Exhibition
To mark Lent and Easter 2025, the Museo Diocesano offers, as a starting point for reflection, the display of the Deposition by Jacopo Tintoretto (Venice, c. 1519 – 1594), one of the masterpieces of the great protagonist of Venetian painting of the second half of the sixteenth century, held in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Along a route created in collaboration with Casa Testori, four contemporary artists – Jacopo Benassi, Luca Bertolo, Alberto Gianfreda and Maria Elisabetta Novello – rise to the challenge before the great canvas, forging a personal relationship with the Venetian master’s painting through a variety of languages, from installation to painting.
Created for the church of Santa Maria dell’Umiltà alle Zattere in Venice and datable to around 1562, in the years of the painter’s full maturity, the painting presents a well-balanced and carefully constructed composition that is at the same time dramatic and highly charged, with a dynamism heightened by the use of light and intense chiaroscuro that creates a powerful emotional impact, allowing the figures to emerge from a shadowy landscape.
The imposing figures, larger than life and clearly recalling Michelangelo, are linked to one another by an interweaving of gestures and glances and are arranged theatrically around the body of Christ, placed diagonally at the centre of the scene and held by the shoulders by a male figure, probably Joseph of Arimathea. Towards him, her arms flung wide in a gesture of devastating despair, reaches the Magdalene, while along another axis lies the Virgin, having fainted, overcome by grief and supported by a pious woman, perhaps Mary of Clopas. The Virgin, almost seated on the ground, as if echoing the iconography of the Madonna of Humility, forms a cross with the body of Jesus laid across her; especially delicate and moving is the gesture of her hand as it brushes the foot of her dead son.
