Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jacopo Bassano (Jacopo da Ponte)
Italian (Venetian); 16th-century
Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art
88%
Lazarus and the Rich Man. c1550. Oil on canvas
It's as if there are two diametric (though not competing) spatial logics governing this picture, neither of which is itself quite consistent internally. (That's a good thing; the possibility of bending up a scene like this is the gift Mannerism gave to Western painting.) First, there's the arrangement of figures: concentric groupings whose tightness and cogency degenerate right to left, from those chattering three at the table through to the boy at their side and into the bracketing beggar in the far bottom corner. Then there's the setting: a too-tight compound of interior and exterior that's angling up and off to the left with no regard for how the primary action — those concentric groupings — seems to spiral off the canvas's face at Lazarus's shoulder. It's as if the background is forcing itself to abide by laws that the picture in toto flouts: look at how stupid those one-point columns look alongside that tree to their side (not to mention the mockery the child-woman-man-man system is making of the columns' four-part orderliness). What makes all this the more confounding is that the spatial fuckery doesn't seem to be an end in itself, but rather a means for pure painterly brushwork and the study of contrasts: there's a rhyme, for instance, between Lazarus's bright torso and the back of that mostly-darkened sitter that's allowed for by the picture's spatial dynamics. (TFS, 2025)
London, England: The National Gallery
85%
The Way to Calvary. c1545. Oil on canvas
I usually think of pictures so crammed as being more about the paint than this; I think of Rubens. But Bassano, though he goes in elsewhere for Venetian macchia, has done this one up as a sequence of well-modeled units in tight interaction. The main event is Veronica inching towards Christ with her veil outstretched — every form in the mass behind them seems to drive towards this action, seems to will the trace of Christ's visage onto the poor woman's cloth. The whole composition, in fact, is a massive projectile pyramid, turned on its side, whose crest is the Lord's looking face. There are many infinitesimal movements within the crowd but everything's ultimately reduced to so many arrows pointing at Christ in the process of making an image. Bassano is less a painter of smart particulars than of strange relations; that is on brilliant display here. If he's somewhat more excellent when those relations have more room to breathe, he nevertheless is to be commended here, not only for the concentration of odd connectivity in this picture, but for the condensation of meaning that results. (TFS, 2025)