Tintoretto Tells Genesis. Research, Analysis and Restoration: this is the title of the upcoming exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, scheduled from February 11 to June 7, 2026, curated by Roberta Battaglia and Cristiana Sburlino. The exhibition marks the return to the museum’s halls of the Stories of Genesis cycle, created by Jacopo Tintoretto in the early 1650s for the Scuola della Santissima Trinità.
For the first time since the cycle’s dispersal in the early nineteenth century, the exhibition brings together the three canvases housed at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, namely The Creation of the Animals, Original Sin and Cain Kills Abel, with the painting Adam and Eve before the Eternal One, exceptionally on loan from the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.
The exhibition project represents the outcome of a long and painstaking restoration, conducted between February 2024 and January 2025 by restorer Claudia Vittori on the occasion of the American exhibition Tintoretto’s Genesis, hosted at the Cincinnati Art Museum from April 18 to September 1, 2025. The work, made possible thanks to the joint support of the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture in New York and the Cincinnati Art Museum, removed patinas and varnishes altered by time, restoring a new luminosity to the works and bringing out a natural landscape that, for the first time in Tintoretto’s production, takes on a central and dominant role.
The visit itinerary, conceived by Roberta Battaglia and Cristiana Sburlino with installation design and technical coordination by Maria Antonietta De Vivo, focuses on Tintoretto’s painting technique, as revealed by the recent diagnostic campaign, and the stages of the conservation intervention. Thanks to the results of the analyses, visitors will have the opportunity to enter the artist’s workshop, discovering fundamental aspects of his working method: from the use of a single large textile support for the three canvases to the presence of preparatory drawings executed in charcoal and brushstroke, to the compositional changes made during execution.
The exhibition is enhanced by an in-room video that reconstructs the original context of the Scuola della Santissima Trinità, once located in the area now occupied by the Dogana de Mar, and offers further insights into the execution technique of the works and the stages of restoration.
Pictured: Tintoretto, Cain and Abel (1550-1553; oil on canvas, 149 x 196 cm; Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia)
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| At the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, an exhibition brings together the cycle with Tintoretto's Stories of Genesis |
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