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Jacopo Bassano
(1553-1613)
Bassano, Jacopo (Jacopo da Ponte) (c.1510/18 - 1592). Italian painter,
the most celebrated member of a family of artists who took their name from
the small town of Bassano, about 65 km. from Venice.
Apart from a period in the 1530s when he trained with Bonifazio Veronese
in Venice, Jacopo worked in Bassano all his life. His father, Francesco
the Elder (c.1475-1539), was a village painter and Jacopo always retained
something of the peasant artist, even though the influence of, for example,
the fashionable etchings of Parmigianino is evident in his work.
He treated biblical themes in the manner of rustic genre scenes, using
genuine country types and portraying animals with real interest. In this
way he helped to develop the taste for paintings in which the genre or
still-life element assumes greater importance than the ostensible religious
subject. From around 1560 his work became vested with a more exaggerated
search for novel effects of light, taking on something of the iridescent
coloring of Tintoretto.
Bassano had four painter sons who continued his style Francesco
the Younger (1549-92), Gerolamo (1566-1621), Giovanni Battista
(1553-1613), and Leandro (1557-1622). Francesco (who committed suicide
by throwing himself out of a window) and Leandro both acquired some distinction
and popularity working in Venice. The work of the family is well represented
in the Museo Civico at Bassano.
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