalogie scientific Coordinator: Giovanni C.F. Villa
Exhibition texts by Melania Mazzucco

Body snatching of San Marco - Tintoretto

JACOPO ROBUSTI (or CANAL), better known as TINTORETTO (1519-1594), is the only key Italian 16th century painter not to have had a major monographic exhibition devoted to his work to date. If we ignore the thematic exhibition of his portraits held in Venice in 1994, the last exhibition of the great Venetian master’s work was held in 1937, due among other reasons to the sheer physical impossibility of shifting the large canvases that he painted in Venice

The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale is part of a broader programme designed to explore the work of those artists who have helped to make the story of art in our country so unique and so grandiose, ranging from Botticelli to Antonello da Messina, from Bellini to Caravaggio and, more recently, to Lorenzo Lotto and Filippino Lippi.
This exhibition, focusing on the three main themes that distinguish Tintoretto’s work: religion, mythology and portraiture, is strictly monographic and will be divided into sections comprising a handful of carefully selected and unquestioned masterpieces, beginning and ending with his two celebrated self-portraits of himself as a young man, from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and as an old man, from the Louvre. Even though he was in competition with Titian, his contemporaries yet recognized his “utterly exquisite eye in portraiture”, and some of his most famous portraits from leading international collections will be on display here in Rome.