Sartre and arts: Tintoretto, the Venice’s sequestratto

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre, a French structuralist philosopher and intellectual who died in 1980, had a special appreciation for Italy, and on his travels to that country, especially when visiting Venice, he always let himself be carried away by the enchantment caused by the work of Tintoretto, on whom a day he meant to write an extensive work which, however, never got to finish. This article treats precisely the fragmentary writings of Sartre on the Venetian painter, understood it as an aesthetic and phenomenological analysis that approximates Sartre to the writings of Merleau-Ponty on Paul Cézanne and Deleuze on Francis Bacon.