The Prado Museum presents a unique and most important collection devoted to the Venetian painter since the last one, in 1937, at the Palazzo Pesaro, in Venice. This exhibit, with about 70 works borrowed from the major European and North American museums in order to allow the visitors to explore the depths of the Venetian painter's art, hosts the first anthological exhibit in Spain dedicated to this master, in addition to being the only monographic display of his works in the whole world, after Venice, seventy years ago. In this exhibit the Prado Museum is proposing a very strict follow up through Tintoretto's extensive career that ends up in a lengthy and exhaustive investigation reflected in the Museum's catalogue.

The Exhibition: With a rigorous selection of forty nine paintings, thirteen drawings and three sculptures, this exhibition offers a comprehensive and detailed survey of the painter's capabilities as well as of his dedication to the different artistic genres, although it emphasizes Tintoretto's dimension as a painter of religious subjects, where he attained his major achievements. The exhibit allows the visitor to enjoy, together, for the first time in 400 years, two of his master works of religious thematic contents. The Last Supper (San Marcuola Church, Venice), especially painted for said church, and the Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples, (Prado Museum). There will also be some of his most important mythological works (Venus, Vulcan and Mars, (Munich, Alte Pinakothek); Origin of the Milky Way, London, National Gallery) and several examples of his activity as portraitist: Self-portraits (Philadelphia, Museum of Art), and (Paris, Louvers Museum), and the Portrait of Lorenzo Soprano (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).

The exhibit especially elaborates upon the painter's creative process, by granting utmost importance to the "disegno", understood as a learning, experimentation and composition tool, as well as to the technical aspects, fully integrated in the explanatory discourse. Tintoretto granted an exceptional importance to designs, so a selection of some of his main ones is included in the exhibit. These are of three different kinds: those he made out of classic sculptures, out of Miguel Angel's, from small models, next to which we can also see some preliminary sketches for full compositions (the only sketch kept for his painting Venus and Vulcan, that can normally be seen at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, in Berlin, is shown at the exhibit, plus several other sketches of figures he used quite often for different compositions.

The criteria the Museum has followed to select the Works, whether paintings or drawings, has been a qualitative one. Tintoretto was both a prolific and daring painter but an irregular one too and this fact has compelled the Museum to be extremely selective. To the point that several of the Prado works, attributed to Tintoretto, have been excluded on the basis of quality criteria. This does not mean that all the works at the exhibition absolutely belong to him. In the 15th century, the idea of authorship was somewhat different to what we have today and the studios had plenty of assistants and students. In some of the works included, mostly in the last ones, the participation of students is fairly noticeable, such as in The Christ's deposition at the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, although this does not imply any criticism against its quality or against Tintoretto's very strong artistic personality.