Jacopo Bassano Biography
Jacopo da Ponte, known as Jacopo Bassano (Bassano del Grappa, circa 1515 – Bassano del Grappa, 13 February 1592), was an Italian painter from the Republic of Venice, an exponent of Venetian painting. He was born in Bassano in 1515 to the painter Francesco dal Ponte, later known as il Vecchio, and his first wife Lucia Pizzardini. He initially trained with his father, a modest artist originally from Gallio and founder of the family. According to Ridolfi's story, he then moved to Venice to learn the secrets of the trade in the workshop of Bonifacio de' Pitati. Upon returning home he joined the family business, gradually taking on a leading role. In 1535 he created three large canvases for the public palace of Bassano, depicting Christ and the adulteress, The three children in the fiery furnace and Susanna and the elders, in which the master's influence is combined with a careful rendering of the naturalistic data and by Titian and Lorenzo Lotto. Between 1535 and 1540 he approached the plasticity of Pordenone. From this period are Samson and the Philistines, now in Dresden, and the Adoration of the Magi, now at Burghley House. The lack of traces of movements has led us to believe that he spent almost his entire life in Bassano. In 1541 the city council granted him exemption from taxes, and from this it appears that he was head of the family and that therefore his father Francesco was dead. From the 1940s he approached mannerist painting, especially that of Francesco Salviati; between 1540 and 1550 he executed the Martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria today in the Civic Museum of Bassano, the Beheading of the Baptist of Copenhagen, with sharp and tapered figures inserted in a rarefied scene, the Going to Calvary, where the landscape is taken from German engravings, the Nativity of Hampton Court and the Rest on the Flight into Egypt in Milan.
