Jacopo Bassano and His Public

by Aikema, Bernard; McCormick, Andrew P.

• ISBN13: 9780691043951
• ISBN10: 0691043957
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-07-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Widely acknowledged as one of the first landscape and genre painters in Italy, Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1510-1592) was highly regarded during his career for his brilliant treatment of light and color and for his innovative rural themes. Although he can be viewed as a pioneer pointing the way to the Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century, this Venetian painter is less known today than many of his contemporaries. In this book, Bernard Aikema uses a contextual approach to perform a much-needed iconological analysis of Bassano's painterly production. By tracing a remarkably consistent use of imagery grounded in a spiritual perspective, Aikema seeks to change our conception not only of the importance of Bassano's oeuvre, but also of the original function and development of genre and landscape painting in Northern Italy as compared to that in The Netherlands.Aikema argues that Bassano developed an imagery that expressed itself in an antithetical mode of representation--in which a good Christian way of life is contrasted with a materialistic concept of human conduct. The author challenges the common belief that Bassano switched to rural settings and genre painting late in life in order to satisfy art collectors' demands for "pastoral" and "low-life" subjects. Even in paintings where the religious scenes are hidden in the background or are lacking altogether, these works had a primarily spiritual function. Aikema shows how such paintings served as visual aids to the changing devotional needs in the second half of the cinquecento.

Author Biography

Bernard Aikema teaches art history at Nijmegen University in The Netherlands.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction	p. 3
The Early Work	p. 7
Heresy and Orthodoxy in Cittadella	p. 7
The Flight into Egypt as a Metaphor of Life's Pilgrimage	p. 14
The Mirror of the Wicked World	p. 26
The Trinity at Angarano	p. 31
The Madonna of Asolo	p. 34
The Selfishness of Herod and His Ilk	p. 40
Two Hunting Dogs for a Polymath	p. 42
The Caritas of the Samaritan	p. 47
Lazarus and Poor Relief	p. 49
The Wicked Shepherd of the Adoration	p. 52
Altarpieces in the Contada	p. 54
Naturalism, Northern Art, and Spirituality	p. 58
The Later Work	p. 74
Another Wicked Shepherd and an Anti-Erasmian Parable	p. 74
Two Venetian Altarpieces	p. 80
The "Bassano Factory" and the Adoration of the Shepherds	p. 82
Journeys from the Old Testament	p. 84
Journeys in Pairs and a Picture with No Subject	p. 91
Jude and Tamar	p. 97
The Flood and the Plague	p. 98
The Moral of the Gospel	p. 105
The Primacy of the Vita Mista	p. 109
Unusual Altarpieces on the Terraferma	p. 115
Susanna's Virtue	p. 126
Seasons, Elements, Months, and Markets	p. 131
Late Altarpieces and the Effect from a Distance	p. 147
A New Pictorial Language	p. 151
Jacopo Bassano in Perspective	p. 159
Notes	p. 175
Bibliography	p. 209
Index	p. 241
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