Vedova Tintoretto. In Dialogue

“I would have identified my matrix in Tintoretto, precisely that sense of upheaval, of ‘metaphysical’ dialogue made of impulses and liberations.”
 (Emilio Vedova)

The exhibition project begins from the extraordinary opportunity to host in Turin one of the concluding and paradigmatic works in Tintoretto’s human and artistic trajectory: the Self-Portrait of 1588, on loan from the Musée du Louvre. A canvas that has been more than an iconographic model, representing, as can be seen from the interpretations of Édouard Manet – who copied it and considered it the most beautiful painting in the world – and from the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, a kind of poetic and conceptual identification for many artists.

Gabriella Belli states: “For the first time this exhibition outlines with extreme scholarly precision the processes through which the young Vedova’s thinking was formed on Tintoretto’s pictorial texts. The itinerary, ordered and visionary at the same time, projects the public into the full maturity of the Venetian painter, when the debt to Tintoretto’s incandescent and premonitory painting was still strong. The intensity can also be perceived in Vedova’s monumental work …in continuum, 100 and more canvases, a unique undertaking, almost a homage in joyful competition with the creative effort of the great Venetian teleri of his prophet Tintoretto.”

Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa continues: “This formidable dialogue on the making of art was strongly desired by Palazzo Madama to evoke the role of the Civic Museums of Turin as they were brilliantly conceived and established by Vittorio Viale, one of the most significant European directors of the twentieth century. Viale brought the Civic Museum into Palazzo Madama, created the Civic Gallery of Modern Art and, finally, together with Luigi Carluccio, structured epoch-making exhibitions. And it is to Viale’s magisterium (1891–1977) that this exhibition is dedicated, in a precise reflection on the antique as something capable of generating the contemporary.”

Tintoretto is, in fact, the interpreter of a pictorial narration capable of reaching our own time by bringing together “Michelangelo’s drawing and Titian’s color”, exalted over the centuries by the romantic genius of the Englishman John Ruskin (1819–1900) – “I have never been so completely annihilated before a human mind as I was today, before Tintoretto” – and by the pens of Goethe, Stendhal and Henry James.

Emilio Vedova wrote of his great master: “Tintoretto has been a kind of identification for me. That space, precisely, a place of happenings. That staging with syncopated and bloody rhythms, magmatic with energies from inner depths of passions, of moved emotionality (…)”

And for Vedova, Tintoretto is the everyday familiarity with the Churches, Scuole and Palaces of Venice, in which he seeks and finds his own Master, the only one who reveals to him the secret of transforming technique from a mere expressive tool of beautiful forms into a sharp blade capable of cutting into history. From him Vedova draws inspiration for themes and content; he derives fundamental lessons on how to master the space of the canvas, how to translate into color the light in his compositions, how to model forms in a rapid, unhesitating gesture – forms that spring from his new sign, which already in 1948 abandons every figurative temptation to resolve itself in abstraction. Finally arriving at the unforgettable sequence of the work …in continuum, compenetrazioni/traslati ’87/’88, proof of how the encounter of a lifetime also made the disciple great, offering him the necessary impetus to go beyond.

The exhibition Vedova Tintoretto. In dialogo (“In Dialogue”), set up in the Aula del Senato of the Kingdom of Italy, presents around fifty masterpieces, including canvases by Emilio Vedova and works by Tintoretto such as the sensational ancone of the Camerlenghi, an extraordinary loan from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, as well as some of the works from the famous Metamorphoses cycle now housed in the Gallerie Estensi in Modena.
The close dialogue between the two artists develops starting from Vedova’s youthful drawings of 1936, moving through the canvases of the 1940s and 1950s reflecting on paintings by Tintoretto such as The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes (from Tintoretto) (1942), The Crucifixion (from Tintoretto) (1947), (Study from Tintoretto’s Dream of St Mark) (1956), and those of the 1980s.

Completing the dialogue and the exhibition is Vedova with the monumental installation …in continuum, compenetrazione/traslati ’87/’88: more than one hundred large canvases, assembled one to another in a development that will challenge the verticality of the Senate Hall, a testament to Vedova’s evolution as he continues, with visionary power, his confrontation with his ideal master.

The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of Valore Cultura, official sponsor of the show within Generali’s multi-year program to promote art and culture.

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