The Small Market

Until 2008 the painter's name on this canvas could not be read. That year the conservation centre at La Venaria Reale, the former Savoy hunting palace outside Turin, cleaned the picture, and on a stone in the lower middle a signature came up, LEANDER BASSANO, his first name in its Latin form. The same cleaning showed that the canvas had already been retouched twice, at different times.

A signature counts for a lot with this family. Jacopo Bassano and his sons ran one workshop and painted the same subjects side by side, crowded country markets among them, so unsigned pictures are often hard to give to a single hand. The museum dates this one after 1580 and to about 1585, when Leandro was in his twenties and still working beside his father. Jacopo's own Large Market, from those same years, hangs in this room.