Gerolamo da Ponte (attributed) (Bassano 1566 - Venice 1621), Pastoral Scene

Gerolamo da Ponte (attributed) (Bassano 1566 - Venice 1621) Pastoral Scene Oil on panel, 44.5 x 36 cm     The Da Ponte family are widely known as Bassano, from the name of their city of origin, Bassano del Grappa: this conventional denomination was established by art criticism during the modern era. The Da Ponte family business was an ante-litteram family-run enterprise, active for about a century and a half. Started by Francesco the Elder in the very early years of the sixteenth century, it achieved great appreciation throughout northern Italy with the personality of Jacopo, from the second half of the fourth decade assisted by his brothers Giambattista and Gianfrancesco. After him, his sons Francesco the Younger, Giambattista, Leandro and Gerolamo will become interpreters of the family tradition. Jacopo's successors used to reprise the iconographic schemes and technical devices of the master, giving life to numerous versions of his most famous and commercially successful paintings. The painting presents the typical stylistic characteristics of the Bassano family but it is intriguing that, in some of the most illustrious monographs dedicated to the family of painters, first of all that of Edoardo Arslan, there is no record of a similar composition among the works of Jacopo. It is indeed known that the workshop was prolific in reiterating the tested paternal iconographies with minimal variations and that the same were in turn used by the pupils. The analysis of the canvas under examination therefore registers its own compositional autonomy and observing the drafts and the typology of the faces, we recognize the characteristic pictorial conduction of Gerolamo da Ponte, the youngest son of Jacopo who managed the important workshop with his brother Giambattista during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The last of Jacopo's sons, Gerolamo da Ponte was born in Bassano on June 3, 1566. A pupil and imitator of his father, he carried out an intense activity as a copyist. Already in 1580-81 he collaborated with Jacopo in the realization of the altarpiece with the Virgin and the saints Agatha and Apollonia, now in the Museum of Bassano. He demonstrated particular skill, using a free, disdainful, almost disordered brushstroke, distant from the "constructive" one of his father Jacopo, basing his chromatic range on the notes of violet, silvery gray, brown and olive-green. After his father's death, Gerolamo relied on Leandro, but his painting, which in his youth had reported significant peaks of originality, decayed into sterile formulas and excessive repetitiveness of the models. After 1595 he moved to Venice, where he married Zanetta Biava, while still remaining in contact with his native locality. The hand of Gerolamo can be recognized in several works of the Bassano school, such as the S. John the Evangelist in the Quadrato Salotto in Palazzo Ducale, a palette with three saints at Hampton Court and the Virgin with SS. Fortunato and Ermagora, now in the Museum of Bassano. The painting depicts a nocturnal pastoral scene with two human figures and a flock of sheep. In the foreground, on the left, a young shepherd in red clothes is intent on taking care of the sheep. On the right, a second, older shepherd, dressed in dark clothes and with a hat, leads a majestic bull with glittering horns to pasture. In the lower right section of the painting there is a refined passage of still life. The attention to detail, the realistic rendering of the figures and animals, and the skillful use of chiaroscuro are elements, found in this painting, which certainly distinguish the activity of the second generation of the Bassano workshop.