Tintoretto Recounts Genesis. Research, Analysis, and Restoration

Jacopo Tintoretto's Original Sin, early 1550s, before and after restoration, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

The cycle of Stories from Genesis created by Tintoretto in the early 1550s for the Scuola della Santissima Trinità, a fundamental stage in the artist's career as it opens the way to the discovery of landscape, is once again visible at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, illuminated by a new light resulting from a long restoration project.

The restoration, conducted by Claudia Vittori and her team on the three canvases in the Gallerie dell'Accademia— The Creation of the Animals, Original Sin , and Cain Kills Abel — freed the paintings from altered patinas and varnishes, restoring an extraordinary luminosity and chromatic intensity, and bringing a new freshness to the biblical narrative. The natural environment, which here for the first time in Tintoretto's oeuvre becomes a central figure in the biblical stories, has come back to life; the compact trees against which the biblical figures stand out have gradually diversified into a rich array of green hues and come alive with a vibrant vibrancy, evoked by the play of light on the foliage.

The Venetian exhibition is a particularly important event due to the presence, alongside the three paintings preserved in the collections of the Gallerie dell'Accademia, of Adam and Eve before the Eternal , exceptionally loaned by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and belonging to the same cycle.

 The reunion of four of the five paintings of the Stories of Genesis , for the first time since the cycle was dispersed at the beginning of the nineteenth century following the suppression of the School, allows us to highlight the compositional and iconographic connections that link the scenes together , a mirror of the different historical events they have undergone; the fifth canvas of the cycle is now preserved in a private German collection.

The exhibition focuses on the restoration of the museum's works and on the data concerning the painting technique that emerged from the diagnostic campaign that supported the conservation intervention. 

These aspects are then extensively covered in the multimedia content via a video displayed in the room that recounts the research conducted from various perspectives: the paintings' original context and their location within the School; the works' historical and conservation history; the data emerging from the diagnostic investigations and their interpretation; and the operational phases of the restoration project.

 The conservation project was made possible thanks to the joint contribution of the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture of New York and the Cincinnati Art Museum, where the paintings were exhibited from April 18 to September 1, 2025, in the exhibition Tintoretto's Genesis, curated by Peter Jonathan Bell.