Why Bowie Needed a Sixteenth-Century Maniac on His Wall
Tintoret painted like a man in a hurry to break the rules. Now in Paris, Bowie’s painting reminds us why he collected him for much the same reason.
There is a temptation, when a dead rock star once owned an Old Master, to treat the painting as celebrity memorabilia with better varnish. Resist it.
At the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, where Éternel Tintoret has just opened, one painting arrives carrying an unusually heavy load of afterlives. Saint Catherine of Alexandria and an Angel once hung in a Venetian church, survived Napoleon, disappeared into private collections, landed with a London dealer and, in 1987, was bought by David Bowie. He kept it until his death. Now it has turned up in Paris, among Tintoret’s saints, sinners and airborne bodies, looking considerably less like a trophy than a clue.
The painting was made for San Geminiano, the little Sansovino church that once faced St. Mark’s Basilica. Catherine kneels as an angel informs her of what amounts to spectacularly bad news: martyrdom is coming. Above her, putti already carry the instruments of the event. Tintoret does not deliver the message politely. Architecture pitches backward, gestures cut through space, light behaves badly. The whole thing feels electrically unstable.
San Geminiano was demolished in 1807 under Napoleonic rule. The painting passed briefly through the Accademia before leaving Venice and beginning the long aristocratic shuffle through private ownership that so many Old Masters endured. Eventually it reached Colnaghi in London. Bowie bought it there when he was forty. It was among his earliest serious acquisitions.
This is where the story could become silly.
Rock star buys Renaissance painting. Thin White Duke meets Old Venetian Master. Cue photographs, auction prices and some lazy theory about theatricality.
Except Bowie really knew art.
His collection eventually sprawled across more than two hundred works of twentieth-century British art, alongside Basquiat, Hirst, Surrealism, African contemporary art, Outsider Art and furniture by Ettore Sottsass and Memphis. Frank Auerbach mattered enormously to him; so did David Bomberg, Peter Lanyon, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. There was no obvious investment-manager logic to any of it. Thank God.
Bowie collected the way interesting people eat: promiscuously, inquisitively and without worrying too much about whether the courses matched.
He also did something many celebrity collectors conspicuously avoid. He worked at it. He joined the editorial board of Modern Painters in 1994, interviewed Balthus, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, wrote about Basquiat and reported from the Johannesburg Biennale. He could discuss an artist without immediately turning the conversation back toward himself.
Of Auerbach’s thick, almost sculpted paint, Bowie once delivered perhaps the finest sentence ever uttered by a musician about a painting: “I want to sound like that looks.”
Now look again at the Tintoret.
Suddenly Bowie’s attraction to him seems almost embarrassingly obvious.
Tintoret painted as if Renaissance decorum were a useful thing to know precisely so that one could violate it properly. Vasari described him as presto and risoluto—fast and decisive. His bodies lunge, levitate, twist. Perspective becomes a weapon. Light crashes into rooms like an uninvited guest. The paintings are theatrical without being polite about theatre. Five centuries later, Bowie would spend a career treating identity, costume, gender, music and cultural hierarchy with much the same suspicion.
He did not need another respectable masterpiece.
He needed trouble on the wall.
Even the attribution of this particular picture has refused to behave. Sotheby’s sold it in 2016 as “Jacopo Tintoretto and Studio.” Scientific examination at Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage subsequently revealed a vigorous freehand underdrawing and changes made during execution; the institute concluded that the work was by Tintoret’s own hand. And yet the current Jacquemart-André exhibition presents it as “Atelier de Tintoret.” A pleasingly Tintoretian mess: even the label cannot quite make the picture sit still.
After Bowie’s death, Sotheby’s dispersed more than 350 works from his collection. The sale brought £32.9 million. Basquiat’s Air Power made £7.09 million. The Tintoret went for £191,000 to Belgian collector Marnix Neerman, who subsequently lent it to the Rubenshuis.
These figures are irresistible and almost completely beside the point.
Bowie once described art as “stable nourishment.” That is a far more revealing phrase than collector, patron or connoisseur. He did not speak about paintings as assets sitting obediently on a wall. He spoke about using them—about waking up, confronting an Auerbach, and having his emotional weather altered by it.
Perhaps that is why his Tintoret matters in Paris now.
Not because a famous man owned it. Not because Bowie somehow makes a sixteenth-century painting cooler, or Tintoret makes Bowie more sophisticated. Both men can survive perfectly well without the endorsement.
The interesting thing is recognition.
One compulsive image-maker, five centuries after another, looked at a painting in which space, bodies and convention were being pushed slightly past the point of good behaviour—and thought: yes. I need to live with that.
Sources
https://www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com/fr/eternel-tintoret
https://pers.rubenshuis.be/rubens-house-presents-david-bowies-tintoretto
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/david-bowies-personal-art-collection-to-feature-in-three-sales
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/bowie-collector
https://www.sothebys.com/en/slideshows/david-bowies-art-captivates-collectors
