Christ in the House of Mary, Martha and Lazarus

Jacopo Bassano (after) ca. 1510 - ca. 1592

Summary

The composition follows in reverse a painting of this subject of 1576-7, signed by Jacopo Bassano and his son Francesco, which is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, although the colours do not conform to those of the Houston painting. Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1510-1592), also known as ‘dal Ponte', because his workshop was close to the bridge in Bassano del Grappa, was the first in a dynasty of painters active in Venice and the Veneto from the early 16th to the early 17th century. Jacopo was, with Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, one of the leading Venetian artists of the 16th century and is best known for religious paintings with a pastoral or genre flavour. In this scene, taken from the Bible, but presented as if from everyday life, Jesus and his disciples are being welcomed into the home of Lazarus by his sisters, Martha and Mary. The artist responsible for Manchester's canvas would appear on stylistic grounds to have been Flemish and probably based his work on a 1598 engraving after Bassano by Jan Sadeler I (1550-1600), which is part of the Kitchens of Sadeler series. Manchester's picture is in the same direction as the engraving, but differs in the foreground and background details, and a figure bending over the basket of fish on the right in the engraving, visible in other painted versions, is absent in the Manchester canvas. Sadeler was in Venice by 1597, where he engraved after a number of Italian artists, including Bassano. He died in 1600, probably in Italy. The artist of this work, following Bassano, employs the narrative to demonstrate his skill at painting still life objects: wet fish in a wicker basket, shining crockery, dead game, drapery, and the flickering flames of a small open fire all present a complex painterly challenge. A much greater emphasis on the food and utensils in Manchester's painting, compared with the attention to architecture in Bassano - notably the inclusion of a prominent bunch of young carrots in the immediate centre foreground (absent in Bassano and Sadeler's engraving) - suggests an early 17th century Flemish imitator of Bassano.