In 2023, the New York–based Foundation for Italian Art and Culture approached the Cincinnati Art Museum (C.A.M.) with a project. Would it like to support the restoration of two works by one of Italy’s greatest painters of the Renaissance—Tintoretto—and then show them? The paintings, part of a series based on stories in the book of Genesis, were in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice, where the restoration work would be done.
For Peter Jonathan Bell, the curator of European paintings, sculptures, and drawings at C.A.M., the chance to show The Temptation of Adam and Cain and Abel was “a crime of opportunity,” he says. “These are amazing paintings.”
