ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre’s visits to artists’ workshops in the 1940s will have proved more beneficial to him than his visits to museums, which he was not too keen on. Sartre’s texts about art will first and foremost be portraits through their titles, in reference to specific individuals. The remodelling of some Sartrean aesthetics demands a thinking experiment that spans from the particular to the general, from the part to the whole, in order to shine light on a blind spot in his work that has been ignored for too long. In “Saint-Marc and his double,” a dense and winding essay, Sartre returns to the aversive relationship between Titian and Tintoretto and reviews almost 19 paintings, including the notoriously scandalous one, The Miracle of the Slave. In Sartre’s aesthetics as well as in Tintoretto’s painting, a stultified pictorial image was thought to be noticed in extra material, which would be filled with dogmatic intent.
