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Rediscovering Bassano
| Article
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10891 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
2,010 Words |
| Author
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Sharon Benge
Sharon Benge is an arts commentator who resides in Fort Worth,
Texas. |
Palo Veronese's sumptuous painting Marriage at Cana, completed in 1562, contains a pointed commentary on sixteenth-century Italian art. The marriage scene includes a string quartet consisting of the four most prominent painters of the period. Veronese, who naturally counted himself, portrayed his fellow players as Tintoretto, Titian, and Jacopo Bassano.
Although Bassano's artistic reputation has long been eclipsed by that of his contemporaries, Beverly Brown U.S. curator of Jacopo Bassano, a quadricentennial retrospective at Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum through April 25, cites the Veronese work as proof that Bassano was highly regarded by his peers.
So what happened? Why are the other painters household name and Jacopo not? Brown thinks he became very well known during his time for his innovative pastoral genre scenes--scenes that evoke the bucolic aspect of the land and his beloved town and namesake, Bassano del Grappa. During his lifetime and later his four sons cranked out similar scenes by the hundreds, and, of course, the farther they got from the model the less successful they were. Left behind and forgotten were most of the religious works done by Jacopo during the height of his powers. This exhibition has brought to light many paintings that substantiate his right to be included in Veronese's string quarter.
Bassano del Grappa, a small, walled town about thirty miles northwest of Venice, is central to a discussion of the work of Jacopo Bassano. Born Jacopo dal Ponte, he not only took on the name of his birthplace, but infused his works with scenes of local agrarian life, animals, and even the nearby Monte Grappa. The fact that Jacopo elected to stay in this town most of his life, preferring its lovely views of the Brenta River and the Alpine foothills over the cosmopolitan verve of Venice, is to some scholars the reason for his relative obscurity.
In viewing the mystery of Bassano's diminished reputation, Paola Marini, director of the Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa and the exhibition's cocurator, writes in the catalog.
Jacopo's choice of a retired life in his very modest native town, the scarcity of documents relating to his work, his feverish pictorial experimentation, the vastness of his output stemming from collaborations--first with his father, Francesco il Vecchio, and his brother, Giambattista, and later and above all, with his own four sons--have rendered his artistic career so complex, rich, and ever-changing
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