Jacopo Bassano and His Public: Moralizing Pictures in an Ages of Reform, ca. 1535-1600.

Bernard Aikema. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 12 color + 147 b/w pls. + xiv + 258 pp. n.p. ISBN 0-691-04395-7.

The true artistic stature of Jacopo Bassano, previously a somewhat neglected figure, was vividly revealed by the splendid monographic exhibition held in his native town of Bassano del Grappa and at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in 1992-1993. Although he spent his long and productive career in the provincial Veneto, far from the metropolis, his works show an unceasing inventiveness of subject-matter, style and technique that even his great Venetian contemporaries Tintoretto and Veronese could hardly match. As was proper, the main concerns of the exhibition catalogue were to define his chronology, to distinguish between autograph and studio productions, and to rehabilitate a number of unjustly underestimated pictures. But larger questions of function and meaning tended to be sidelined, and in particular the question central to any study of Bassano, of the relationship between the genre-like figures and settings of his pictures and their religious content. All the more reason, therefore, to welcome the present two books, as serious and detailed attempts to provide answers.

Aikema takes issue with a traditional interpretation of Bassano as essentially a genre painter who used religious subjects as a pretext for depicting the peasants and farm animals familiar to him in the rustic backwater where he lived. For the author, the painter was a moralist for whom the use of peasants provided the most effective means of conveying his message. Aikema is concerned less with public works such as altarpieces, which he sees as entirely conforming to Counter Reformation orthodoxy, as with pictures intended for domestic use, and hence better able to reflect the kind of more private, reflective Christianity associated with Evangelism.

Typical of Aikema's approach to such pictures is his interpretation of the Flight into Egypt in the Toledo Museum of Art, in which the Holy Family's journey is seen as symbolic of the ordinary Christian's pilgrimage of life, leading to salvation symbolised by the distant mountain. Aikema claims that this activity, virtuously conducted along a stony path, is placed in deliberate contrast to that of two peasants in the lusher middleground, busy with their own affairs and apparently oblivious of the Holy Family. Here and elsewhere Aikema insists that Bassano's peasants are conceived not as innocent, picturesque rustics, but as exemplars of godlessness and stupidity. Aikema's constant hunt for explicit, dialectical contrasts between virtue and vice in every detail of Bassano's pictures often seems somewhat forced; and particularly unconvincing is his reading in terms of moral turpitude of the entire cast of the lovely Parable of the Sower in the Thyssen Collection. On the other hand, Aikema is surely correct in accepting Michelangelo Muraro's identification of this picture as a parable, and not simply as a pastoral idyll; and equally, he is surely justified in his basic assumption that works of this kind are meant to convey a message consistent with the religious climate of the period. Even if one does not subscribe to all the author's conclusions, his book is important for the thought-provoking questions it raises, as well as for the rich information it provides on Bassano's patrons and the cultural context in which he lived and worked.

Berdini's study, which is the unrevised text of his Ph.D. dissertation, is more theoretical in character and methodologically more ambitious; it is also rather less reader-friendly. Particularly in the long introductory chapter, discussion of actual works of art often takes second place to abstract, sometimes repetitious argument on the relationship between image and text. Berdini's main theme is that traditional, Panofskian iconographical analysis demands too close a concordance between the image and a pre-existing text; and he argues instead that sixteenth-century painters in general, and Bassano in particular, invariably amplify any written source by a process that the author calls "visual exegesis." In other words, in visualising his text, the painter suggests meaning by drawing on his own more general reading and experience. While Berdini is at one with Aikema is seeing rustic genre as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, his interpretation of Bassano's religious message is rather more subtle, and is often more convincing. In the Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, for example (Houston, Blaffer Foundation), Aikema characteristically draws a contrast between the true piety exhibited by the sisters and the crass materialism represented by the fat man eating, the boy with a basket of fish, and the display of food in general. Berdini sees instead the genre elements (presumably including the fat man and the boy) as essential to a proper understanding of Christ's gentle admonition to Martha: her attentive hospitality is good, but it should not be pursued to the exclusion of spiritual matters. In this way, the circumstantially described, mundane aspects of the scene are not presented for condemnation, but they do invite the thoughtful beholder, like Martha, to transcend their limitations in his or her everyday life.

PETER HUMFREY University of St. Andrews