Landscape with farmyard animals

For a long time this crowded farmyard was catalogued as an autograph work by Jacopo Bassano himself. In 1931 the scholar Wilhelm Arslan reassigned it to his workshop, and that is where the label sits today, though a recent cleaning brought up passages good enough that the question is not quite closed. Either way it shows what made the Bassano family famous across Europe: not saints or battles but animals and the ordinary business of a farm. Painted around 1590, it lines up dogs, poultry and livestock across the foreground with the care other painters gave to noblemen. The canvas reached the Accademia through the Contarini bequest, one of the old Venetian collections that seeded this museum.