Paris exhibition presents Tintoretto alongside his French fanboys

Jacopo Robusti—better known as Tintoretto—was revered by French painters from Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Paul Cézanne. His facility for narrative drama inspired Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, and provoked Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who was enthralled but troubled by the Venetian master’s disregard for the rules of compositional harmony.

Despite his pivotal role in the history of art, exhibitions are rarely dedicated to the 16th-century master, and Timeless Tintoretto, opening this month at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris will be the first comprehensive survey of his career ever staged in France. The exhibition offers an antidote to the rivalry with Titian that dogged Tintoretto in his lifetime, and which persists today in exhibitions that often reduce him to a supporting role in the older artist’s story, explains Neville Rowley, the exhibition’s co-curator along with Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa and Pierre Curie.

Viewing Tintoretto through the prism of 19th-century painting has special resonance at the Musée Jacquemart-André, whose collections were acquired during the same, Venice-obsessed age of Henry James, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust and John Ruskin. (Although its purportead Tintorettos were all later reattributed to his circle.)

Indelible presence

In Venice, Tintoretto remains an indelible presence, stamped on massive civic and religious projects such as the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the Sala del Maggior Consiglio of the Palazzo Ducale. But if a survey of his career without these landmarks seems rather thin, Rowley disagrees. “There is another side to Tintoretto, which is known by specialists but not so much by the public”, he says, adding that the show includes paintings previously known to him only as black-and-white photographs. The 40 or so exhibits take a thematic and chronological path through Tintoretto’s mythological and religious works, portraits and drawings, several of which emphasise his interest in Michelangelo’s sculptures. The altarpiece of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and an Angel (around 1560-70), once owned by David Bowie, will be included.

Loans coming from outside Italy, whether from private collections, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, or even regional museums such as the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, underscore Rowley’s confidence in the exhibition’s revelatory nature. However, the loan of The Creation of the Animals (1550-53), from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, is a particular coup. “It was not so easy to have because it was part of an exhibition in the Accademia,” Rowley says. (It was on display until 30 August as part of a temporary exhibition marking the completion of a major conservation project.) Rowley adds: “Aside from the historical importance of the work, it’s very important for us that we found a way to have a work from the Accademia—from Venice in general, but particularly the Accademia—because if you want to see Tintoretto you have to go to Venice, you have to go to San Rocco, to the Palazzo Ducale, but also to the Accademia. So, as a symbolic gesture, we are very happy to have this.”

Conservation treatment

Another loan, the Portrait of a Man (around 1560-75), from the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, has undergone conservation treatment to stabilise it for travel but, for the most part, it is the enormous size of the canvases, and the relatively modest proportions of the museum, rather than fragility, that has been the main obstacle in securing loans.

In the final rooms, Édouard Manet’s copy of Tintoretto’s self-portrait is displayed alongside the original and, with Ingres’s Aretino in the Studio of Tintoretto (1848), it sets up a series of dialogues with Tintoretto that, in an echo of Cezanne’s celebrated status as the father of Modern painting, makes a decisive case for Tintoretto as “master of us all”.

• Timeless Tintoretto, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, 11 September-24 January 2027