The Development of Modern Science in the Early Sixteenth Century
(cats. 6–14)
Courtly Banquets and Conversations
(cats. 15–39)
Humankind Through the Passage of Time
(cats. 40–44)
Humankind in the Universe – Myth and Poetry
(cats. 45–50)
Venice on the Mainland and the Development of Agronomy
in the Sixteenth Century (cats. 51–56)
Jacopo Bassano and the Representation of the Seasons in Venice
(cats. 57–62)
Influences from the North
(cats. 63–65)
Francesco and Leandro Bassano and the Viennese Cycle of the Months
(cats. 66–73)
Leandro Bassano and His Patrons in Padua
(cats. 74–80)
Nature Studies Between Prague and Florence
(cats. 81–87)
(cats. 88–90)
Nature’s Time
A Ridolfo Imperadore mandò i dodeci mesi.
Carlo Ridolfi, Maraviglie dell’Arte
In his Maraviglie dell’Arte , published in 1648, the Veronese painter and art connoisseur Carlo Ridolfi reported that Jacopo Bassano, an artist active in the region between Bassano del Grappa and Venice until the end of the sixteenth century, sent Emperor Rudolf II twelve paintings depicting the months of the year.
Examined and re-evaluated as part of a project researching the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Bassano Collection, this impressive late Renaissance cycle offers numerous art historical findings, suggestions, and insights into various cultural contexts suited to visual presentation in an exhibition.
These magnificent paintings were intended for an aristocratic residence and, with their imposing format, continue to impress today. Their lively narrative is enriched by a multitude of precisely depicted objects and
utensils – genuine parts of a still life – and illuminated with lively colours. These pictures are unique in Venetian painting and provide a point of reference for labours of the months in following years.
All of the paintings are signed by Leandro, Jacopo Bassano’s third son, and yet are to be regarded as the product of the family workshop. To understand the significance of these creations, the personality of the father – the ingenious artist and founder of the workshop – needs to be examined more closely. He is less well known to the general public today than his famous fellow artists, Tiziano Vecellio, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese. But he was very well known and highly appreciated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Every collection of note had to have ‘Bassano’ paintings. The Medici, Emperor Rudolf II, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the rulers of France and Spain, as well as the English aristocracy collected pictures by this family of painters until well into the seventeenth century. The rise
SYLVIA FERINO-PAGDEN
Reflections on Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons
Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s depictions of the Four Seasons (cats. 28, 29, 90) are renowned for their exceptional composite structure – a method of artistic expression that made the painter famous during his lifetime and, thanks to the Surrealist movement, led to a resurgence in his reputation during the twentieth century. At the time, this had less to do with the artist’s chosen theme of the changing seasons. The current exhibition focuses on nature in the context of cosmogony and cosmology, as well as on the annual metamorphoses that occur from spring through to winter, which are structured by the passage of time and can be compared to the cycle of human life from birth to death. Ovid and other ancient writers composed wonderfully evocative descriptions of these phenomena, and philosophers have been attempting to explain them since antiquity. Planets, astrological signs, and smaller units of time such as months, but also the elements that make up earth’s matter play key roles in these fascinating processes, as illustrated by the exhibited artworks and discussed in the contributions to this catalogue.
All three painters who feature in the current exhibition –Arcimboldo, Bassano, and Bruegel – created artworks on the theme of the four seasons. In contrast to the paintings made by the Bassano family (cats. 62, 66, 67) and by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (cat. 15), which represented the seasons as landscapes with human subjects performing corresponding activities, sometimes in combination with astrological signs or other elements, Arcimboldo’s depictions drew on the ancient tradition of personification. Adopting a unique and highly distinctive approach that will be examined in greater detail in this essay, he created composite heads that incorporated the characteristic attributes of the different seasons.
Pictorial representations of the four seasons can be traced back to antiquity. Derived from Greek predecessors – the Horae – the dancing ‘Pompeian’ maidens who adorned chamber walls in private houses in Rome conferred seasonal blessings upon the inhabitants, as is conveyed in Roman prayers.1 The propitious influence of these personified seasons was later incorporated into
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters , 1565. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 19.164; Rogers Fund, 1919
Early Modern Agronomic Literature
The Birth of a Publishing Genre
Introduction
The history of agronomic literature has its roots in classical antiquity, from which, along with its early contents, it inherits the monthly and seasonal rhythms in the organization of the subject matter. Since the Middle Ages, it has shared some features with the related herbal genre –which investigated the knowledge relating to the medicinal virtues of the vegetal ‘simples’, the materia medica – and with the Tacuina sanitatis (cat. 16), which in the synthetic form of the taqwīm (illustrative plates with text-caption at the foot of the page) offered their noble buyers the first visual representations of rural work and of the food and drink resulting from man’s efforts, marked by the stars and the seasons. All these subjects are also found in the contemporary books of hours and in some painted cycles.1 Although still stylized and reflecting the visual angle of contemporary court society, the Tacuina sanitatis nourished the imagination and were almost an illustrated
counterpart to the agronomy publications, in which the word always prevailed over the image. The everyday aspect of the man–nature relationship burst forth for the first time in the medieval Tacuina , and over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries attained a maturity that fed art on one hand and various textual genres on the other.2 As this exhibition shows, it was precisely in this period that the forms and material substance of nature in itself and in relation to the human being began to be studied. Drawing and painting explored the forms; from being a generic backdrop for different subjects, nature increasingly emerged in the foreground of paintings and pictorial compositions until it became an independent subject, triumphant in the naturalistic transfiguration of the personification of the seasons by Arcimboldo (cats. 28, 29, 90). At the same time, nature was studied in its materiality by enthusiastic investigators (professionals and amateurs alike), both for its still little-known medicinal properties (materia medica) and for the usefulness that
Cat. 28.2, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Summer
Cat. 28.3, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter
Cat. 67.7, Leandro Bassano, July (Spinning and Weaving)
Cat. 67.8, Leandro Bassano, July
Cat. 89.2, Jan Baptist Saive the Elder, Fruit Market (September–October)
This book accompanies the exhibition
Arcimboldo – Bassano – Bruegel. Nature’s Time.
Kunsthistorisches Museum
www.khm.at
11 March to 29 June 2025
Director General
Jonathan Fine
EXHIBITION
Curator
Francesca Del Torre Scheuch
Curatorial assistance
Alexandra Sattler
Exhibition management
Julia Neudorfer
Exhibition design
Gerhard Veigel
Partner
We thank William S. Barrett and Katherina Minardo Macht for their generous support of the digital exhibition presentation in our web journal.
PUBLICATION
Media owner
KHM-Museumsverband, Vienna
Edited by
Francesca Del Torre Scheuch
Editorial assistance
Alexandra Sattler
Editorial coordination
Sara Colson (Hannibal Books)
Rafael Kopper (KHM)
Copy editor
Cath Phillips
Translations
Gerald Brennan
David Graham
Jacqueline Todd
Graphic design
Tim Bisschop
Image rights and coordination
Séverine Lacante
Image editing
Michael Eder
Jakob Gsöllpointner
Thomas Ritter
Daniel Sostaric
Printed by
Printer Trento, Trento
Paper
Gardapat 11 High White 150 g/m2
English edition & distribution
Hannibal Books, Veurne www.hannibalbooks.be
Gautier Platteau
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