Christ in the house of Mary and Martha

Perhaps because he and his family were based not in Venice but in their native town, Bassano, Jacopo da Ponte, despite his ability to draw on elements of the styles of such painters as Titian and Parmigianino, was in every sense an innovative and independent artist. From the outset of his career he had shown an interest in the human world around him and he exploited this with great skill to give plausibility to his religious commissions. Christ in the House of Mary and Martha is one of a number of compositions he evolved in about 1576 in which the genre element is visually predominant. Few pictures of the subject had previously been painted in Italy, a notable exception being that of about 1566 at Munich by Tintoretto—which as Bernard Aikema observed in his thorough analysis of the composition (Jacopo Bassano and his Public, Princeton, 1996, p. 105) is very different in character—and indeed closer in mood to treatments of the subject by Aertsen whose picture of 1563 at Rotterdam includes a chimney with consoles in the same position as in Bassano’s design.

What is generally regarded as the prime version of this, signed jointly by Jacopo and his son Francesco, which measures 98 by 126.5 centimetres, is in the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston (no. 79.13). Jacopo was evidently responsible for the overall design, but the picture was executed by Francesco, Jacopo then adding ‘the finishing touches, painting in a thin layer of the highlights and adding details, for the most part, in the foreground’ (L.A. Vinco da Sesso, Jacopo Bassano, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth, 1993, no. 61). This less widely-known and marginally larger canvas differs from that at Houston in a number of respects: the dress of the kneeling sister is in the rich green so characteristic of Jacopo, rather than a pale lilac; the left side of the top of the arch behind her is rendered—and already in decay, rather than of stone blocks; the dog by her is slightly further from the cat; an animal in the middle distance is omitted; the mountain, evidently the Monte Grappa, is described in greater detail and set against a pink sunset sky rather than white cloud; the stitching on the hanging cloth is simplified; Martha’s maid, Martilla, holds the spoon above the left side of the pot on the fire rather than in the middle of this; a bunch of grapes on the table is omitted; and, most obviously, the upper section with the rather awkward arched ceiling with cassettone is eliminated. What is clear is that Jacopo himself was responsible for the execution of Christ, the two men behind him and other elements of the picture.

The popularity of the design is attested by the survival of other versions. Those in the Uffizi (Gli Uffizi, Catalogo Generale Florence, 1979, no.P147) and at Hampton Court (J. Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge, 1983, no. 24) correspond with the Houston picture except in the relative positions of the dog and cat and the omission of the grapes in which these agree with that under discussion. Two others show Christ’s head at a different angle, with his chin jutting forwards. The smaller (79 x 110 cm.) example in the Hermitage (T.D. Formichova, The Hermitage, Venetian Painting fourteenth to eighteenth Centuries, Florence, 1992, no. 12, as Francesco Bassano (?)), which omits the stitching on the folded cloth, corresponds with this picture in the omission of the bunch of grapes and the proximity of the two animals, but otherwise follow the Houston canvas. In the much larger (133 x 182.5 cm.) canvas at Cassel (J.M. Lehmann, Italienische, französische und spanische Gemӓlde des 16. Bis 18. Jahrhunderts, Fridingen, 1980, p. 20-1), the bag on the chimney is moved to the left side and the cloth on which the dead birds, the dog and the animal in the middle distance (in the Houston picture) are omitted, but the kneeling woman is, as in this picture, in a green dress, while the column on the left is raised to the full height of the canvas.