Bassano, Jacopo ( Jacopo da Ponte) (
b Bassano [now Bassano del Grappa],
c.1515;
d Bassano, 13 Feb. 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 (40 miles) north-west of Venice. Jacopo is regarded as a member of the Venetian School and among his contemporaries is ranked inferior only to the great triumvirate of
Titian,
Tintoretto, and
Veronese. However, apart from a period in the 1530s when he worked with
Bonifazio Veronese, he was not resident in Venice itself; he lived almost all his life in his native town, where he was easily the leading artist of the day, producing a large and varied output. Although he painted only a handful of pictures for churches or other public buildings in Venice, his work was popular with private collectors there and he also had clients in other cities of north Italy, including Treviso and Vicenza, and occasionally commissions from as far away as Florence. His father
Francesco the Elder (
c.1475–1539) was a village painter and Jacopo always retained a certain earthiness in his work, but in other ways his style was sophisticated and it was constantly developing: in the 1540s and 1550s, for example, he was influenced by the elongated forms of
Parmigianino's etchings, and in his late paintings he responded to the dramatic lighting effects of Tintoretto. Frederick Hartt (
A History of Italian Renaissance Art, 1970) writes that ‘Bassano's work can be dazzling in its unexpected combination of rustic naturalism with a daring freshness of invention and color.’ Most of his pictures are on religious subjects, but he often treated biblical themes in the manner of rural
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.
Bassano had four painter sons who continued his style and sometimes collaborated with him—
Francesco the Younger (1549–92),
Gerolamo (1566–1621),
Giovanni Battista (1553–1613), and
Leandro (1557–1622). Francesco and Leandro both acquired some distinction and popularity working in Venice—indeed Leandro was knighted by the doge in 1595 or 1596 (thereafter he sometimes added
Eques to his signature). Francesco was mentally unstable and died after throwing himself from a window. Leandro's death in 1622 brought the artistic dynasty to an end. The work of the family is well represented in the Museo Civico at Bassano and there are examples in many other collections.
