Summer

Around 1574 Jacopo Bassano designed a series of the four seasons, a new kind of picture in Italy, in which the work of the farm year fills the canvas and a small Bible story plays out far behind it. The idea came from northern calendar pictures, and it sold. His family workshop repeated the seasons for years, and engravings by the Sadelers, a family of Flemish printmakers, carried them across Europe.

In Summer the front of the picture belongs to sheep shearing and to a woman resting with three children, while further back the crop is cut, gathered and threshed. Far in the distance Abraham is about to sacrifice his son Isaac. For a long time this Vienna canvas was given to Jacopo's son Francesco. The Kunsthistorisches Museum now attributes it to Jacopo himself and dates it around 1576.