Jacopo Bassano

Jacopo Bassano
Self-portrait in later age
Born	Jacopo dal Ponte c. 1510 Bassano del Grappa near Venice, Republic of Venice
Died	14 February 1592 (aged 81–82) Bassano del Grappa near Venice, Republic of Venice
Nationality	Italian
Education	Bonifazio Veronese
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Supper at Emmaus (1538) Flight into Egypt (1544) Christ in the House of Mary and Martha Baptism of Christ (1590)
Movement	Venetian School

Jacopo Bassano (c. 1510 – 14 February 1592), known also as Jacopo dal Ponte, was an Italian painter who was born and died in Bassano del Grappa near Venice, and took the village as his surname. Having trained in the workshop of his father, Francesco the Elder, he painted mostly religious paintings, landscapes, and genre scenes. Indeed, he often treated biblical themes in the manner of rural genre scenes, representing peasants, animals, and the agrarian landscape with great accuity. Bassano's pictures were very popular in Venice and, eventually, throughout Europe. His four sons: Francesco Bassano the Younger, Giovanni Battista da Ponte, Leandro Bassano, and Girolamo da Ponte, also became artists and followed him closely in style and subject matter.

Life

The Good Samaritan

Jacopo da Ponte, called Jacopo Bassano – Adoration of the Magi

Jacopo Bassano was born around 1510 in the town of Bassano del Grappa, located about 65 km from the city of Venice. His father, Francesco il Vecchio, was a locally successful painter who had established a family workshop that produced mostly religious works. During his youth, Bassano was an apprentice in his father's workshop, where learned the rudiments of painting while also gaining experience in surveying, mapmaking, and engineering. His skill in these more practical disciplines helps to explain why the representation of the dynamic landscape of the Veneto would come to occupy such an important role in some many of his paintings. Bassano eventually made his way to Venice in the 1530s, where he may have studied under Bonifazio de Pitati (also known as Bonifazio Veronese) and certainly was exposed to the works of artists as Titian and il Pordenone. After his father's death in 1539 he returned to Bassano del Grappa and permanently set up residence there, even marrying a local woman, Elisabetta Merzari, in 1546. He took over the management of his family workshop, which would eventually come to include his four sons, Leandro Bassano, Francesco Bassano the Younger, Giovanni Battista da Ponte, and Girolamo da Ponte. After his death in 1592, his sons continued to produce numerous works in his style, making it difficult for later art historians to establish which pieces were created by Jacopo himself and which works were created at the hands of his progeny.

Works

The Way to Calvary

Bassano's ability to experiment and absorb stylistic qualities from other contemporary artists is evident in the four distinct periods seen in his artistic legacy. Each period shows the artist's work in reconciling his own aesthetics with the styles of his peers.

Early works

Bonifazio de Pitati imparted upon his young pupil a lasting appreciation of Titian's work, the influence of which is clearly seen in his early pieces. Bassano's earliest paintings exhibit his lifelong obsession with brilliant colours that he had seen in Titian's beginning works, particularly in Bassano's Supper at Emmaus (1538). In this commission for a local church, Bassano fills the canvas with rich, luminous colours that help distinguish the figures from their surrounding environment. He breaks away from the practices of his contemporaries by placing the figure of Christ towards the back of the scene and allowing the lay people around him to play a more significant part in the composition of the piece. They are also unique in their dress. Instead of clothing his figures in the draping, shapeless fabrics many Renaissance artists equated with Classical Roman fashion, Bassano chose to feature figures in 16th-century clothing. The details of this piece are the most often discussed aspect of it. To many art historians his inclusion of various food on the tables, a dog lying down and a cat slinking around the chairs, as well as numerous secondary characters is a testament to Bassano's practice of drawing from life instead of relying on stylistic conventions of the age.

Bassano's paintings from the 1530-50s betray a range of artistic influences, including Dürer, Parmigianino, Tintoretto, and Raphael, whose compositions he would have known through prints, of which he must have been an avid collector.

Later Work

From the late 1550s onwards, Bassano's work was characterized by an interest in rustic subjects. Drawing upon pastoral paintings and prints by Titian and others, he created compositions which show shepherds and animals moving through the countryside. Rather than placing religious scenes in Classical Roman settings (as his Renaissance counterparts did), he placed figures in a more natural landscape, where the trees and the flowers were as carefully rendered as his figures. Many of his paintings are set in the landscape around his hometown of Bassano del Grappa. Frequently showing scenes of agricultural labor, these paintings reflect the ongoing effort to transform the Venetian mainland in to a more agriculturally productive region, but some of his works also seem to hint at the dangers of environmental mismanagement.

Bassano also experimented with the representation of light in his later works. In the final decades of his career, he became one of the first artists to paint a "nocturne", or a painting in a nighttime landscape with artificial lighting. This type of painting was extremely popular with local audiences and made Bassano paintings highly valued.

• Paintings
• 
  The Annunciation to the Shepherds (1533), Belvoir Castle
• 
  The Way to Calvary (1535-1538), Fondation Bemberg
• 
  Supper at Emmaus (1538), Kimbell Art Museum
• 
  The Procession to Calvary (1540), The National Gallery
• 
  The Last Supper, 1542, Galleria Borghese, Rome
• 
  Calvary
• 
  Portrait of a Cardinal
• 
  Portrait of a Gentleman
• 
  The Adoration of the Kings, early 1540s
• 
  Altarpiece painted for the Church at Tomo, Pinakothek at Munich
• 
  Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist (1570), Galleria degli Uffizi
• 
  The Baptism of Christ, 1592, private collection
• 
  Jacopo Bassano and workshop - The Purification of the Temple
• 
  Adoration of the Magi
• 
  Animals boarding Noah's Ark
• 
  Miraculous Draught of Fishes
• 
  The Purification of the Temple, The National Gallery

References

Jacopo da Ponte monument, Bassano del Grappa

Further reading

• Aikema, Bernard (1996), Jacopo Bassano and His Public: Moralizing Pictures in an Age of Reform, ca. 1535-1600 (translated by Andrew P. McCormick), Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Pilgrim James (2023), "Jacopo Bassano and the Flood of Feltre." The Art Bulletin 105:3 (2023): 115-137.
• Rearick, W. R. (1993), Jacopo Bassano, 1510-1592, Fort Worth, Texas: Kimbell Art Museum.

External links

Media related to Jacopo dal Ponte at Wikimedia Commons

• 41 artworks by or after Jacopo Bassano at the Art UK site
• Jacopo Bassano in the Web Gallery of Art
• Jacopo Bassano: Founder of Landscape Style
• Bryan, Michael (1889). Walter Armstrong; Robert Edmund Graves (eds.). Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical. Vol. II L-Z. London: George Bell and Sons. p. 308.