Review
"Following the text are extensive notes and a comprehensive bibliography that, taken together, become a valuable research tool for those interested in the topic. This book makes a significant contribution to the small body of works associated with Jacopo Bassano and, at the same time, suggests to the reader an alternate method of reading his paintings." Katherine A. McIver, Sixteenth Century Journal

"This is a sound book as well as a beautiful one. It reveals an art historian who commands an unusual amount of relevant fact about the sermons in words, as well as the sermons in pictures, of the Sixteenth Century." Bibliotheque D'Humanisme

"It is a testament to the interst and innovation of Berdini's own work that such research and discussion would seem to be well worth the effort." Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

Book Description
In The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis, Paolo Berdini offers a new and provocative reevaluation of a selected group of paintings, drawings, and religious objects by one of the inventive artists of the late Italian Renaissance. This study also challenges traditional iconograph analysis, particularly the word-image paradigm celebrated in much art history. Utilizing both the methods of hermeneutics and phenomenology, The Religous Art of Jacopo Bassano introduces a new model for understanding the painter as a reader, and for coming to terms with visual exegesis.

Card catalog description
In The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis, Paolo Berdini offers a new and provocative evaluation of paintings, drawings, and religious objects by a Late Renaissance artist from the periphery of the Venetian Republic. Addressing these works within historical context, particularly the reforms in religious experience occasioned by the Council of Trent, this study also challenges traditional iconographic analysis, particularly the word-image paradigm celebrated in much art history. Utilizing the methods of both hermeneutics and phenomenology, The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano introduces a new model for understanding images based on texts. Observing the painter first as reader, the model proceeds to suggest that, in the same way that reading subscribes to specific norms called exegesis, so too painting may be considered a form of exegesisvisual exegesis.

FROM THE PUBLISHER