HUNGER GAMES

The Miracle of the Quails by Jacopo Bassano combines the sophisticated palette one would expect from a Venetian painting with an equally refined composition. Davide Gasparotto of the Getty, which acquired the work last year, tells Apollo what makes this Biblical scene so unusual

The painting shows a very rarely depicted episode from the Old Testament, the episode of the Miracle of the Quails, which is mentioned very briefly in the Book of Exodus and the Book of Numbers. What we see in the painting, on the left, in the middle ground, is Moses and Aaron engaged in a conversation, while the rest of the canvas is occupied by a beautifully animated, naturalistic depiction of the people of Israel, who gather these birds, these quails, miraculously fallen from the sky. The episode in the Bible comes immediately before the more famous and more frequently depicted Miracle of the Manna. The story goes that the Israelites left Egypt, they crossed the Red Sea, then they were stuck in the desert and starving, so God sent them some food.

In the painting the landscape is not the Sinai desert, which Jacopo never saw, but it’s really suggestive of the Prealps – and the mountain that is portrayed in the background is Monte Grappa, the mountain that dominates Bassano, which was Jacopo’s home town [from which he takes his name].

The patron was a Venetian nobleman named Domenico Priuli. The painting was probably destined for his palace in Venice. I imagine it hanging in the great portico, in the long room that characterises Venetian aristocratic homes and probably facing another painting by Jacopo, as previous scholars have suggested: Lazarus and the Rich Man (c. 1550), which is today in Cleveland [at the Cleveland Museum of Art]. It’s almost identical in size.

Most of the people are engaged in gathering the birds. There is a group, but everyone is psychologically isolated from each other, so everyone is caught in a moment. The figures in the very foreground, one seen from behind and the other seen from the front, are typical Jacopo figures, bringing us into the painting, inside the composition. Then there are these poetic episodes of a child seen from behind, nude, holding one of the quails near the beautiful basket of flowers. There is a mother holding the child in her lap. There are two guys – a little bit more in the background

– who are gathering the birds from the tree. Then this mysterious woman in the middle of the picture, really like a column, who has a strong presence. She is looking to Moses and Aaron, maybe expecting something from them, because they are really absorbed in their own conversation. I find this female figure – which has a central role in the composition, dividing the composition into two – very striking, but also very mysterious because she is absorbed in her own thoughts. To me there’s a great power in the overall composition, but also in these individual episodes, not to mention the wonderful background with this stormy landscape with Monte Grappa, with the tents of the Israelites. In some ways I would say it is unique in Jacopo’s long career.

One of the things that you immediately notice is that, only one figure – the man with the hat, with the plume at the left, in the background near Aaron – is looking outside of the picture, is looking towards us. Everyone else is absorbed in doing something or thinking something, so nobody is really looking at us, but despite this we are drawn into the picture. We are drawn in and then invited to wander around. This is a Venetian painting, it’s not a central Italian or Florentine painting. I find the composition very compelling; it’s apparently natural but in the end it’s very calculated as a composition.

I don’t think there is a particular significance in the colours, but they are very striking and very different from what Jacopo used before, especially in the 1540s. His range of colours is very harmonious – there are rose colours, greens, chocolate browns, this very lustrous white – but it’s also an earthy palette, darker. There are strong contrasts of light and shade and this was new in Jacopo’s artistic development. If we look at some paintings from the 1540s, they are very different. They are luminous, their colours are very brilliant, the contours of the figures are more precisely drawn. They are not as shadowy as this picture. Here Jacopo is really moving in a direction which will become more typical, using the kind

There is a group, but everyone is psychologically isolated from each other, everyone is caught in a moment