The history of painting is made of inspirations, rewrites and renewal. This is what the exhibition Cézanne and the Masters highlights, where Cézanne's work is set against masterpieces by Italian masters, his predecessors of the 16th and 17th centuries first, but also his successors of the Novecento. Although he never travelled to Italy, the Aixois never ceased to draw on the Italian example to establish a "new" painting. As a reader of Virgil, Ovid and Lucretia, he took up the work of Titian, Tintoretto, Poussin and El Greco. He assimilates the subjects, the volumes, the colour or the light, releases the spirit of the paintings and modernizes them to "make Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of museums". This dialogue through the ages is reflected in the influence Cézanne has on the Novecento. As Italian painters broke with the ancients, they turned to the stripping and simplicity of the latter's themes. Boccioni, Morandi and Pirandello recognise in him the bearer of a certain classical idea, a painter of permanence, confirming the link between Cézanne and the Italians. Featuring some sixty masterpieces from the most important public and private collections around the world (Musée du Louvre, Orsay, National Gallery of Art in Washington, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid, Pola Museum in Kanagawa, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, etc.), this exhibition is an art history lesson in understanding the decisive influence of Cézanne in establishing a "new" painting.