Jacopo Bassano and his public1996
moralizing pictures in an age of reform, ca. 1535-1600
by Bernard Aikema
Widely Acknowledged as one of the first landscape and genre painters in Italy, Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1510-1592) was highly regarded during his career for his brilliant treatment of light and color and for his innovative rural themes. Although he can be viewed as a pioneer pointing the way to the Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century, this Venetian painter is less known today than many of his contemporaries.
In this book, Bernard Aikema uses a contextual approach to perform a much-needed iconological analysis of Bassano's painterly production. By tracing a remarkably consistent use of imagery grounded in a spiritual perspective, Aikema seeks to change our conception not only of Bassano's oeuvre, but also of the original function and development of genre and landscape painting...
