September 6, 2018 > January 6, 2019
Venice, Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo

Curated by Chiara Squarcina

The sixteenth-century city painted by the artist is revealed in the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo.

On the occasion of the celebrations for the five-hundredth anniversary of Tintoretto’s birth, the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo is hosting a fascinating exhibition within its permanent collection, revealing the forms and colours of the clothes worn at the time, through a display of reconstructions of Renaissance garments, worn by the characters portrayed in Tintoretto’s works, and their “existential choreography”.

What is revealed is a world full of symbolic references that are often incomprehensible to the contemporary observer. The exhibition thus offers a unique opportunity to learn about the historical context and dive into sixteenth-century Venice, exploring the fashion and taste of the era. The velvets, damasks, brocades that embellish the protagonists of Tintoretto’s paintings will be visible in the exhibition alongside some vintage artefacts from the museum collections: the famous 32 cm-high shoes, Calcagnini, and the men’s corset, the Cuoietto. Moreover, in this journey into the past, in order to make the memory even more vivid, copies of the clothes worn by the characters portrayed by the artist will be presented.

Thanks to the involvement of Stefano Nicolao and his students of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, of the “Sartoria Poetica” – professional tailors who work at the Accademia da Ponte in Vittorio Veneto – and a series of significant loans from the Elio Dal Cin collection, an expression of the great artistic craftsmanship of the time, it will be possible to relive this distant world in settings that show them off to best effect.