The Miraculous Draught of Fishes

1545

Jacopo Bassano

Painter, Venetian, c. 1510 - 1592

Close to us, six light-skinned men crowd into two small wooden boats that together span the width of this horizontal painting. The bow of the boat to our left overlaps the stern of the boat to our right. In the stern of the boat to our left, along the left edge of the canvas, a man, Jesus sits in profile facing our right. A marine-blue garment drapes around his waist and legs over a rose-pink tunic, and three rays of gold light emanate from the top, front, and back of his head. He raises his left hand toward the other two men in his boat. A bearded, balding man wearing marigold orange kneels with his hands pressed together in prayer in front of Jesus. To our right, at the bow of the boat and near the center of the composition, a younger bearded man with flowing hair steps toward Jesus, his arms outstretched. His pink tunic and emerald-green cape billow around him. Two muscular, bare-chested men bend over the side of the boat to our right, pulling in a fishing net. A balding man with a white beard sits in the bow of that boat, his body facing our left. He looks over his left shoulder toward the water and the half-submerged oar he holds. Blue water stretches into the distance between a distant mountain to our left and the meandering shoreline to our right. The horizon where the blue sky meets the water is close to the top edge of the composition.

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This painting, which came to light in 1989, is a major addition to the work of Jacopo Bassano. One of the four leading mid–to–late 16th–century Venetian painters, Jacopo is less well–known than are his contemporaries Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. Only with the exhibition of his work in his native town of Bassano del Grappa in 1992 did the artist finally get the recognition he deserves. Aside from the quality and variety of his production, Bassano had the most extraordinary development of any 16th–century Venetian master except Titian. After modest beginnings, Bassano's work exploded into greatness with a series of pictures dating from the 1540s, which demonstrated his true measure as an artist. He overcame his provincial isolation and kept abreast of artistic trends by studying prints by or after other masters such as Raphael. Bassano's mannerist compositions of the 1540s and 1550s, with their rich color and animated figures, gave way to the expressive lighting and more genre–like character of the works of the 1560s. Thereafter, Bassano's art increasingly emphasized figures of peasants and their animals. With their dark tonality, flickering brushwork, and somber mood, the best of his late pictures approach Rembrandt.

As we learn from the painter's account book, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes was ordered in April 1545 by the Venetian governor of Bassano, Pietro Pizzamano. Returning to Venice later that same year, the patron took his picture with him, where, in 1547, Titian copied it for the background of an altarpiece he painted. In The Miraculous Draught of Fishes Jacopo typically drew on a print source for the composition—Ugo da Carpi's chiaroscuro woodcut of the same subject. The print in turn reproduces (in reverse) Raphael's great tapestry cartoon of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes of c. 1515, which, with the other cartoons in the series, is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Though relying here, as elsewhere, on a visual source, Jacopo nevertheless transformed the print he took as a point of departure. The aesthetic appeal of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes lies in the way the brilliant hues of rose red, ocher, and green are set off against the broad expanse of blue water. Jacopo's colorful tableau, extending across the width of the canvas, has an almost vertiginous effect, in which the play of gestures and expressions of Christ, Peter, and Andrew on the left contrasts with the denser grouping of Zebedee and his sons James and John on the right. Uniting the two groups of apostles is the dramatic form of Andrew's billowing cape, a signature motif of the artist. Bassano further enlivened the composition through the careful observation of nature, reflected in Zebedee's oaring, the fish struggling in the net, and the view of his native town in the upper right.

(Text by David Alan Brown, published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 22


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Patrons' Permanent Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 143.5 × 243.68 cm (56 1/2 × 95 15/16 in.)
    framed: 177.8 × 277.5 × 12.7 cm (70 × 109 1/4 × 5 in.)

  • Accession

    1997.21.1


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Commissioned 1545 in Bassano by Pietro Pizzamano, Venice. possibly private collection, Rome.[1] private collection, London, by 1989; sold 1997 through (Matthiesen Gallery, London) to NGA.
[1] According to Patrick Matthiesen (letter of 12 September 1996 to Alan Shestack, NGA deputy director, copy in NGA curatorial files).

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1992

  • Jacopo Bassano, c. 1510-1592, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa, Italy; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, 1992-1993, no. 15, repro. (shown only in Fort Worth).

2000

  • Art for the Nation: Collecting for a New Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000-2001, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

Bibliography

2004

  • Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 86-87, no. 62, color repro.

2015

  • "Art for the Nation: The Story of the Patrons' Permanent Fund." National Gallery of Art Bulletin, no. 53 (Fall 2015):14-15, repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20176398


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