Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien: Band 12

Band 12 (= 104)

Bibliographic data

Series

Persistent identifier:: 990025659750203331

ZDB-ID:: 1479978-9

Title:: Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien

Place Of Publication:: Mainz; Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

Publisher:: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

Document type:: Series

Collection:: House Publications; KHM-Yearbook

Copyright:: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0); KHM-Museumsverband

Language:: Deutsch

ISSN:: 1605-2773

Periodical volume

Persistent identifier:: 0015499

Title:: Band 12

Shelfmark:: 10.230

Volume count:: = 104

Publisher:: Philipp von Zabern

Document type:: Periodical volume

Collection:: House Publications; KHM-Yearbook

Publication year:: 2010

Copyright:: KHM-Museumsverband

DOI:: 10.60477/khm1-0015499

Chapter

Title:: Production and reproduction in the workshop of Jacopo Bassano. Four matrices for the Four Seasons in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

Author:: Corsato, Carlo

Carlo Corsato Production and Reproduction in the Workshop ofJacopo Bassano Four Matrices for the Four Seasons in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna* * My gratitude goes to Francesca Del Torre Scheuch, who is working at the Bassano-project at the Kunst historisches Museum in Vienna, for her generous advice and her continuous support without which these pages would have never been written. I also want to thank Sylvia Ferino-Padgen for facilitating my research during my studies of the paintings at the Gemäldegalerie in Vienna. Finally, I wish to thank Isabelle Decobecq, Ursula Winkler, and in particular Dulcia Meijers for their valued input regarding this paper. I have here summarized and revised the third chapter included in Carlo Corsato, Identitä ed Ereditä nelle Botteghe dei Bassano. Le Stagioni, 1570-1592 ca., doctoral thesis, Universitä degli Studi di Verona, 2010, under the supervision of Bernard Aikema. 1 See Alessandro Ballarin, Jacopo Bassano. Scritti 1964— 1995 e Tavole, 5 vols., Cittadella, 1995, in particular: vol. I, pp. 3-26 (formerly in Arte Veneta 18, 1964, pp. 55-72) and vol. II, pp. 311 -332 (the Conference held at the Fondazione “Giorgio Cini” in Venice, Sep tember l st , 1992). 2 See Ballarin 1995 (cited note 1), vol. I, pp.71-95 (formerly in Arte Veneta 20, 1966, pp. 112 -136); Ex hibition Catalogue Jean Habert and Catherine Loisel- Legrand, eds., Bassano etsesßls aans les museesfangais, Paris, 1998; Exhibition Catalogue Miguel Falomir Faus, Los Bassano en la Espana del siglo de oro, Sala- manca, 2001; Stefania Mason, “L’inventario di Gero- lamo Bassano e l’ereditä della bottega”, in Notiziario dellAssociazione Amici dei Musei e dei Monumenti di Bassano dei Grappa, 2009, in particular pp. 7-13. 3 In this year Girolamo Bassano died and his brother Leandro stopped registering at the Painters Guild (fra- glia) in Venice. 4 William R. Rearick, “Jacopo Bassano’s Later Genre Paintings”, in The Burlington Magazine 110, 1968, pp.241-249; id., “Tiziano e Jacopo Bassano” in Tiziano e Venezia, Vicenza, 1980, pp. 371-374; and id., “The life and works of Jacopo dal Ponte, called Bassano c.,1510-1592”, in Exhibition Catalogue Be verly Louise Brown and Paola Marini, eds., Jacopo Bassano, c. 1510-1592, English Version, Bologna, 1992, pp. 45 —172; Rearick agreed with Ballarin in the Exhibition Catalogue Jacopo Bassano e il doge Sebastiano Venier (Bassano, 1996), where he uninten- tionally brought forth a “tentativo di de-cristianizzare l’immagine di Jacopo Bassano”, according to Paolo Berdini (“Parola e immagine”, in Venezia Cinquecento 18, 1999, p. 102, note 5). 5 See Bernard Aikema, Jacopo Bassano and his public. Moralizing pictures in an Age of Reform, ca. 1535— 1600, Princeton, 1996; and Paolo Berdini, The Reli- Fig. 1: Bassano, Four Seasons. The Al Series. Vienna, Kunst historisches Museum, inv. nos. 4303, 4302, 4304, 2869. The workshop of the Dal Ponte family has always been known for paint ings representing scenes of every-day life or, more specifically, peasant life set in rural landscapes 1 . It is generally assumed that from the mid 1560s and 1570s onwards the capobottega, Jacopo Dal Ponte, also known as Bas sano (c. 1510-1592), created most of the compositions that were then copied by his sons Francesco, Giambattista, Leandro and Girolamo 2 dur ing the following decades, or at least until 1621 The general tone of their work seems either non-engage A or influenced by devotional concepts based on moral sermons widely circulated during the Cinquecento throughout the Veneto region 5 . The success of their productions, defined by critics as genre painting and/or biblical-pastoral painting 6 , largely coincided with the fame of the Bassano brand. In fact, patrons would probably have pre ferred to buy paintings without a restricted religious content, and such works would therefore have guaranteed greater commercial success than copies and/or replicated versions of explicitly religious devotional subject matters. The artistic character of their works is distinguished by a “genre” iconography that rarely allowed them to be identified as traditional devo tional paintings since the Bassanos did not paint them following the esta- blished canons of religious history painting. The Four Seasons are certainly the most representative of these “genre” iconographies, considering the large number of copies, replicas and vari- ants (many of which still survive) mentioned in primary sources and in- ventories 7 . The metaphorical System reflected in these paintings seems obscured by the depiction of pastoral settings and rural labours, and thus they are generally referred to simply as the Four Seasons. The most signi- ficant group of paintings representing this iconographic theme is today preserved in the Gemäldegalerie in Vienna, which houses two almost com- plete suites featuring highly divergent compositions, as well as three other individual copies/variants 8 . This paper will try to reconstruct the composi- tional evolution of this particular iconography and to shed light on the chronology of its production, while also outlining the multifaceted dyna- mic of the Bassano family’s bottega System. The two primary compositions In 1660, David Teniers the younger published his Theatrum Pictorium\ in which he recorded most of the collection of Italian paintings that the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria had collected during his stay in Coudenberg Palace in Brussels as governor of the Spanish Netherlands. From among the twenty-two works identified by the generic label “Bassan” 10 ,

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: Band 12 (= 104)

Series

Periodical volume

Chapter

Table of contents

Downloads

Full record

This page

Image fragment

Formats and links

Formats

Links

Cite

Full record

This page

Citation recommendation