Jacopo Bassano and His Public: Moralizing Pictures in an Age of Reform, ca. 1535-1600 - Review

trans. Andrew P. McCormick

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 257 pp.; 12 color ills., 147 b/w. $95.00

Wondering about the subtitle of Charles E. Cohen's book, I asked two distinguished linguists at Rutgers, Jane Grimshaw and Alan Prince, to explain the difference between "dialect" and "language." His one-word answer: "politics." Her explication of this terse reply: an allusion to Max Weinreich's definition of language as dialect with an army and a navy - a definition that describes equally well the difference between Renaissance Venice and its mainland territories, Bassano and Pordenone.(1) Today's Italian is of course the modernized Tuscan dialect of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Venetian dialect, veneziano or venessian, once the language of a great empire, is now close to extinction.

Natives of Pordenone in Friuli or Friul speak and spoke yet another dialect or language, friulan, incomprehensible to modern Italian ears outside the region. I remember a filmed advertisement for a local digestivo ("sciniappa") in friulan with subtitles written in Italian. Friulan was the language of Giovanni Antonio Sacchis, called Pordenone, as distinct from the languages of Venice and of Tuscany as his art is different from theirs. At least, that is the implication of Charles Cohen's subtitle, the linguistic metaphor implying the visual distinction between the friulan painter and his Venetian and Central Italian contemporaries.(2) Pordenone's dialect or his "provincialism" (vol. 1, p. xiii) is central for Cohen's interpretation, describing the artist's admittedly retardataire beginnings in the countryside and his eventually transcending those origins in the city, namely, Venice, where, Cohen argues, Pordenone came to rival Titian himself (vol. 1, p. 406).

Linguistic metaphors aside, Cohen's two-volume book is essentially "old-fashioned" or traditional art history, a monograph and catalogue primarily concerned with attribution, dating, and stylistic influence - fundamental problems, especially in dealing with a comparatively little-known master. And given his importance, Pordenone has not quite received his due, as Cohen rightly protests, notwithstanding a major exhibition in 1984, several monographs and specialized studies, mostly in Italian, and previous publications by Cohen himself.(3)

Cohen begins his study of the artist with a discussion of his birthplace. Today, Pordenone is a rich city known for the manufacture of refrigerators and other household appliances; in the 16th century, it was impoverished and known for so little that the Venetians were willing to cede it to one of their condottieri. The following eight chapters of volume 1 treat the artist's life and works in chronological order. Collaborative works are relegated to an appendix. Volume 2 offers 85 catalogue entries of autograph and collaborative works (including fresco cycles), likewise arranged in chronological order. Cohen also includes a catalogue of lost works and a chronology of Pordenone's career. The two volumes are splendidly illustrated with more than 800 photographs, including decorative complexes, works in situ, and related drawings.

Born ca. 1483-84 and documented as a master in 1504, Pordenone showed little if any promise of artistic greatness early in his career (vol. 1, p. 40). His first known work is cited as convincing evidence of this judgment: the fresco triptych in Valeriano, signed and dated 1506 (pls. 4-7), is criticized by Cohen for its "retardataire, Quattrocento, provincial style" (vol. 1, p. 3). Thus, perhaps inevitably, at the beginning of considering Pordenone's career, the author and the reader are faced with the problematics of artistic quality and taste. If there is a province, there must be a center; if some artists are retardataire, others are presumably inventive and forward-looking - and, by implication, greater than their country cousins. Recognizing the difficulties inherent in his terminology, Cohen explains that "provincial" is not necessarily meant to be pejorative (vol. 1, p. 4); he uses "the term in a neutral sense to refer to works that are strongly conditioned by the factors of patronage, culture, iconography and style that prevail in the provincial environment for which it was created" (vol. 1, p. 5). Despite these declarations, however, when the problem of provincialism reappears in the book from time to time, it is accompanied by Cohen's assertions of Pordenone's having surpassed his origins as he responds to various "central" masters. To be sure, provincials, such as Pordenone, may influence cosmopolitans, such as Titian (vol. 1, p. 6). But I disagree with Cohen when he describes greater openness to new ideas as a strength of provincial artists (vol. 1, p. 7). Does Cohen really mean to suggest that Pordenone was more receptive to new ideas than such urbanites as Titian and Michelangelo, or, to invoke an earlier generation, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo? (Of these masters, only Bellini was city-born, but all were trained in town, that is, in Florence or Venice.)