Portrait of Jacopo Bassano
First quarter of the XVII century. Oil on canvas.Not on display
Although in 1660 Boschini mentioned a Self-Portrait of Jacopo Bassano in the Aromatario collection in Venice, the only surviving versions are replicas attributed to Leandro. The Prado work is identical to the one housed at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence (inv. 1.825; at times attributed to Francesco); there is a third known version that is very similar to the first two but of greater iconographic interest, since it shows the painter with his palette, paintbrushes and other instruments of his profession (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, n. 282). The Madrid and Vienna versions portray the official image of Jacopo, which was engraved by Giacomo Piccini and included by Carlo Ridolfi to illustrate the biography of the painter in Le Maraviglie dell´arte (Venice, 1648). This elderly Jacopo, with a white beard, fur-lined coat and black headdress, so obviously resembles Titian in his final years that the question arises as to whether he did not deliberately imitate the image of the most celebrated Venetian painter of his time. The hypothesis that this work was one of a supposed series of portraits of painters that hung in the Galería del Mediodía of the Alcázar in Madrid in the middle of the 17th century is unfounded, as neither can the other sitters be positively identified with Veronese (Prado, P378), Marietta Robusti (Prado, P384), Paris Bordone (Prado, P32) and Palma el Joven (Prado, P375), nor were they recognised as such in the 1666, 1686 and 1700 inventories (Text drawn from Falomir, M.: Los Bassano en la España del Siglo de Oro, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2001, p. 247).