The Large Market
Details
The story
This canvas is over four metres wide, a market scene on the scale of an altarpiece. Jacopo Bassano made it around 1580 to 1585, in the last years of a long career, when he and his sons were running the family workshop together.
1580 was also the year Charles Emmanuel I became Duke of Savoy, at 18, ruling from Turin, the capital his father had moved there from Chambéry 17 years earlier. Venetian painting was a favourite at his court, and the Galleria Sabauda credits him with bringing the pictures of Jacopo Bassano and his sons to Turin.
Market scenes sold well, and the Bassano workshop painted more than one. In Turin this canvas goes by the Large Market, and the same gallery owns a smaller market scene by Jacopo's son Leandro, signed LEANDER BASSANO on a stone near the bottom.
