Identità ed Ereditànelle Botteghe dei Bassano.Le Stagioni, 1570-1592 ca.

The Workshops of the Bassanos: Identity, Legacy and The Four Seasons, ca. 1570-1592 In considering the development of a ‘Bassano brand-name’ and its related workshop or bottega (in Italian), one must take into account the involvement of a wide range of artists. There were in fact at least twelve painters belonging to four different families and as many workshops, yet all related (Dal Ponte, Apollonio, Scaiaro, Guadagnin), over a broad time period, between the early Sixteenth Century and at least until 1654, when Giacomo Apollonio, the last “true” descendant of this lineage, died. This investigation develops into larger scale proportions, if we are to include all those named and unnamed artists, who were inspired by the Bassanos and defined as “School of”, “Followers” or “Imitators”. In order to obtain a trustworthy scientific account and a complete historical result would require a lifetime of work, which perhaps might not cover everyone and everything. Consequently, this research called for a careful selection of aims and limits: a)Topic – the only family of artists investigated are the true-blooded Bassanos: Jacopo Dal Ponte and his four sons Francesco, Giambattista, Leandro, Girolamo. b)Chronology – the span of time to be carefully taken into account is circa: 1570-1592. c)Case study – the iconographic subject to be thoroughly examined: The Four Seasons. These limits can enable us to obtain more clarity over a vast range of analyses, while helping to answer two precise questions: 1)Identity: what were the relationships between the capo bottega (workshop master) Jacopo Bassano and his four sons? 2)Legacy: were most of the artworks produced by Bassano's sons simply replicas of their father’s compositions or did each instead possess a specific individual talent? Focusing the attention on two periods, 1530-1550 and 1570-1592, the research was able to give new shape to the published and unpublished documentation about the Dal Ponte/Bassano family. It emerged that they managed a multi-level shop: in Venice the sons played the role of keepers and gainers of the new market shares that their father Jacopo occasionally supplied during his career. The Four Seasons iconographic subject has shown how those painters were able to create an artistic high-competing product against the main shops active in the late sixteenth century Venice on one hand, and on the other they painted visual texts capable to shape iconography into the devotional needs of nameless buyers. The Bassanos devised hard-hitting textual consumer goods and the Fours Seasons is the best case study in order to analyse the socio-economic and artist features of this kind of production.