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

trans. Andrew P. McCormick

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 257 pp.; 12 color ills., 147 b/w. $95.00

Wondering about the subtitle of Charles E. Cohen's book, I asked two distinguished linguists at Rutgers, Jane Grimshaw and Alan Prince, to explain the difference between "dialect" and "language." His one-word answer: "politics." Her explication of this terse reply: an allusion to Max Weinreich's definition of language as dialect with an army and a navy - a definition that describes equally well the difference between Renaissance Venice and its mainland territories, Bassano and Pordenone.(1) Today's Italian is of course the modernized Tuscan dialect of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Venetian dialect, veneziano or venessian, once the language of a great empire, is now close to extinction.

Natives of Pordenone in Friuli or Friul speak and spoke yet another dialect or language, friulan, incomprehensible to modern Italian ears outside the region. I remember a filmed advertisement for a local digestivo ("sciniappa") in friulan with subtitles written in Italian. Friulan was the language of Giovanni Antonio Sacchis, called Pordenone, as distinct from the languages of Venice and of Tuscany as his art is different from theirs. At least, that is the implication of Charles Cohen's subtitle, the linguistic metaphor implying the visual distinction between the friulan painter and his Venetian and Central Italian contemporaries.(2) Pordenone's dialect or his "provincialism" (vol. 1, p. xiii) is central for Cohen's interpretation, describing the artist's admittedly retardataire beginnings in the countryside and his eventually transcending those origins in the city, namely, Venice, where, Cohen argues, Pordenone came to rival Titian himself (vol. 1, p. 406).

Linguistic metaphors aside, Cohen's two-volume book is essentially "old-fashioned" or traditional art history, a monograph and catalogue primarily concerned with attribution, dating, and stylistic influence - fundamental problems, especially in dealing with a comparatively little-known master. And given his importance, Pordenone has not quite received his due, as Cohen rightly protests, notwithstanding a major exhibition in 1984, several monographs and specialized studies, mostly in Italian, and previous publications by Cohen himself.(3)

Cohen begins his study of the artist with a discussion of his birthplace. Today, Pordenone is a rich city known for the manufacture of refrigerators and other household appliances; in the 16th century, it was impoverished and known for so little that the Venetians were willing to cede it to one of their condottieri. The following eight chapters of volume 1 treat the artist's life and works in chronological order. Collaborative works are relegated to an appendix. Volume 2 offers 85 catalogue entries of autograph and collaborative works (including fresco cycles), likewise arranged in chronological order. Cohen also includes a catalogue of lost works and a chronology of Pordenone's career. The two volumes are splendidly illustrated with more than 800 photographs, including decorative complexes, works in situ, and related drawings.

Born ca. 1483-84 and documented as a master in 1504, Pordenone showed little if any promise of artistic greatness early in his career (vol. 1, p. 40). His first known work is cited as convincing evidence of this judgment: the fresco triptych in Valeriano, signed and dated 1506 (pls. 4-7), is criticized by Cohen for its "retardataire, Quattrocento, provincial style" (vol. 1, p. 3). Thus, perhaps inevitably, at the beginning of considering Pordenone's career, the author and the reader are faced with the problematics of artistic quality and taste. If there is a province, there must be a center; if some artists are retardataire, others are presumably inventive and forward-looking - and, by implication, greater than their country cousins. Recognizing the difficulties inherent in his terminology, Cohen explains that "provincial" is not necessarily meant to be pejorative (vol. 1, p. 4); he uses "the term in a neutral sense to refer to works that are strongly conditioned by the factors of patronage, culture, iconography and style that prevail in the provincial environment for which it was created" (vol. 1, p. 5). Despite these declarations, however, when the problem of provincialism reappears in the book from time to time, it is accompanied by Cohen's assertions of Pordenone's having surpassed his origins as he responds to various "central" masters. To be sure, provincials, such as Pordenone, may influence cosmopolitans, such as Titian (vol. 1, p. 6). But I disagree with Cohen when he describes greater openness to new ideas as a strength of provincial artists (vol. 1, p. 7). Does Cohen really mean to suggest that Pordenone was more receptive to new ideas than such urbanites as Titian and Michelangelo, or, to invoke an earlier generation, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo? (Of these masters, only Bellini was city-born, but all were trained in town, that is, in Florence or Venice.)

Cohen recounts how Pordenone began his career as a follower and very likely a student of Gianfrancesco da Tolmezzo, who died in 1511 (vol. 1, pp. 16, 21, 45-48). Pordenone was also influenced in his early years by Alvise Vivarini and other painters from Murano and by Bartolomeo Montagna, whose impact seems particularly conspicuous to me in such works as the Valeriano triptych, "a wholly quattrocentesque provincial work," as Cohen reminds us (vol. 1, p. 49). Pordenone stayed in this rural rut until the end of the first decade. Cohen sees the frescoes for S. Lorenzo at Vacile as a watershed, recognizing a "significant change" between the still conservative paintings of the vault, which he dates within "a few years" of 1506, and the more monumental compositions on the walls, "around 1511" (vol. 1, p. 68). Pordenone's stylistic evolution is explained in relation to a series of possible "influences," including ancient art and such contemporary masters as Signorelli, Mantegna, and the Venetians Bellini, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titian (vol. 1, pp. 78-79, 101).(4)

Pordenone, or at least his art, first came into direct contact with Titian - or his art - in 1520, in the Malchiostro Chapel of the Annunciation in Treviso Cathedral. Pordenone supplied the chapel's fresco decoration, largely destroyed by bombing in World War II (vol. 1, pp. 141, 163 n. 29; vol. 2, pp. 572-78, cat. 32). Titian provided the altarpiece, the Annunciation, which includes the patron's portrait in the background (vol. 1, p. 144). In the cupola, Pordenone represented God the Father and his strangely wingless putti swirling around the lower half of the dome and threatening, in Cohen's words, to "impinge upon the observers' space and thus involve them in the painting" (vol. 1, p. 146). In fact, "the threat" is neatly contained by the fictive balustrade of the dome, which neither the figures nor their clouds interrupt (pl. 193).

Following John Shearman and Juergen Schulz, Cohen sees God the Father in the cupola "as actively participating in, and iconographically completing, the Annunciation in Titian's altarpiece," which does not include the Father (vol. 1, pp. 146, 147). Such "cross-space references and illusionism" remind Cohen of Raphael's plans for the Chigi Chapel of S. Maria del Popolo, where God in the dome is likewise related to the Virgin in the Assumption - "the first entirely consistent cross-spatial visual and iconographic connection" (vol. 1, pp. 147, 148). In fact, the connection is anticipated by another Roman monument, Filippino Lippi's Caraffa Chapel in S. Maria sopra Minerva (1488-93), where the altarpiece and surrounding frescoes are similarly related both spatially and iconographically.(5) Closer to home, in Venice, Pordenone might have found precedents for spatial and thematic relations in the juxtaposition of altarpieces by Bellini (1513) and Tullio Lombardo (ca. 1499-1502) in S. Giovanni Crisostomo or in the nave of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where Titian's Assunta (1516-18) is similarly related to the triumphal arch of the choir screen.(6) Whether Pordenone had Venetian or Roman precedents in mind for spatial and thematic references, however, surely his most specific Roman quotation in Treviso is God the Father, derived from Michelangelo's figures of God in the Sistina (Cohen says "probably inspired by a combination of various depicions in the Sistine Ceiling," vol. 1, p. 149, but I think he is unnecessarily cautious here).

One might have expected that Pordenone's work in Treviso would have led to commissions in Venice, but he was destined to spend the next few years in Cremona and in other small cities (vol. 1, pp. 169-221 for Cremona, pp. 222-59, for other provincial projects). When Pordenone finally made it to the Big V, in 1528 or perhaps even a year earlier (vol. 1, p. 261), he immediately entered into competition with Titian, his erstwhile "partner" from the Malchiostro Chapel. In Treviso their competition was de facto, that is, implicit in the immediate juxtaposition of their works. But now, it became explicit, as they competed for the commission of the altarpiece for the chapel of the confraternity of St. Peter Martyr in SS. Giovanni e Paolo, the principal Dominican church of Venice. To be sure, this competition "is not. . . strictly documented" (vol. 1, p. 260), although 17th-century authors mention the contest and Pordenone's participation. A drawing in the Uffizi (pl. 338) may be Pordenone's "entry piece," its central group based on Titian's fresco of the Miracle of the Jealous Husband in Padua, as Hans Tietze suggested (vol. 1, pp. 260, 316 n. 14). In any case, Titian won the confraternity's commission for the Martyrdom of Saint Peter Martyr. Considered by contemporaries one of Titian's greatest, the Peter Martyr was destroyed by fire in the 19th century.(7)

As for Pordenone, he found employment elsewhere in Venice: on May 9, 1528, he contracted to paint the frescoes in the choir of the church of S. Rocco (vol. 1, p. 261). Cohen speculates that Pordenone may have received this commission because of his "by now great reputation as a frescante and the fact that the indigenous Venetian tradition of fresco painting was weak" (vol. 1, p. 265), but I think the explanation may lie elsewhere. After all, as Cohen and Pordenone himself have just reminded us, Titian had begun his career as a fresco painter in Padua, and before that in Venice, for the Fondaco dei Tedeschi; he returned to fresco in 1523 for Doge Andrea Gritti's commissions in the Ducal Palace, including the giant St. Christopher. Surely the brothers of the confraternity of S. Rocco knew Titian's "reputation as a frescante" but chose Pordenone for their commission because they were pleased with the armadio doors he had completed for them in 1527. Indeed, they should have been pleased with these magnificent doors, with their enormous figures of Sts. Martin and Christopher flanked by worshipers, described by Cohen as one of "Pordenone's most forceful works and one of his few completely successful attempts to adjust his style to the Venetian ambience that are preserved to us" (vol. 1, p. 269). In particular, Cohen notes a relation with Titian's St. Christopher fresco and other works of the earlier 1520s, including the St. Roch woodcut, but adds that Pordenone's armadio saints also find precedents in his own oeuvre (it seems to me that Pordenone's Christopher is directly inspired by Titian's print).

After these auspicious beginnings in Venice, Pordenone produced a much more modest work, the fresco cupola of S. Giovanni Elemosinario attributed to him first by Marco Boschini in the 17th century, whitewashed in the 18th, and rediscovered in the 1980s. Cohen is correct, I think, to suggest that the work is "certainly not entirely autograph," a skepticism he shares with Caterina Furlan, the leading Italian scholar of Pordenone (vol. 1, pp. 274, 318 n. 43). One may wonder why the master would delegate so much of this important commission to assistants. The patron here was in fact the doge himself, Andrea Gritti, who was also an enthusiastic client of Titian's in these years, as we have seen. Cohen suggests that "one possibility that accounts for the apparent unevenness of the frescoes is that Pordenone began the project before he left Venice at the end of the decade, and that it was mostly painted by others before he returned to Venice in 1532" (vol. 1, p. 274). If that is what Pordenone did, it would seem ill-advised, given the patronage - but also consistent with his increasing use of assistants in the 1530s, in particular his son-in-law Pomponio Amalteo (vol. 1, pp. 364-66). Amalteo's works look like an evolutionary throwback to Pordenone's early days in Friuli, employing a style that evidently still appealed to provincial customers. In any case, given the mediocrity of the S. Giovanni Elemosinario frescoes, it is hard to agree with Cohen about their importance for Pordenone's venetian future (vol. 1, p. 275). If Pordenone later succeeded in Venice, it was despite - not because of - these paintings.

When Pordenone returned to the city in 1532, he worked (again?) in. S. Giovanni Elemosinario, painting an altarpiece for the Corrieri Chapel, and perhaps also a fresco of the saint in the apse of this church (a lost work mentioned in 17th-century sources). From this date until his transfer to Ferrara in 1538, Pordenone mostly divided his time between venice and his native Friuli, with sojourns in Genoa and Piacenza. His altarpiece of B. Lorenzo Giustinian (or Giustiniani) was probably painted at the beginning of this period of Venetian residency (vol. 1, p. 332). Now in the Accademia, the painting was commissioned for the Renier family chapel in the church of the Madonna dell'Orto, "one of the earliest altars dedicated to" Giustiniani, according to Cohen, who notes that the "cult was encouraged almost immediately after his death (1456), although it was only sanctioned by Clement VII in 1524 and he was not canonized until 1690" (vol. 1, p. 332). Cohen adds that the cult "seems to have been encouraged by the state for political reasons" (vol. 1, p. 333). This was undoubtedly the case, and indeed consistent with the use of images both to promote canonization and in canonization proceedings (if he's represented as a saint, and worshipers venerate his image, why then, he must be a saint, and this is what he looked like).(8) The relation between such images and canonization accounts for Pordenone's conspicuous recollections of the Lorenzo Giustinian signed and dated by Gentile Bellini in 1465 - only nine years after Giustinian's death - a canvas likewise painted for the Madonna dell'Orto, which must have been a principal early locus of the cult.(9) While Cohen recognizes Pordenone's debt to Bellini's "iconographic tradition" (vol. 1, p. 379 n. 12), he does not fully explain that in this case, the artistic borrowing was obligatory, precisely because of the role of images in establishing a saint's cult. These kinds of paintings of saints avant la lettre are tantamount to campaign posters - and in the case of this Venetian protagonist, the campaign was equally political and religious.

Reconstructing the last four years of Pordenone's life, Cohen maintains that the artist received significant public commissions (most of them now lost) and enjoyed the patronage of such nobles as Doge Gritti and the friendship of such men of letters as Lodovico Dolce - better known as Titian's champion - and Pietro Aretino - better known for many other things, including scurrilous letters, pornography, and his intimate friendship with Titian. Even so, Cohen makes a convincing case for Aretino's and especially Dolce's support of Pordenone (vol. 1, pp. 416-17), at the same time suggesting that "there may have been some effort by Titian partisans after Pordenone's death to minimize his role" (vol. 1, p. 391). This may well be the case, and if so, certainly not the only case of Renaissance "spin control." But perhaps Cohen exaggerates when he claims that Pordenone threatened "in some ways to supplant Titian" (vol. 1, p. 406).(10)

Cohen supports his argument with reference to Pordenone's prestigious public commissions in Venice, including works in the Ducal Palace, concluding "that Pordenone was a major rival of Titian and that he must have been fostered by an important faction in the political and cultural elite of Venice" (vol. 1, p. 415). Cohen himself acknowledges, however, that there is "little evidence that he [Pordenone] had a substantial practice as an easel painter" (vol. 1, p. 407), whereas Titian was unquestionably one of the greatest "easel painters" of Western art. Even readers who suspect that with this assertion I am merely substituting my hero for Cohen's, or my taste for his, cannot argue with the fact that Titian - unlike Pordenone, and indeed unlike every other 16th-century master - had an international career, a steady stream of commissions from the greatest princely and ecclesiastical patrons of Italy and Europe. Pordenone's success in obtaining public commissions in Venice must be understood in part in relation to the fact that Titian had considerable demands on his time. In any case, some patrons would have preferred other masters to Titian (de gustibus. . .). But to put Pordenone's Venetian success in context, we should remember that before him, Sebastiano del Piombo (not to mention Giorgione and old Giovanni Bellini) could certainly have been considered a "threat" to Titian; and after Pordenone, the younger masters Tintoretto and Veronese also took their own considerable pieces of the Venetian pie. But none of these men had a career comparable to Titian's. This is not to say that their artistic achievement is less than his: it is rather an assertion of Titian's unparalleled commercial and social success throughout Europe.

Pordenone was indeed at work in the Ducal Palace in 1535 - but this does not mean that Titian was being "supplanted" (vol. 1, p. 407). After all, there had always been more than one master working on the palace decoration, so far as we can tell from documents and other sources dating back to the 14th century. Moreover, as Cohen reminds us, Titian had been particularly dilatory about fulfilling his obligations in the palace, and this too, together with Venetian appreciation of Pordenone's art, must be taken into account in considering the latter's commission in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio (vol. 1, pp. 411-13). Pordenone never executed this work, however. He had not had time to begin the mural before he was called to Ferrara in December 1538, where he died a month later (January 1539).

Concerning Pordenone's Venetian commissions, Cohen coincidentally raises some fascinating questions about the relationships of painters and patrons, about reading between the lines of 16th-century sources, and about rivalry - rivalry not only among artists but also among patrons. Discussing Pordenone's painted friezes of the Sala della Libreria in the Ducal Palace, lost but known from copies and drawings, Cohen cites Vasari's comment that the commission came through the good graces of Jacopo Soranzo, a procurator of S. Marco (vol. 1, pp. 415, 420, 450 n. 12). Vasari's likely source for this and probably for most of his information about Venice was Titian, very much alive in 1541-42 when Vasari visited the city, whereas Pordenone was dead and buried in Ferrara. Remembering this, we may wonder whether Titian repeated the story to explain away Pordenone's success in terms of his patron's support rather than in terms of his artistic skill. If Vasari mentions competition between Pordenone and Titian in the biographies of each master, perhaps the point (Titian's point?) was to remind the viewer that the Venetian had overcome - or at least outlived - yet another challenger. Then too we may ask about Titian's relationship with Soranzo. Presumably they knew each other or of each other, given their involvement in the palace decoration, but I do not know of any work painted by Titian for the procurator. Rereading Vasari, then, and considering the probable source for his assertion about Soranzo's support of Pordenone, I wonder whether Titian meant not only to disparage his rival but indirectly to condemn Pordenone's patron as well. All of this may sound very convoluted, but would not, I think, be beyond Titian or uncharacteristic of him.

Another puzzle about patronage: "if we can take at face value the seventeenth-century report that Pordenone painted the portrait of . . . Benedetto Pesaro . . . and of his son Girolamo Pesaro, . . . we have further evidence of his access to an extremely rarefied circle of patronage" (vol. 1, p. 415). If this is true - and it is admittedly "iffy" - we would also then have evidence of Pordenone's patronage by one of Bellini's clients (Benedetto Pesaro), whose cousin and great rival, Jacopo Pesaro, bishop of Paphos, had been one of Titian's first great Venetian patrician patrons. The bishop commissioned two works from Titian, the votive picture now in Antwerp and the Pesaro altarpiece still in situ in the Frari. If the 17th-century source adduced by Cohen is accurate, Benedetto's and Girolamo's commissions to Pordenone might suggest that Titian was still sullied in these Pesaro eyes by his association with Jacopo a decade after completing the bishop's altarpiece in 1526.

These musings must remain speculative, but there is no uncertainty regarding the Annunciation, the high altarpiece of S. Maria degli Angeli in Murano and "the last major painting by Pordenone for which we have both convincing evidence of the date and an extant image" (vol. 1, p. 433), completed ca. 1537-38. Pordenone's painting was commissioned when the nuns of S. Maria rejected the Annunciation by Titian because his price tag of 500 scudi was too high. Acting on the advice of Aretino, the expert par excellence in Renaissance gift-giving and -receiving (or -extorting), Titian sent the Annunciation to Empress Isabella, consort of his most august patron, Charles V. Charles had knighted Titian in 1533, calling him "his Apelles," and now the emperor rewarded him for his gift with the extravagant sum of 2,000 scudi. ("Now" was shortly before November 9, 1538, the date of Aretino's letter congratulating Titian for his success.) These facts are certain, but how are we to interpret them? Cohen concludes that, "like several other works in this period, it" - that is, Pordenone's Annunciation - "was produced in deliberately competitive circumstances with a work by Titian" (vol. 1, p. 433). Implying that Pordenone put himself forward as an alternative to Titian, Cohen sees Pordenone's altarpiece as some kind of victory over the Venetian: "Not only did Pordenone undercut Titian's price, but he may have adapted parts of his composition. . . " (vol. 1, p. 434). It seems to me, however, that this episode, which is recounted by Vasari and by Aretino (in the letter of November 9), is in fact insulting to Pordenone. "Undercutting the Venetian's price," Pordenone in effect set himself up as a bargain-basement substitute, a "poor man's" - or "poor nun's" - Titian. Nor do the poor nuns come off very well: pinching their crummy 500 scudi, they have lost the chance to have an altarpiece that was worth four times that sum to the Holy Roman Emperor himself. Reading this story, once again one must remember the source.

Cohen closes the monographic or narrative volume of his study on a speculative note. Recognizing "in at least part of Pordenone's last work, a real crisis of expression and perhaps of cultural identity," Cohen acknowledges that "it is difficult to say how or if he might have worked this out" (vol. 1, p. 440). Perhaps, Cohen postulates, "Increased Mannerist tendencies . . . combined with considerable . . . success with secular subject matter, might have led to an expanded dimension for his career in courtly settings . . . " (vol. 1, pp. 440-41). "At any rate," Cohen concludes, "one does feel that this extremely self-conscious, pliable, yet very individualistic artist . . . would somehow come to terms with these new Maniera currents and with his own cultural disequilibrium" (vol. 1, p. 441).

Volume 2 of Cohen's book is an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting catalogue of Pordenone's oeuvre. The author himself forewarns us: "I have selectively, but more extensively than is usual, summarized the discussion of each painting under the 'sources and scholarship' section" (vol. 2, p. 507). It may seem perverse that a reader is not entirely grateful for such authorial largesse, but it is precisely the verbosity of these sections that encumbers the catalogue, swamping Cohen's new ideas and perhaps even preventing him from exploring problems of interpretation. Ancient assertions long since disproved by recent scholarship are repeated only to be denied (again), and discredited critical judgments or attributions are reiterated only to be supplanted by Cohen's conclusions. Minutiae of old arguments are rarely worth repeating and put book and reader at risk of missing the forest for the leaves. Cohen's seemingly encyclopedic completeness in the catalogue entries is all the more unnecessary precisely because the reader trusts his judgment and his scholarship and expects him (or an editor armed with blue pencils) to separate wheat from chaff. Historiography is a wonderful thing - but a little historiography can go a long way to suggest an artist's fortuna critica, especially when treated incisively instead of inclusively.

Discussing a detached fresco in the museum of Conegliano, Mary Magdalen and St. Ubaldo (?), St. Augustine (?), and St. Catherine, for example, Cohen repeats old misinformation only to discard it: "Venturi (1928) treated the fresco with works of the early 1520s. . . . Schwarzweller (1935) saw the figure of St. Catherine as the highpoint of Pordenone's Venetian period . . .," whereas thanks to recently discovered documentary evidence, we now know it to have been painted in 1514 (vol. 2, p. 525, cat. 11).

Discussing the "Decoration of the Immaculate Conception Chapel and Part of the Pallavicino Mortuary Chapel" in SS. Annunziata in Cortemaggiore, after reassuring us that the attribution "has never been challenged," Cohen continues: "there have been various suggestions about their dating, including c. 1526-27 (Schwarzweller), the late 1520s (Fiocco), c. 1529 (Cohen), and the mid-1530s (Venturi) . . . . the most likely date of execution seems to be in the late 1520s, perhaps in the months just preceding his agreement to paint in S. M. di Campagna in Piacenza (15 February 1530)" (vol. 2, p. 634), Thus Cohen is agreeing with Cohen - that is, his own earlier publication of the paintings - and splitting hairs with Fiocco.

This chapel of the Immaculate Conception in Cortemaggiore culminates in Pordenone's spectacular cupola with God the Father hurtling through space with a company of wingless children (larger than putti) who anticipate his entry into our space by overlapping the fictive cornice of the dome. Clouds also penetrate our space, concealing the fictive gold-ground mosaics that enclose the cupola's illusionistic opening to the sky. Describing the painting, Cohen enumerates "major recognizable motifs in this decoration. . .: (1) symmetrical pairs of horn-blowing satyrs, putti and hybrid . . . figures . . .; (2) a Medusa head . . . " and so on (vol. 2, p. 631). He does not mention that the "angels" have no wings, and, more important, he does not explain that the Cortemaggiore cupola is an emendation of that painted eight or nine years earlier in the Malchiostro Chapel in Treviso. Given the fact that one is almost a replica of the other, it is not enough to say that in Cortemaggiore, "Pordenone has . . . achieved a totality of iconographical and illusionistic unity which goes well beyond the Treviso Duomo frescoes" (vol. 1, p. 282; see also pp. 53, 284, and vol. 2, p. 633) or that "In . . . Cortemaggiore . . . the unity and illusion of the Treviso complex . . . are carried to a logical extreme" (vol. 1, p. 152).

The iconographic analysis here seems problematic to me. "What is represented," Cohen explains, ". . . is the predestined pure soul of Mary. . . descending from God the Father in the vault towards St. Anne" in the altarpiece (vol. 1, p. 280), the Descent of Mary's Immaculate Soul to St. Anne and the Four Fathers of the Latin Church, now in the Capodimonte (pls. 390-93). SS. Annunziata is a Franciscan church, and, as Cohen reminds us, belief in the Immaculate Conception was "especially supported by the Franciscans" (vol. 1, p. 281).(11) Following Mirella Levi d'Ancona's study published in 1957, Cohen explains that the chapel's altarpiece is a type of the Immaculate Conception representing not the Virgin herself but St. Anne," perhaps already pregnant" as "the already purified soul of Mary enters" her womb (vol. 2, p. 638). Unfortunately, Cohen's plate 390 is cropped and the reader must consult plate 393 for the small robed figure identified as Mary's immaculate soul flying toward St. Anne. Cohen is surely correct to identify the matronly and double-chinned woman as Anne and not her daughter (vol. 2, p. 637). But in suggesting that Anne is "perhaps already pregnant," Cohen skates on very thin theological ice. If Anne is already with child, then what Pordenone has represented would be more suited to a Dominican than to a Franciscan venue. Neither order and no Catholic doubted the purity of the Madonna. Their argument concerned rather the character of her conception or generation. Mary must be a human being, so that her Son may be human and therefore capable of dying for the salvation of humankind. And in order to be a human being, Mary must have been conceived in the customary human way. That being the case, however, like all human beings, Mary would also be descended from Adam and Eve, hence stained with Original Sin. According to the Dominicans and others, though conceived in this way, Mary was purified of the stain in her mother's womb. The Franciscans, on the contrary, while not denying Mary's humanity, argued that she was imagined by God before time itself - before Adam and Eve - and thus conceived without the stain of Original Sin, that is, Immaculate. If Pordenone's altarpiece, painted for a Franciscan church, represents the Immaculate Conception, then St. Anne should not be pregnant, despite her swelling breasts and stomach, because the "already purified soul of Mary" is not yet within her mother's womb. Perhaps Pordenone represented Anne in this way to anticipate her pregnancy? Or perhaps he merely added a few pounds to her figure to characterize her as an older matron, not to be confused with her daughter, whom she resembles in other works by Pordenone.

Jacopo dal Ponte, called Bassano (ca. 1510-1592), was just beginning his career as Pordenone's was coming to a premature end. As Pordenone has been underappreciated, according to Cohen, so too Bassano, according to Bernard Aikema in Jacopo Bassano and His Public (pp. 3-6). Like Cohen, Aikema places part of the blame for this neglect on the artist's "provincialism" and also considers the relation between Bassano and the center, but this problem is of peripheral importance to his book. Unlike Cohen's Pordenone, Aikema's Bassano is not an inclusive monograph and catalogue but rather a study of Bassano's sacred pictures and how his "visual language met the demand for a particular type of devotionalia" (p. 6). More precisely, Aikema is concerned with Bassano's visualization of "tepidity," as reformers called the lack of religious zeal, which leads all too easily to Acedia, Sloth, one of the Seven Deadlies. Aikema sees tepidity and Sloth as leitmotifs of Bassano's sacred paintings, imaged in such naturalistic (dis)guises as peasants, overweight hostelers, and even drowsy dogs. Bassano's naturalism in depicting these figures from daily life "is not an end in and of itself," Aikema argues, "but rather a means to communicate a specific message to a specific audience" (p. 6); "naturalism was never simply employed to purely aesthetic ends, but was always an element intended to clarify the significance of a given image" (p. 59).(12)

Aikema's first example of such communicative naturalism is the innkeeper in Bassano's Supper at Emmaus for the high altar of Cittadella Cathedral, for which the artist received final payment in 1538 (p. 7). Standing in the left foreground and looking toward Christ, the innkeeper evidently does not understand the miracle that he witnesses: "With his arms folded behind him comfortably so that his well-filled belly is all the more conspicuous, he is the very image of spiritual listlessness, of indolence. As such he embodies the danger of tepidity: having lapsed into sloth, or acedia, he is heedless of the Divinity beside him" (p. 10). Aikema adds that the innkeeper's sinfulness is "further clarified" by his wearing shoes while the disciples are barefoot (p. 11). Bare feet may indeed signal saintliness or piety - but shoes do not necessarily signify wickedness or moral failing. Although disciples in "biblical" garb are apt to be barefoot, innkeepers in 16th-century dress are just as likely to be shod. But if bare feet indeed signal awareness of Christ's resurrection in the Supper at Emmaus, the innkeeper should keep his shoes on, precisely to confirm his ignorance of this event which has not yet been revealed even to the Apostles themselves. That is to say, the innkeeper cannot know of the miracle at this time, and his ignorance (and his shoes) cannot be taken as proof of sinfulness. According to the biblical text, only the two disciples who share Christ's meal recognize him at this moment - and not before. While the two were walking toward Emmaus, "Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him" (Luke 24: 15-16). When they arrived at Emmaus late in the day, the disciples persuaded the stranger to join them for the evening meal: "When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him . . . " (Luke 24: 30-31).

This is the moment that Bassano has represented in a straightforward way, expressing the disciples' surprise through their poses and gestures. A moment later, Christ will vanish, and they will return to Jerusalem with their joyous news and will learn that meanwhile the Lord has also appeared to St. Peter. While they were talking, Christ appeared again to all of them. At first, the Apostles "were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit" (Luke 24: 36-37). Christ reassured them, asked for food, confirmed his resurrection in fulfillment of the prophecies, and while blessing the Apostles, "parted from them" (Luke 24: 50). In other words, the disciples at Emmaus did not know Christ until he opened their eyes, and even his Apostles were uncertain that the being before them was truly Christ and not an apparition until he reassured them. Indeed, initial uncertainty and even inability to recognize the Resurrected Savior characterize every biblical account of his appearances to his followers; and nowhere in the Bible does he appear to anyone but his followers, individuals who are named or otherwise identified as disciples. Is it fair, then, to accuse the innkeeper at Emmaus of tepidity or Sloth for his failure to recognize the Lord? Aikema's condemnation of the man seems unjust given the circumstances.

While censuring the innkeeper, Aikema praises the maidservant in the background of Bassano's Supper at Emmaus as the "vigilant" antithesis of the presumably tepid innkeeper: "Having realized a miracle is taking place she brusquely draws aside the kitchen curtain and beholds Christ" (p. 10). This praise seems as unwarranted to me as the blame assigned to the innkeeper. Perhaps the servant senses some commotion, but if she understands the miracle, then she must be understood as sharing honors with St. Mary Magdalene as the first woman to recognize the Risen Savior.(13) Pulling aside that curtain (an action that does not look "brusque" to me), the maid reveals a colleague at work preparing a meal - this is an inn, after all, and there are three customers at table. These figures are not, I think, necessarily good or evil or endowed with specific moral significance, any more than the cat, "a traditional emblem of the devil," according to Aikema, or the sleeping dog, here considered "a symbol of indifference" (p. 10). The primary function of these figures, human and animal, is to set the stage, to embellish the scene of the Supper at Emmaus in such a way that the 16th-century beholder may associate the miracle with his or her experience.

Aikema himself makes this point in another context, relating the representation of "poignant details" in Passion scenes, for example, to late medieval "meditation practices that appeal to the emotions" (p. 59). In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, according to Aikema, "Nature came to be depicted with such faithfulness . . . because a spiritual convention that developed in the devotional literature called their [people's] attention to everyday detail" (p. 59). After citing several religious texts, Aikema concludes that "The more true to life the image we call to mind, the more effectively it will guide us in the rest of the spiritual process" (p. 60). I agree with Aikema but would add that in Italy these developments are related to and perhaps determined by Franciscan spirituality. It is worth remembering that the first known depiction of the Crucified Christ as dead or dying on the cross, rather than alive and seemingly triumphant, was likely a Franciscan commission, and that emphasis on the Savior's vulnerability, both on the Cross and as a helpless infant, was characteristic of Franciscan (indeed, of St. Francis's) spirituality.(14) I sometimes disagree with Aikema, however, when he offers more specific iconographic interpretations of various everyday details and characters, including the innkeeper at Emmaus.

Some years ago, in "'Highlands' in the Lowlands," Millard Meiss discussed these kinds of indifferent bystanders in sacred paintings.(15) The essay is particularly germane here, because Aikema frequently invokes Netherlandish prototypes in his analyses of Bassano's imagery. Likewise crediting Northerners for the invention of the motif that concerned him in "Highlands," Meiss argued that the kinds of small figures who stroll or doze or ride or hunt in background landscapes may be unaware of - or, if aware, uninterested in - the sacred event in the foreground. Their uninterest is not necessarily a spiritual failing, however, but rather the means whereby the artist situates the sacred event in time and space, that is, in history. Perhaps Meiss had read W. H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," a poem that seems to describe Bassano while discussing Brueghel:

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the poughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure. . . .(16)

Bassano's Flight into Egypt in the Toledo Museum of Art, dated ca. 1542 by Aikema (p. 17), may be explained by Meiss's analysis or by Auden's poetry. Aikema sees it rather differently. Here, as in Bassano's earlier depiction of the subject (1532-37) in the Museo Civico of Bassano,(17) Aikema finds numerous symbolic references in the landscape that signify the Holy Family's "'separatione' from the material world" (p. 17). They are accompanied by three barefoot shepherds in each case, and St. Joseph is likewise shoeless in Toledo though he wears sandals in Bassano. The shepherd at the left in the Toledo canvas has a flask, "indicating that he is a pious pilgrim" (p. 18). In the far distance, a peasant couple walks in the same direction as the Holy Family, the man with a long stick, the woman carrying a goose: "Curiously, neither figure takes the slightest notion of the refugees" (p. 19). Their attributes signify that these two are on their way to market, and this fact, in addition to their ignoring the Holy Family, indicates that "the peasants stand for the godless" (p. 19). Other figures in the distance are likewise characterized as ungodly, and Bassano's contemporaries would have understood them as such, according to Aikema: "any reference to rustic or rural life would have elicited anything from laughter to loathing on the part of prosperous sixteenth-century urbanites" (p. 20). To be sure, there was another, more positive opinion of country life, represented in bucolic poetry and reified in villas and pastoral paintings, and, as Aikema reminds us, the Paduan author Ruzante (Angelo Beolco, ca. 1502-1542) "openly sided with the peasants" (p. 21). Nonetheless, Aikema considers that negative sentiments toward the peasantry prevailed in north Italy, and the peasant who sells his goods at market was considered particularly loathsome. Aikema concludes that the market-bound peasants in the Toledo Flight into Egypt "symbolize the uomo carnal. At the same time . . . the pious shepherds who accompany the Holy Family embody sancta rusticitas" (p. 23).

Christ reveals himself to two disciples at Emmaus, but according to the Gospel of St. Luke, no one else yet knows of the Resurrection; peasants go to market along the same road that leads the Holy Family into Egypt, but pay them no heed: life goes on. Of course, the beholder knows that life does not in fact go on as before; he or she realizes what is not known by (or knowable to) the oblivious witnesses within the painting. In this way, among others, the artist invites the viewer to identify with the experience of the sacred beings, to empathize and to share in the event, and thus to distinguish him- or herself from the indifferent (fictive) bystanders. Alternatively, the artist may offer an exemplar of empathic identification with the sacred beings, and in these cases, the actual beholder is encouraged to emulate this exemplary behavior.

Neither invitation and neither type of subsidiary figure - engaged or indifferent - is new to Bassano. The inattentive bystander seems to have wandered into Italian art from the north, as Meiss suggested; but the empathetic beholder may have been a Franciscan conception and thus native to Italy. Certainly the Friars Minor had long endorsed the conception of the deeply sympathetic beholder, urging the worshiper of a Nativity scene to imagine helping the Virgin Mary tend her Infant, and so on, an identification of oneself with the sacred beings and events that involves a suppression or merging of one's ego with the sacred. Francis himself had provided prototypical examples of empathic piety with his compassionate response to images of Christ, and Christ had responded in turn with miracles confirming the efficacy of such devotion - addressing the saint as he worshiped before the Cross of S. Damiano, for example, or seeming to come to life in the saint's arms as he embraced the doll representing the Child in the creche of Greccio. Numerous Franciscan texts exhort the faithful reader to emulate the saint's devotion, including his biographies and the Meditations on the Life of Christ.(18) These are the kinds of writings that set the stage for the 16th-century devotional literature cited by Aikema, including Pietro Contarini's Christologos peregrinorum and Ludolph of Saxony's life of Christ (pp. 24-25).

Such pious devotion is to be devoutly wished, and indifference, or tepidity, to be shunned, as Aikema reminds us. It is easy enough for the artist to visualize and hence for the viewer to recognize piety in a sacred image, thanks in large part to a familiar vocabulary of actions and gestures. Sinners do not fold their hands in prayer, at least not in paintings and sculpture. But how is the artist to visualize tepidity? And are all figures somehow characterized as uninvolved in the sacred event to be understood as spiritually tepid or slothful? Can the artist and can the viewer differentiate between the bystander who is disinterested from one uninterested in salvation, and hence sinful?

Aikema argues that most if not all of Bassano's subsidiary characters are either spiritually engaged, hence virtuous, or disengaged, hence sinful. Whether one agrees with Aikema's iconography depends in large part on his or her interpretation of a figure's actions and demeanor. I found myself disagreeing with Aikema not only at Emmaus and on the road to Egypt but also in the Temple. Bassano's Christ among the Doctors in the Temple (Ashmolean Museum) was commissioned in 1539 by the Venetian patrician Marco Pizzamano, whose brother Francesco had been named archpriest of Bassano Cathedral two years earlier (p. 26). Bassano adapted his figures' poses "from Central Italian models by way of Pordenone," according to Aikema, who concludes that "The violently gesticulating doctors, one of whom is so enraged that he tears a page from a folio, are nothing new in treatments of this theme" (p. 26). But are Bassano's doctors enraged? Do they really gesticulate violently? It seems to me that their gestures are the actions traditionally associated with debate, from Quintiallian onward. One doctor makes his point by counting on his fingers, one index finger on the other; another touches his companion's shoulder to get his attention as he discusses an idea; a third has his hand to his bearded chin and seems thoughtful, perhaps even respectful, as he listens to Christ's discourse; and the doctor who is accused of vandalizing a book looks to me as though he is turning a page, searching for the elusive paragraph with which to clinch his argument. Next to him, a doctor turns away from the discussants to look toward Mary and Joseph, who are just now entering the Temple. Aikema says that this doctor is one of "the most surprising figures" because he "demonstratively turns away from Christ in an elegant maniera pose. Jacopo [Bassano] contrasts his arrogance with the piety of Mary who sits beside him" (pp. 26-27). If the doctor demonstrates arrogance by turning toward the Virgin and St. Joseh as they enter the Temple, what would his turning his back on them indicate? The poor doctor has got to look somewhere, and his turning toward them helps direct the viewer's attention while also counterbalancing the movements and postures of his colleagues in the left foreground.

Aikema also finds grievous fault in the posture of a servant in the foreground of the Adoration of the Magi in Edinburgh (National Galleries of Scotland), probably completed in 1542 (p. 27). To be sure, "none of the figures in the crowded entourage pays any heed to the Divinity," but Aikema recognizes especial disrespect in the servant next to Caspar in the right foreground, the king's "negative counterpart" and "clearly characterized by his costume as a peasant" (p. 28). Caspar kneels, of course, in order to offer his gift to the Child, and looks up toward the Holy Family as he does so. Kneeling on two bundles that he has presumably been carrying, the peasant looks downward at a group of dogs in the right corner, that is, in the opposite direction from Caspar and with his buttocks turned even more frontally toward the beholder. Nearby, just behind the peasant and above his head, Bassano gives us the "innocent behind" of a horse. I do not know what if anything to make of all this, but I wonder whether Aikema is correct when he characterizes the peasant as the civitas terrena as opposed to the "sanctuary" of Christ (pp. 28-29).

Analysis of this kneeling peasant should take into account Bassano's The Good Samaritan in Hampton Court, completed only a few years later, 1546-49 (pp. 47-49). "Sam" assumes precisely the same pose as the peasant in the Adoration of the Magi with his posterior facing the beholder. The Samaritan's figure is clearly based on the same cartoon that Bassano had used for the peasant, but reversed, facing his left instead of his right. We may also recall the figure of St. Francis, "seen almost from the rear" in Pordenone's Giustiniani altarpiece (Cohen, vol. 1, p. 335). To be sure, Francis turns his back on us in order to face the Lamb of God, and so if the pose expresses disrespect, it is for us and not for God. What are we to think of such rear views? Perhaps the answer is twofold: context is everything; and sometimes a figure turns around in order to balance a composition. Whichever answer applies to the kneeling peasant in Bassano's Adoration - whether he is disrespectful or merely moves to fulfill his aesthetic role in the composition - each viewer will decide for him- or herself.

The problem of interpretation is compounded when the subject is uncertain or perhaps even nonexistent in the traditional sense, that is, when the painting is not an istoria. The argument about "Subject and Not-Subject" in Venetian and Veneto art is an old one, discussed some years ago by Creighton Gilbert in relation to Giorgione's Tempesta and I think still unresolved, despite the learned solution more recently put forward by Salvatore Settis.(19) Whatever one may think about the Giorgionesque conundrum, however, the fact remains that a strong argument may be made for understanding such paintings as Bassano's Landscape as pastorals, as many scholars have argued.(20)

There is support for the "not-subject" view in the words of Bassano's contemporaries. Rocco Benedetti, for example, praised the artist as "miraculous at painting pastoral pictures" (p. 80). At least this 16th-century viewer saw Bassano's paintings as pastorals and not as parables. Similarly, in 1548 Antonio Zentani commissioned Bassano to paint "two hunting dogs, that is only dogs" (p. 42). As Aikema notes, there are two paintings that correspond to this description in the Libro secondo, one in the Louvre, which he dates before 1550, and the other in the Uffizi, ca. 1554 (p. 43).(21) Zentani's payments were made in 1548-49 and must therefore refer to the Two Hunting Dogs in the Louvre, which Aikema analyses as a sacred allegory: "The two animals are tethered to a stump with new shoots. The message is . . .: there are 'cose spirituali' and 'cose corporali' in the world." As in the Uffizi canvas, one dog stands while the other lies on the ground, and "the recumbent canine is the noted symbol of sloth" while his standing companion is virtuous and vigilant (p. 43). Zentoni, who ordered the earlier composition, eventually became a patron of the hospital of the Incurabili in Venice, and as such ordered construction of their church in 1566. Aikema adduces this patronage as evidence of Zentoni's piety and, by extension, of the meaning of the painting he had commissioned from Bassant nearly twenty years earlier (p. 46). But as Aikema himself reminds us, Zentoni was also the author of works with such tantalizing titles as Dubbi morali and Dubbi amorosi and had gathered a collection of ancient Roman Imperial coins - biographical data that suggest a patron of broad interests, not all of them necessarily pious. Without impugning Zentoni's character, one may imagine that he might have wanted a picture of "only dogs" by Bassant, just as Federico Gonzaga wanted and got pictures of his stud horses by Giulio Romano in the Palazzo del Te. Bassano's Parisian dogs may belong in this company: they are dogs going on with their doggy life.

Whatever meaning Bassant (or Zentoni) may have intended to convey, we may appreciate the compositional and iconographical (or noniconographical) originality of his dog paintings. Bassant and his patrons demonstrated this kind of originality already at the beginning of his career. While Bassano's Supper at Emmaus is traditional in composition and iconography, for example, it is also the first altarpiece (as opposed to devotional image) representing that theme in the Veneto (p. 12). Similarly, the Flight into Egypt in the Museo Civico of Bassant is the first representation of that subject as an altarpiece in the Veneto (pp. 14-15), whereas the composition itself is derivative. The Virgin and Child are quoted from Titian's fresco in the Palazzo Ducale but transformed "into a somewhat ambivalent narrative," according to Aikema, "ambivalent . . . because the central group constitutes a static Andachstbild while concomitantly forming part of the story being visualized" (pp. 15-16). Aikema relates this process to the isolation of devotional groups from their narratives in later 15-century Northern art, recalling the voyage from Icon to Narrative charted more than thirty years ago by Sixten Ringbom.(22) But is the Trinity completed in 1547 for the church of Santa Trinita in Angarano (near Bassant del Grappa) likewise "remarkable because of . . . its unusual subject" (p. 31), as Aikema indicates?

As Aikema explains, the Trinity is represented as a Gnadenstuhl (Throne of Mercy or Throne of Grace), in which the enthroned God the Father supports the Crucified Christ. Aikema compares Bassano's work to Durer's Landauer Altar of the Trinity (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), painted between 1507 and 1511 (p. 31). He might just as well - or better - have cited Masaccio's fresco Trinity (Florence, S. Maria Novella, ca. 1426), which was also an altarpiece, or numerous 14th- and 15th-century Italian panel paintings similarly representing the Triune God as the Throne of Grace. In the Italian Trinities, the Dove flies between Christ and the Father, as in Bassano's painting (but not in Durer's), and only a small number of figures accompany them, rather than the vast "Christian community" in the Landauer altarpiece, including the patron, Matthaeus Landauer, himself.(23)

What is most unusual in Bassano's Trinity is not the subject per se but the panoramic landscape. For Aikema, recalling Erwin Panofsky's Augustinian explanation of the Landauer altarpiece, Bassano's landscape "can only represent the civitas terrena," as opposed to the City of God: "The many figures are absorbed in all sorts of activities, but none takes any notice of the monumental Trinity in the foreground . . . " (p. 32). In Durer's altarpiece, the Virgin Mary, saints, prophets, and mortals who encircle the Trinity indeed "take notice," with various actions and gestures of worship. The Son is represented as smaller than most of the other figures, and even God the Father is smaller than some of the foreground characters. Relations of scale are certainly not consistent or logical in Durer's vision - and indeed why should they be so? But nowhere is diminution of scale so great as to imply different locations for any of the worshipers: near or far, saintly or mortal, all share the same celestial realm. The only exception is the tiny figure of the artist himself standing in the lower right corner, displaying his signature on a tablet. In Masaccio's Trinity, on the contrary, all the figures are in the same scale, including the Madonna and St. John the Evangelist, and the donors kneeling between the sacred beings and ourselves. In Bassano's Trinity, the putti who accompany the Throne of Grace - cherubs who flew right out of Titian's Assunta taking even their pattern of light and shadow with them - are likewise in scale. But the minuscule actors of Bassano's landscape cannot be compared with Durer's monumental figures, so completely attentive to the Triune God. To be sure, attentiveness is not determined only by size: Durer's tiny self-portrait implies spiritual awareness despite his miniature dimensions. Each master has represented a vision but visions seen differently. Durer gives us All Saints, the Christian community, and the written testimony of his own faith, that is, his signature; Bassano gives us the Trinity tout court and leaves definition of veneration to the worshiper. Durer's figures are self-evidently aware of the Trinity's presence, and Bassano's earthlings just as clearly unaware, as Aikema notes. But is his accusation of moral tepidity warranted? The scale of the surrounding buildings, landscape, and figures places these earthly elements in another realm from which the Trinity may not or cannot be seen. An alternative, more benevolent interpretation of the background figures' indifference to the Trinity might be that the Throne of Mercy is offered to humankind whether or not we are paying attention: God's sacrifice and his grace do not depend on us or even on our deeds, and he is with us always, whether or not we acknowledge him.

Giovanni Bellini provided the "ultimate paradigm" (p. 60) for Bassano's combination of near and far - large foreground figures and tiny figures in the distance - but this dichotomy of scale is not only a stylistic device. In Bassant as indeed in Bellini, it establishes the visionary nature of the composition.(24) Like Bellini's Madonnas, Bassano's Trinity is an apparition revealed to the beholder but not to the minuscule beings in the background. I do not mean to suggest that Bassano's Trinity or indeed other compositions of his mature style are merely variations on motifs by Bellini, or derivations from other masters, for that matter. To be sure, as Aikema notes, Bassant was indeed influenced by his predecessors and contemporaries. But the more I look at Bassant, the more I am struck by his compositional originality. It is as though background details from Bellini have come to the foreground in Bassano's compositions, but sometimes without being organized around an obvious focal point, perhaps especially in such private devotional images as the Thyssen Parable of the Sower in Madrid (fig. 59).

In comparison with pictures for private devotion, Bassano's altarpieces are much closer to tradition, their subjects immediately recognizable, as indeed one would expect. An altarpiece is not a good (or safe) venue for experimentation. Perhaps fear of the Inquisitors or other theological constraints, real or imaginary, kept Bassant from giving full rein to his imagination in the two altarpieces he painted for Venetian churches. The first, a triptych commissioned for the great Augustinian church of S. Cristoforo in the late 1550s, "must have seemed rather old fashioned" (p. 80). The second is his "austere" canvas of Saints Peter and Paul painted ca. 1564 for S. Maria dell'Umlita and now in the Galleria Estense, Modena (p. 81). Puzzled that Bassant produced only these two altarpieces for Venetian churches, Aikema concludes that "It could well be that the artist did not solicit commissions for altarpieces in the lagoon city; after all, he had no shortage of clients" (p. 82). Perhaps like Rhett Buffer, Bassant really did not give a damn, but it seems more likely to me that the two commissions suggest choice (or avoidance) by Venetian patrons. Even so, there is no doubt of Bassano's success elsewhere, as evidenced by the size of his studio and the sheer quantity of their production, and Aikema is right to remind us of this success. Moreover, starting in the mid-1560s, Bassano's son Francesco the Younger began to replicate Jacopo's works for an eager Venetian clientele (pp. 82-83). Demand was great, and Francesco was later joined by his younger brothers, Giambattista, Leandro, and Gerolamo, who had studied at Padua and could have been a doctor. (Was his mother disappointed about Gerolamo's revised career plans?) What kept the Bassano boys busy in Venice, however, was not altarpiece commissions but the replication of secular themes, often in series, representing Seasons, Elements, Months, and Markets (pp. 131-47). Bassano's style, or what became the "house style," undeniably appealed to Venetian taste for these subjects but not for sacred works, at least not for altarpieces.

Perhaps Venetians perceived something in Bassano's style that seemed unsuitable for altarpieces though not for private devotional images. Discussing "Jacopo Bassano in Perspective" (pp. 159-73), Aikema notes that the painter's style was indeed criticized in relation to sacred subjects. Earlier in the century, Pietro Bembo and other influential Venetian Petrarchans had affirmed that style should be appropriate to the subject represented. Although they were not discussing Bassano, their aesthetic judgment might well have been applied to him. In any case, criticism of Bassano escalated after the Venetian synod of 1592 on religious art, guided in turn by Tridentine recommendations promulgated in 1563. Bassano was blamed not so much for his "banal" subjects as for his use of the stilus humilis for sacred images instead of the stilus gravis. To be sure, Aikema reminds us, Bassano was aware of the rules of decorum and the precepts of classical rhetoric; yet "he consciously broke them in order to hold the attention of his audience whom he incited to choose between two conflicting paths of life" (p. 160), the path of virtue represented by various protagonists in the foreground, or the path of vice often personified by those tepid or slothful peasants in the background. The reader may well follow Aikema's iconographic path and be convinced of his interpretations, at least in some instance, but my inclination is to join Meiss in the "Highlands" and Auden in the "Musee des Beaux-Arts."

RONA GOFFEN Department of Art History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick New Brunswick, N.J. 08903

Notes

1. Domination of Bassano del Grappa (northwest of Venice) began in 1404, and the Republic added Pordenone (northeast) in 1508.

2. Bernard Aikema also invokes a linguistic metaphor, describing Bassano's development of a "visual idiom" beginning in the late 1550s. "The term is used here quite literally," Aikema explains: "like a written or spoken language Jacopo's system consists of interdependent terms (motifs) that derive their individual value (meaning) exclusively from the simultaneous presence of other terms" (p. 155). Aikema is paraphrasing Saussure via Philip Sohm (p. 205 n. 339).

3. The exhibition catalogue is Caterina Furlan, ed., Il Pordenone, Passariano and Pordenone, 1984. N.B. also her monograph, Il Pordenone, Milan: Electa, 1988, and Cohen, The Drawings of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980.

4. Concerning the great Renaissance collections of antiquities in Padua and Venice, in addition to the references cited by Cohen, see Irene Favaretto's erudite Arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della Serenissima, Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1990. N.B. also Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, published in the same year as Cohen's Pordenone and therefore not included in his bibliography, which, as he explains, goes "through 1992" (p. xv).

5. See Gall L. Geiger, Filippino Lippi's Carafa Chapel: Renaissance Art in Rome, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 5, Kirksville, Mo: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1985; and Rona Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986, 98-100.

6. David Rosand, "Titian in the Frari," Art Bulletin 53, no. 2, 1971, 196-213; Goffen, Piety and Patronage 86, 87, 97, 112, 193 n. 57, and Giovanni Bellini, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, 184.

7. Bellini's Madonna and Child with Saints was lost in the same fire. By 1531 Titian's patron, the confraternity or Scuola di S. Pietro Martire, became affiliated with the Scuola di S. Vicenzo e S. Cattarina da Siena, for whom Bellini had painted this Madonna and the polyptych of St. Vincent Ferrer, which still survives in situ in SS. Giovanni e Paolo. For documents describing the affiliation of the scuolas, see Goffen, "Giovanni Bellini and the Altarpiece of St. Vincent Ferrer," in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. Andrew Morrogh, Fiorella Superbi Gioffred, Piero Morselli, and Eve Borsook, Florence 1985, vol. 2, 277-96.

8. "Franciscans exploited images of Louis of Toulouse in this way in the 14th century, as did the Dominicans in the 15th, to advance the canonization of Vincent Ferrer; see Goffen, "Bellini and the Altarpiece of St. Vincent Ferrer" and Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto's Bardi Chapel, University Park, Penn., and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988, appendix 2. For Giustinian, in addition to the bibliography cited by Cohen, see Francomario Colasanti, San Lorenzo Giustiniani nelle raccolte della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Catalogo di Mostra, Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1981; and the biography by his nephew, Bernardo Giustinian, probably written in 1471 and first published in Venice in 1475: I. Tassi, ed., Vita Beati Laurentii Iustiniani Venetiarum Proto Patrarchae, Rome: Officina Poligrafica Laziale, 1962. The saint's works were published in Latin in Bressanone in 1506 (Opera Divi Laurentii Iustiniani Venetiarii Prothopatriarcha) and in an Italian translation by Andrea Picolini in Venice in 1565 (Devoti sermoni delle solennita de Santi del beato Lorenzo Giustinian). Not coincidentally, it was a Venetian pope, Alexander VIII Ottoboni, who canonized Giustinian in 1690.

9. For the painting and its display in the Madonna dell'Orto before its transfer to the Accademia, see Sandra Moschini Marconi, Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia: Opere d'arte del secoli XIV e XV, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1955, 61, and Juerg Meyer zur Capellen, Gentile Bellini, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1985, 39-45, 136-37. For an earlier image by Gentile's father, see Meyer zur Capellen, La figura del San Lorenzo Giustinian di Jacopo Bellini, Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani, Quaderni, no. 19, Venice, 1981.

10. Ten pages later, Cohen seems to modulate this assertion: "While unlikely to have ever entirely supplanted the great Titian, . . . it is very plausible that the two rivals were played off against each other" (vol. 1, 416).

11. A minor point about the Friars Minor: as friars, they live in a friary or convent - not a monastery (cf. Cohen, vol. 1, 279). Monks live in monasteries, and one may also speak of a monastery of nuns, including Franciscan or Dominican nuns. But there is no such thing as a monastery of friars.

12. Paolo Berdini compares the artist's naturalism to biblical exegesis; The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis, Cambridge University Press, New York and Cambridge, 1997. I read this book for Cambridge when they were considering it for publication.

13. The Magdalene is accompanied by "the other Mary" in Matt. 28: 1, 9, who is presumably "Mary the mother of James," as explained in Mark 16: 1. Mark has Salome with them at the tomb and implies that all three women will see the Risen Christ at Galilee, as the angel tells them at the tomb (Mark 16: 1, 7). Luke identifies the three women as the Magdalene, "Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women" (Luke 24: 10). Magdalene is alone at the empty tomb in John and runs to inform Peter and John (John 20: 1-2). The Apostles go to the tomb but then return to their homes.

14. See Henry Thode, Franz von Assisi und die Anfange der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien, first published in 1885 and reprinted Vienna: Phaidon-Verlag, 1934; and Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto's Bardi Chapel, University Park, Penn., and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988, 21-22, on Franciscan emphasis on Christ's suffering and the depiction of the Christus Patiens, dead or dying on the Cross.

15. "'Highlands' in the Lowlands: Jan van Eyck, the Master of Flemalle and the Franco-Italian Tradition," first published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts 57, 1961, and reprinted in The Painter's Choice: Problems in the Interpretation of Renaissance Art, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, 36-59, esp. pp. 45-52 on genre groups in the backgrounds of what he calls plateau compositions of sacred subjects, notably van Eyck's Crucifixion and its Italian descendants. As Meiss notes, in van Eyck's painting, "the Crucifixion calls forth no. . . universal response" (p. 47).

16. Dated December 1938; in W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, New York: Random House, 1991, p. 179.

17. He represented the subject in at least three versions; the first is in Bassano del Grappa; the Toledo canvas is the second; and the third, painted ca. 1545, in Pasadena, the Norton Simon Museum.

18. Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, tr. and ed., Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.

19. Creighton Gilbert, "On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures," Art Bulletin 34, no. 2, 1952, 202-16; Salvatore Settis, Giorgione's Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject (1978), tr. Ellen Bianchini, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

20. Aikema cites among others Luba Freedman, The Classical Pastoral in the Visual Arts, New York, Bern, Frankfort, and Paris: P. Lang, 1989.

21. Michelangelo Muraro, Il libro secondo di Francesco e Jacopo Dal Ponte, Bassano del Grappa: G. B. Verci, 1992. This "second book" is the Bassano's only surviving account book, covering the decades between 1530 and 1560 (Aikema, 4).

22. Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, Abo: Abo Academy, 1965.

23. For the "Christian community" and the theme of "All Saints" in the Landauer altarpiece, see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, 4th ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955, 125-31, and 126 for the patron and other mortals who occupy the "lower zone of Durer's Heaven," immediately adjacent to the saints and pre-Christian persons in the upper zone. For the imagery of the Throne of Grace in Italian art, see Goffen, "Masaccio's Trinity and the Early Renaissance" and "Masaccio's Trinity and the Letter to Hebrews" (a revised version of an essay first published in 1980) in Masaccio's "Trinity," Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

24. "Once again, n.b. Meiss (as in n. 15).

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