In 2021 the Getty Museum acquired a major painting by Jacopo Bassano, The Miracle of the Quails. Documented in 1554 in Jacopo Bassano’s Account Book and commissioned by the Venetian nobleman Domenico Priuli, the subject is a rare depiction of a biblical episode mentioned in the book of Exodus and Numbers, when God miraculously brought quails to the hungry Israelites in the wilderness. Striking in its daring composition and the bravura execution, the painting perfectly embodies the genre to which Jacopo Bassano owed his fame: the depiction of biblical themes with a pastoral character, where realistic details from everyday life are incorporated into compositions of great formal sophistication. Davide Gasparotto will guide us in the discovery of this complex and ambitious work.

Presented by Dr. Davide Gasparotto, Save Venice Board Member and Senior Curator of Paintings, Getty Museum.

Dr. Davide Gasparotto is Senior Curator and Head of the Paintings Department, and Chair, Curatorial Affairs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. A native of Bassano del Grappa, Italy, he was previously the Director of the Fondazione Piero della Francesca in Sansepolcro (1996-98), and a curator at the National Gallery of Parma from 1999 to 2012. From 2012 to 2014 he was Director of the Galleria Estense in Modena. He was also a Francis A. Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute, London (1999), Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (2007), and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011-2012). He organized several acclaimed exhibitions such as Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento (Padova, Palazzo del Monte di Pietà, 2013, with Guido Beltramini and Adolfo Tura), Aldo Manuzio. Il Rinascimento di Venezia (Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, 2016, with Guido Beltramini), and Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice (Los Angeles, Getty Museum, 2017-18).

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Image: Jacopo Bassano, The Miracle of the Quails, 1554.