Last Supper

da Ponte Jacopo called Jacopo Bassano

(Bassano del Grappa 1510 - 1592)

The painting is one of the Veneto artist’s masterpieces and shows his capacity for absorbing the compositional techniques of Raphael, Dürer and Leonardo, even from his remote location. The closed space, framing the architectural background and the lively scene in the foreground, highlights the distinctive features of the apostles, far from any sense of idealisation, as in other works by the artist.

Object details

Commentary

The painting has been identified as the Last Supper commissioned in 1546 by the Venetian nobleman Battista Erizzo (P.C. Marani 2001, p. 310). The balance of thirty scudi for this work was paid between 1547 and early the following year. Due to its high pictorial quality, the work is considered one of the artist's most outstanding works. An earlier version of it is known, commissioned by Ambrogio Frizier in September 1537 and now in the parish church of Wormley in Hertfordshire (Joannides, Sachs 1991, pp. 695-699).

The painting's first appearance in the Borghese collection was in the 1700 inventory, ascribed to Titian. Towards the end of the century (1787) it was recorded under the name of Schiavone (Ramdhor 1787, I, p. 290). It was only in 1893 that Adolfo Venturi convincingly put forward the name of Jacopo Bassano, while noting that “In a painting of muted hues, Bassano's characteristic faded red dominates, and his predilections as a genre painter are apparent: the cat, the dog, the shiny metal basin. Some faces are full of character, but they are almost all without any spiritual quality. The rest of the bodies, the extremities especially, painted formulaically, stick out and are badly intertwined” (Venturi 1893, p. 102).

Venturi's attribution was not shared by Lorenzetti who, in 1911, considered it to be “the work of a school or workshop rather than Jacopo” (Lorenzetti 1911, pp. 241-257). Moving away from the Bassano circle, Willumsen attributed the painting to El Greco (Willumsen, 1927, I, pp. 107-123). A useful term of comparison for the dating of the Borghese work has been noted by critics in Tintoretto's Last Supper in the church of San Marcuola (1547), from which it takes its compositional layout and general structure. According to Pallucchini, the close connection with this would imply a dating of the Borghese canvas to around 1550 (Pallucchini 1950, pp. 53, 103): the latter suggestion was largely accepted by later critics (Longhi 1948, p. 50; Zampetti 1957, p. 64; Magagnato 1981, p. 169). However, more recently, the fact that the dating has been brought forward to the mid-1540s has distanced Bassano's work from that of Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto). Indeed, the painting is often taken as a gauge of Bassano's awareness of contemporary artistic developments. Despite the isolation of the province where he lived, he still managed to keep up to date with the latest developments of Raphael and Dürer. Bassano took some individual compositional elements from the engraving of the Last Supper printed by the German artist in 1523, such as that of the figure of Christ, as well as that of the apostle John depicted asleep with his head in his crossed arms, and that of the basin in the foreground. From this model he drew on the emotional tension, the highly charged, exaggerated expressiveness, manifested in the dramatic gestures and poses and in the dynamism of the entire composition. On the right is the figure of Judas, traditionally on the other side of the panel from that of Christ, with the bag of thirty coins and the cat at his feet, perfectly highlighted by the latest restoration of the canvas. An overall view reveals the complexity of the overall composition, in which all the characters are divided, without any focus on Christ in the centre, on the source of the Word, separating into opposing factions and thus distracting from the substance and meaning of the sacrifice (Gentili 2000, pp. 173-181).

Fabrizio Carinci