From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In the state room of the Louvre hangs one of the most sensitive portraits painted in the Renaissance (and, no, I’m not talking about the Mona Lisa). Two Dogs Tied to a Tree Trunk (c. 1548–49) is the masterpiece of Jacopo Bassano, the least well known of the great 16th-century Venetian painters. Famed in his day for animal paintings and pastoral scenes, Bassano was credited with inventing the nocturne, decades before Caravaggio’s tenebrism. After training in Venice with Bonifazio de’ Pitati, he returned to his father’s workshop in his hometown of Bassano (now Bassano del Grappa) on the mainland. Jacopo’s four sons became painters; Francesco, Leandro and Gerolamo opened independent workshops in Venice while Giambattista took over the family business.
Thanks to the survival of the Libro Secondo, the second of four account books, we know extraordinary details about the Bassano workshop’s practices and patrons, learning, for example, that the Louvre portrait immortalises the hunting dogs of the diplomat Antonio Zantani, or that the clients sometimes paid the workshop in grain or agricultural products instead of cash. In addition to working for well-to-do clients, Jacopo and his family also produced paintings for local tradesmen. These smaller-scale works combine religious subjects with scenes of everyday life, often foregrounding seasonal labour and livestock to create a new kind of painting that merges the biblical with the pastoral.
Virgin and Child with John the Baptist and Saint Anthony the Abbot (1561–62), Jacopo Bassano. Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Pirje Mykkänen/Finnish National Gallery
It is these smaller, later works produced from the 1550s to the 1570s that are the focus of an exhibition at the Sinebrychoff (part of the Finnish National Gallery), curated by the museum’s director Kirsi Eskelinen and Claudia Caramanna. It is the first exhibition of Bassano’s work in Europe outside Italy, the first monographic exhibition since 2010 and also the first exhibition dedicated to an Italian Renaissance artist in Finland. It brings together 34 works from eight different countries and 13 institutions, including newer acquisitions, reattributions and discoveries. Among the acquisitions is a painting bought by the museum in 2019 of a rare subject: Saint John the Baptist Gathering Flowers for his Parents. This work, together with the Virgin and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Anthony Abbot, are the inspiration and impetus for this exhibition project. In the first room, these paintings form a double introduction to Bassano’s debt to Titian in his palette and composition, and to the ways in which many of Bassano’s paintings have changed over the centuries. He employed an unusually varied range of pigments, according to the preferences of the clients who paid for the materials. The exhibition presents new technical research into the fading of smalt, an alternative to azurite and ultramarine blues. A painting like the Adoration of the Child and the Angels with the Instruments of the Passion (Museo Civico di Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza), once considered to be grisaille by design, is here presented with other works that have similarly faded in their smalt blues.
Moses Striking Water from the Rock (c. 1569), Jacopo Bassano. Princely Collections of Liechtenstein, Vaduz-Vienna
At the heart of the show is a compelling gathering of the biblical-pastoral works for which Bassano was famed. Moses Striking Water from the Rock (c. 1569) exemplifies the way in which scriptural narratives are a departure for representing rural communities: families and their livestock quench their thirst at the gushing spring while Aaron and Moses, the latter identified by two daubs of white light representing his horns, are distant on a rocky path. Works from three of Bassano’s seasonal series seem at first to present an idyllic vision of rural life in the Veneto, with tiny religious scenes relegated to far-off hilltops – yet, as Eskelinen demonstrates in the catalogue, these works are carefully constructed to emphasise the spiritual significance of seasonal labour. Sheep-shearing takes place unusually late in the year in Summer (Vienna), for example, connecting a distant scene of Abraham and Isaac with the lamb of God. In the elusive Sleeping Shepherd (Budapest), a withered fig tree sprouts new fruit, perhaps a clue to the painting’s now lost meaning. This atmospheric work is an exhibition highlight, and retains beautiful passages in the foregrounded flocks.
Bassano’s animals are the protagonists throughout, in studies and portraits as well as larger paintings with religious import. The Louvre’s Two Dogs could not travel, but is substituted by two rarely seen paintings from the Uffizi: another double dog portrait and a finely finished study of a ewe and her feeding lamb, both unfortunately veiled by old varnish. It should be said that condition is a little uneven among the loans, some of which have been obscured or overcleaned in the past, as well as suffering from changing colours. This does not detract from the power of works such as the nocturnal Annunciation to the Shepherds (Prague), but it makes one wonder what subtleties have been lost. The painter’s attention to atmosphere and lighting is demonstrated by two versions of the Adoration of the Magi (Banca Popolare di Vincenza; Galleria Borghese, Rome) set at different times of day, here both attributed to Jacopo and seen side by side. Careful distinctions in saturation and shadow between these works are striking.
Original painting and digital reconstruction of John the Baptist Gathering Flowers for his Parents (c. 1559–60) by Jacopo Bassano. Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo of original (above): Hannu Pakarinen/Finnish National Gallery; digital reconstruction (below): Aleks Talve/Finnish National Gallery
Bassano scholars distinguish between the hands of Jacopo and his sons, who signed works in collaboration with their father as well as producing workshop paintings in his name. This exhibition presents several new attributions, such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice), here given to Jacopo, while making a case for the collaborative nature of the Bassano workshop, which also produced portraits, here represented by a small selection of rather uneven works. The show also includes some of Bassano’s unusual coloured-chalk drawings, produced for use in the workshop and as preparatory sketches for frescoes. A pair of rabbits (Uffizi) and the head of a woman (Louvre) are particularly accomplished. It is ironic that a painter so preoccupied with atmospheric effects and the role of colour in composition produced paintings that have changed so much over the centuries. Nonetheless, Bassano’s sensitivity as a painter of people, light and animals is deftly conveyed in this unexpected exhibition, which will no doubt appeal to visitors from across Finland and beyond.
‘Jacopo Bassano: Venetian Renaissance Master’ is at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki, until 12 January 2025.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.