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 colour 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 con-temporaries. 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 the importance of Bassano's oeuvre, but also of the original function and development of genre and landscape painting in Northern Italy as compared to that in The Netherlands. Aikema argues that Bassano developed an imagery that expressed itself in an antithetical mode of representation - in which a good Christian way of life is contrasted with a materialistic concept of human conduct.
The author challenges the common belief that Bassano switched to rural settings and genre painting late in life
- ISBN10 0691043957
- ISBN13 9780691043951
- Publish Date 25 August 1996
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 January 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 280
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/5825.html