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 Kunsthistorisches
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, September
l st , 1992).
2 See Ballarin 1995 (cited note 1), vol. I, pp.71-95
(formerly in Arte Veneta 20, 1966, pp. 112 -136); Exhibition
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, Salamanca,
2001; Stefania Mason, “L’inventario di Gerolamo
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 (fraglia)
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 Beverly
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 unintentionally
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, Kunsthistorisches
Museum, inv. nos. 4303, 4302, 4304, 2869.
The workshop of the Dal Ponte family has always been known for paintings
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 Bassano
(c. 1510-1592), created most of the compositions that were then
copied by his sons Francesco, Giambattista, Leandro and Girolamo 2 during
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 preferred
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 devotional
paintings since the Bassanos did not paint them following the established
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 variants
(many of which still survive) mentioned in primary sources and inventories
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 significant
group of paintings representing this iconographic theme is today
preserved in the Gemäldegalerie in Vienna, which houses two almost complete
suites featuring highly divergent compositions, as well as three other
individual copies/variants 8 . This paper will try to reconstruct the compositional
evolution of this particular iconography and to shed light on the
chronology of its production, while also outlining the multifaceted dynamic
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 ,
