Gerolamo da Ponte (attr.) (Bassano 1566 - Venice 1621)

Gerolamo da Ponte (attr.) (Bassano 1566 - Venice 1621)

Pastoral scene

Oil on board, 44.5 x 36 cm

The Da Ponte are commonly known as Bassano, from the name of their city of origin, Bassano del Grappa: this conventional name was fixed by art critics during the modern age. The Da Ponte was a family-run business before the letter, active for about a century and a half. Initiated by Francesco il Vecchio, in the first years of the sixteenth century, achieved great appreciation throughout northern Italy with the personality of Jacopo, starting from the second half of the fourth decade assisted by the brothers Giambattista and Gianfrancesco. After him, his sons Francesco il Giovane, Giambattista, Leandro and Gerolamo will be the interpreters of the family tradition. The successors of Jacopo used to take over the iconographic schemes and technical devices of the master, giving rise to numerous versions of his paintings more known and commercially successful. The painting presents the typical characters of style of the Bassano but intrigues that, in some of the most illustrious monographs dedicated to the family of painters, first among all that of Edoardo Arslan, there is not recorded a similar composition between the works of Jacopo. It is in fact known how the workshop has been prolific in reiterating with minimal variations the proven iconographies of his father and that the same have been used by the students. The analysis of the canvas in question thus registers its own compositional autonomy and by observing the drafts and the typology of faces, one recognizes the characteristic pictorial conduction of Gerolamo da Ponte, Jacopo’s last son who ran the important workshop with his brother Giambattista during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The last of Jacopo’s children, Gerolamo da Ponte was born in Bassano on 3 June 1566. Student and imitator of his father, he carried out an intense activity of copyist. Already in 1580-81 he collaborated with Jacopo in the realization of the altarpiece with the Virgin and the saints Agatha and Apollonia, now in the Museum of Bassano. He showed particular skill, using a free brush, contemptuous, almost disordered, distant from the "constructive" of his father Jacopo, basing his chromatic range on the notes of violet, silver gray, brown and olive. After the death of his father, Gerolamo leaned on Leandro, but his painting, which in its youth had brought significant peaks of originality, decayed into sterile formulas and excessive repetition of models. After 1595 he moved to Venice, where he married Zanetta Biava, while remaining in contact with his native town.  The hand of Gerolamo is recognized in several works of the bassanesca school, such as S. Giovanni Evangelista in the Salotto Quadrato in the Doge’s Palace, a palette with three saints at Hampton Court and the Virgin with SS. Fortunato and Ermagora, today in the Museum of Bassano.

The painting depicts a nocturnal pastoral scene with two human figures and a flock of sheep. In the foreground, on the left, a young shepherd in red clothes is taking care of the sheep. On the right, a second shepherd, older, dressed in dark and with a hat, leads to pasture a majestic bull with sparkling horns. In the lower right section of the painting stands a refined piece of still life. The attention to detail, the realistic rendering of figures and animals, and the skilful use of chiaroscuro are elements that can be found in this painting, which certainly distinguish the activity of the second generation of the Bassano workshop. 

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