“Celebrating Tintoretto: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings” Exhibition

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Celebrating Tintoretto: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings Celebrating Tintoretto

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19–1594) was one of the preeminent Venetian painters of the 16th century, and was renowned for his dynamic narrative scenes and insightful portraits. In celebration of the 500th anniversary of the artist’s birth, The Met will present Celebrating Tintoretto: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings, a focused exhibition that will explore an innovative aspect of his portraiture, and one that has been little studied: his small-scale, informal portrait heads characterized by their immediacy, intense observation, and startling modernity.

Seen together for the first time, these portrait studies will reveal Tintoretto’s famous quickness as a painter—his “prestezza”—capturing both the spirit and appearance of the sitter. The exhibition will unite 21 works from European and American museums and private collections, bringing them into a larger discussion of the artist’s approach to portraiture and painting.

Facets of artistic practice in the Tintoretto workshop will come to light in the exhibition’s exploration of the relationship between Jacopo and his son Domenico. Central here will be a series of bold figural drawings and a painting in the Museum’s collection, The Finding of Moses, whose long-debated attribution to both father and son will play a key role in the discussion of this flourishing workshop.

The exhibition is made possible by the Robert Lehman Foundation and the Placido Arango Fund.

Celebrating Tintoretto: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings is organized by Andrea Bayer, The Met’s interim Deputy Director for Collections and Administration and Jayne Wrightsman Curator in the Department of European Paintings, and Alison Manges Nogueira, Associate Curator in the Robert Lehman Collection.

Programs

On Friday, October 26, Benjamin Paul, Associate Professor at Rutgers University, will explore Tintoretto’s The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, which exemplifies the artist’s unique and rarely studied feminine style in a MetFridays talk (free with Museum admission, 7:30 p.m.).

A “Conversations With…” in-gallery talk on Friday, November 2 will be led by curators Andrea Bayer and Alison Nogueira. This lively, 30-minute dialogue will focus on Tintoretto’s portraiture (free with Museum admission, 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.).

On Thursday, November 8, Andrea Bayer will survey a panorama of remarkable and innovative works of portraiture by artists in northern Italy in the early decades of the 16th century. The talk, From Leonardo to Titian: Renaissance Portraiture in Northern Italy, will be held at 11 a.m. in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.

The exhibition is featured on the Museum’s website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using the hashtag # CelebratingTintoretto

On view concurrently in the Robert Lehman Wing, In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met will showcase some of the Museum’s greatest paintings and provide a fresh perspective on the Dutch Golden Age of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer.