Follower of Jacopo Bassano, Allegory of Spring, 17th century

Follower of Jacopo Da Ponte, known as Jacopo Bassano, 17th century Allegory of Spring Oil on canvas. Dimensions: With frame: cm W 122.5 x H 89 x D 6.5. Canvas: cm W 106.5 x H 72 Price: private negotiation Object accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and expertise (attached at the bottom of the page) The painting, of great decorative effect and accompanied by a non-coeval carved and gilded wooden frame, is the work of a painter, active in the mid-17th century, a follower of the celebrated Venetian school of the Bassano da Ponte, a family of painters who developed their prosperous workshop for over two centuries, between the 15th and advanced 17th centuries. It depicts the allegory of Spring with all the peculiar activities of the season: in the foreground on the right is depicted the milking of goats, while on the left a hunter, with his dogs on a leash, is ready for a hunt. The scenes are set in a hilly landscape with some birds flying among the budding branches of the trees. In the distance, on the right, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. This is a composition taken from the cycle The Four Seasons now attributed to Jacopo da Ponte (known as Bassano). The series of painters da Ponte or dal Ponte, also known as Bassano, begins with Francesco the Elder, born in Bassano del Grappa between 1470 and 1480, an artist of late 15th-century style. He had four children, including the famous Jacopo, founder of the Bassanese school. Jacopo had eight children, of whom Francesco, Leandro, Giambattista and Girolamo, all painters in the paternal workshop. Jacopo was the initiator of a biblical-pastoral genre that had great success, engaging the workshop and his children in numerous variations. Over the years, these paintings, sometimes taken from the New Testament, or cyclical compositions of the Seasons, Months, Elements, to satisfy the increasingly dense requests of the bourgeois clientele, became a mixture of styles and subjects, with phenomena of reciprocal assimilation and imitation, within a real proto-industry of images. Bassanese painting did not end with the death of Jacopo's four children: it was instead transmitted to their descendants for two generations. The dynasty became extinct in 1661 and the activity ceased definitively. The success of their productions, defined by critics as genre painting and/or biblical-pastoral painting, largely coincided with the fame of the name Bassano or Bassanese. The artistic character of their works is distinguished by a "genre" iconography that rarely allowed them to be identified as traditional paintings since the Bassano did not paint them following the established canons of religious history painting. The fortune of Bassanese painting was very great and already in the 17th century many painters did not scruple to copy, imitate and falsify the paintings and themes of the Bassano, thus contributing to often creating an inextricable attributive tangle. The Four Seasons are certainly among the most representative works of Bassanese iconographies. The metaphorical framework seems obscured by the representation of pastoral environments and rural works. However, in the background of all four canvases is represented a scene from the Old Testament: in the case of Spring, there is depicted the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Jacopo Bassano makes use of a simple compositional scheme: against the background of a landscape, the activities of people, domestic animals and the equipment used are described with vivid narrative realism. The painter portrays the landscapes in the four canvases, as a series of studies on the light that changes during the day, creating effects of interconnection and complementary between the works. The changing light of the day becomes increasingly evident: Spring begins the series bathed in dawn light, Summer has the full light of day, while Autumn reveals the last light changing from warm afternoon tones turning to twilight. In Winter, the evening gives way to the night, the fading light reveals the bright splendor of the white peaks of the mountains against the dark night sky. In this series, Jacopo's appreciation for nature is evident, in combination with his interest in the characteristic activities of rural and domestic life. The most significant group of paintings representing this iconographic theme is now kept in the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna. The series of the Four Seasons by Jacopo Bassano, conceived by the author in 1570, belonged to the famous collection of Archduke Leopold William (1614-1656). The Archduke's collection later became a significant part of the current collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (inv. nn. 4303, 4302, 4304, 2869). In the same place is also preserved the series of the Four Seasons by Jacopo Bassano's son, Francesco, from 1580. The representation of the months and seasons became the subject of entire pictorial cycles, elaborated in multiple versions. If the different seasons show absolutely similar characteristics, in the bucolic intonation, in the landscape gently sloping towards bluish hills, in the cut of the scene, there are in fact absent real replicas or copies of the same subject. The success of the cycle of the Four Seasons is certainly due to the presence of numerous engravings whose prints circulated widely and extensively. In 1660, David Teniers the Younger published his Theatrum Pictorium, in which he recorded most of the collection of Italian paintings that Archduke Leopold William of Austria had collected in the Coudenberg Palace in Brussels, appointed as governor of the Spanish Netherlands. There are several cycles of prints, some probably taken from the same engravings that were circulating. An example is the one engraved by Jan Sadeler I and printed by Jaques Callot, whose printed sheets show the subjects again in counterpoint compared to the engravings of Teniers, and therefore in the same direction as the paintings. Furthermore, there is the existence of other famous series of the Seasons, one kept at the Sforza Castle in Milan, one at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, one at the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola in Genoa, one at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Presumably, the painter of the painting in question had the opportunity to see and therefore to be inspired by paintings taken from the Viennese works or, in the workshop, one of those prints was owned. Carlotta Venegoni