Summer
c. 1546/1548
Painter, Venetian, 1518 or 1519 - 1594
Summer is represented here as Ceres, goddess of agriculture, reclining in front of her attribute, a row of wheat stalks. The work is one of three known paintings from a cycle by Jacopo Tintoretto depicting the personifications of the four Seasons. Spring and Autumn are housed in other collections; there is no trace of Winter. All three of the surviving Seasons feature powerful figures combined with a decorative elegance that is especially prominent in Summer, in the undulating line of stalks of grain silhouetted against the sky, the lacy grape leaves and clustered grapes, and the exquisitely rendered birds.
Tintoretto’s Seasons were created to surround a central ceiling painting in the Casa Barbo a San Pantaleone, in Venice. That painting, the octagonal Allegory of the Dreams of Men (Detroit Institute of Arts), has a complicated network of symbols that, when considered together, comment upon the interaction of human dreams and desires, fortune, and the great cycles governing heaven and earth. The depiction of the Seasons surrounding the central allegory would have complemented the motif of cyclical change.
As in his other youthful works, Tintoretto’s Casa Barbo ensemble demonstrates a clear intent to show off his mastery of the most up-to-date central Italian taste circa 1546–1548. Here, the primary source of inspiration can be identified as the paintings of Giorgio Vasari, who had worked in Venice during his stay of 1541–1542.
West Building Main Floor, Gallery 24
Artwork overview
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Medium
oil on canvas
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Credit Line
-
Dimensions
overall: 105.7 x 193 cm (41 5/8 x 76 in.)
framed: 139.07 × 224.16 × 11.43 cm (54 3/4 × 88 1/4 × 4 1/2 in.) -
Accession
1961.9.90
More About this Artwork
Artwork history & notes
Provenance
Casa Barbo a San Pantaleone, Venice, by 1648.[1] possibly private collection, southern France.[2] (Frederick Mont, Inc., New York), by 1956; sold February 1957 the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[3] gift 1961 to NGA.
[1] In a 1648 publication, Carlo Ridolfi describes a decorative cycle of paintings by Tintoretto: “In casa Barba a San Pantaleone miransi nell’intavolato d’una stanza un capriccio de’ sogni, & alcuni Deità in un Cielo, con varie imagini delle cose apportate nel sonno alle menti de’ mortali, e le quattro staggioni in figura nel recinto” ("...one sees in the paneling [intavolato] of a room a capriccio of dreams and some divinities in the heavens, with various images of the things brought to the minds of mortals in their sleep, and the four Seasons personified in the surrounding area [‘nel recinto’]”). Three of the paintings depicting the personifications of the four Seasons are known: Spring (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norkolk), the NGA painting, and Autumn (private collection); Winter is unlocated. See: Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, overo Le vite de gl’illustri pittori veneti, e dello Stato, 2 vols., Venice, 1648: 2:46; Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’arte, overo Le vite de gl’illustri pittori veneti, e dello Stato (Venice, 1648), edited by Detlev von Hadeln, 2 vols., Berlin, 1914-1924: 2(1924):55.
Tintoretto may have begun the paintings at Casa Barbo around 1546 or 1547, and completed them in 1548. It was in 1548 that Faustino Barbo married, and because he was the designated heir to the palace, the occasion may have been the impetus for a restoration and decoration of the family house that was noted in Faustino's uncle's will of 1557. For details, and additional discussion of the Barbo family in residence at the Casa Barbo in the mid-16th century, see Stefania Mason, "Tintoretto the Venetian," in _Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice_, edited by Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Venice; National Gallery of Art, Washington, New Haven, 2018: 36-61.
[2] The central painting in the cycle described by Ridolfi, Allegory of the Dreams of Men (Detroit Institute of Art), as well as another of the surrounding personifications of the Seasons, Spring (see note 1), were both previously in a collection in southern France. The Detroit painting was acquired from this unknown collection by the dealers Mont and Newhouse in 1957, and the Norfolk painting was acquired by Walter Chrysler from Newhouse Galleries in 1958. Mont frequently worked with the Newhouse Galleries, so it is very possible the NGA painting shares this provenance. (Information provided by Robert Echols, email of 11 June 2010, in NGA curatorial files.)
[3] Betty Mont wrote to Guy Emerson of the Kress Foundation on 5 November 1956 that they had "a splendid painting by Tintoretto" in their studio. The invoice from Frederick Mont & Company to the Kress Foundation, for four paintings including the Tintoretto (called "Allegorie of Summer"), is dated 14 February 1957; three payments for the group were completed in September of the same year. (See copies of the letter and invoice in NGA curatorial files and The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2021).
Associated Names
Exhibition History
1960
Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese with a group of sixteenth-century Venetian drawings, Art Gallery of Toronto, 1960, no. 11, repro.
1994
Allegory of the Dreams of Men, Detroit Institute of Arts, 1994, no catalogue.
2007
Tintoretto, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2007, no. 6, repro.
2018
Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Gallerie dell'Accademia and Palazzo Ducale, Venice; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2018-2019, fig. 79.
Bibliography
1959
Suida Manning, Bertina. “Two ‘Seasons’ by Jacopo Tintoretto.” Studies in the History of Art dedicated to William E. Suida on his Eightieth Birthday. London, 1959: 253-257, figs. 2, 6.
1962
Suida Manning, Bertina. “Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto in the Collection of Walter
P. Chrysler, Jr.” Arte Veneta 16 (1962): 54-55.
1965
Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. .National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 128.
1968
National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 114, repro.
Schulz, Jürgen. Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance. Berkeley, 1968: 118.
1969
Pallucchini, Rodolfo. “Inediti di Jacopo Tintoretto.” Arte Veneta 23 (1969): 46.
1970
De Vecchi, Pierluigi. L’opera completa del Tintoretto. Milan, 1970: 107, no. 166.
1972
Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, Mass., 1972: 201.
1973
Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XVI-XVIII Century. London, 1973: 51-52, fig. 94.
1975
European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 342, repro.
1978
Gandolfo, Francesco. Il “Dolce Tempo”: mistica, ermetismo e sogno nel Cinquecento. Rome, 1978: 237.
1979
Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:470-471; 2:pl. 335.
1982
Pallucchini, Rodolfo, and Paola Rossi. Tintoretto: le opere sacre e profane. 2 vols. Venice, 1982: 1:176, no. 210, 2:fig. 276.
1984
Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 230, no. 292, color repro.
1985
European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 394, repro.
1993
Echols, Robert. "Jacopo Tintoretto and Venetian Painting, 1538-1548." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 1993. Ann Arbor, MI, 1994: 181-191.
1996
Echols, Robert. “‘Jacopo nel corso, presso al palio’: dal soffitto per l’Aretino al Miracolo dello Schiavo.” In Jacopo Tintoretto nel quarto centenario della morte: atti del convegno internationale di studi. Edited by Paola Rossi and Lionello Puppi. Padua, 1996: 78-79.
2007
Butterfield, Andrew. "Brush with Genius [review of the exhibition Tintoretto, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2007] ." The New York Review of Books (26 April 2007): 12, repro. 14.
2009
Echols, Robert, and Frederick Ilchman. “Toward a New Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of Revised Attributions and a New Chronology.” In Jacopo Tintoretto: Actas del congreso internacional/Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, February 26-27, 2007. Madrid, 2009: 122, no. 40.
Wikidata ID
Q20176564