Sheep and Lamb

This small canvas, about half a metre wide, holds nothing but a ewe and her lamb. The lamb has dropped to its knees under its mother to suckle, while she stands in profile against a dark ground. The Galleria Borghese dates it to around 1576, when Bassano's family workshop was turning out Bible scenes crowded with flocks and herds, and the museum reads this picture as animals painted as a subject in their own right. It was already in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the papal nephew who assembled this gallery, by about 1633. A Roman guidebook of 1650 called it a Titian. Later inventories moved it to the Bassano workshop, and today it is given to Jacopo himself, the head of the family. The museum records its frame as 16th-century work, with arabesques on a black ground.