ART : ART REVIEW : Miracles Meet the Mundane : Jacopo Bassano’s exquisite 16th-Century works abound with rich details of the rural life he chose over the refinements of Venice

Jacopo Bassano was an out-of-towner. Although in 16th-Century Italy the magical city of Venice came to be the undisputed seat of artistic preeminence, with extraordinary painters like Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese decorating palaces and working in the employ of emperors and dukes, Bassano pretty much stayed away.

He had been born in a small town on the Brenta River, in the foothills of the Alps about 30 miles northwest of the glittering pearl of the Adriatic, a town from which his name derives. Both his father and his brother were also painters, and when he had sons--four of them--they became painters too.

Yet, despite his early adoration of Titian’s dazzling art, and aside from a brief and youthful period of study in Venice in the studio of the minor artist Bonifazio de’ Pitati, Bassano spent almost all of his life away from the powerful, highly refined and nearby cultural center.

This decision to work in a provincial town, away from the mighty center but still within the distinct tug of its influential orbit, is one key to understanding Bassano’s sometimes strange, often compelling art. His earthy alertness to the ordinary activities of rural life, in addition to attending to the prerogatives of the city or the court, is not often encountered in 16th-Century art.

It’s also important in coming to terms with the unusual, decidedly contorted place he has been assigned in the history of Western painting. Bassano’s art partakes of elements as diverse as Roman and Florentine Renaissance form, Tuscan Mannerism, the pyrotechnics of Venetian color, Northern European landscape motifs and more, all arrayed within the contours of his own highly inventive point of view. Yet, he’s mostly been acknowledged for one feature of his art that has been severed from the rest.

Because of the unusual proliferation of scenes of ordinary life, typically as context for the religious subject matter of his work, Bassano’s precedent is cited for having legitimized genre painting as a major activity for subsequent generations of artists.

The claim is not necessarily incorrect. It is certainly incomplete. Indeed, a fuller, more coherent and integrated view is among the principal triumphs of the remarkable, eagerly awaited retrospective of Bassano’s art that has now been organized by the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, where it remains on view through April 25, and by the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappo, the artist’s Italian birthplace, where last fall the show had its only other presentation.

Not since 1957 has there been a full-dress retrospective of Bassano’s art, and never before has one been displayed outside Italy. The Kimbell show is the most significant Old Master exhibition to be mounted in the United States this season; it’s likely to be an important complement to the survey of 16th-Century Venetian painting soon to open at the Grand Palais in Paris. The 51 paintings and 19 drawings in Ft. Worth, together with the exhaustive 600-page catalogue, will stand as the authoritative view of Bassano and his art for a very long time to come.

If, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his death, Bassano does not emerge as the equal of his incomparable contemporaries, Titian and Tintoretto--well, they’re not incomparable for nothing.

However, he does assume a prominent place among the second tier--among such artists as Lorenzo Lotto, Correggio and Parmigianino. Especially in a number of exquisite pictures that date from the 1540s, when Bassano first made his mark, he ranks as an unusually gifted artist who is capable of moments of dazzling brilliance.

Although celebrated and successful in his own day, documents of Bassano’s life are scarce (another hazard faced by the out-of-towner). The date of his birth isn’t even known for sure, although current estimates place it somewhere around 1510. Only lately have a number of his paintings been identified, thanks to the recent discovery of the account book he diligently compiled to keep track of the production emanating from his burgeoning workshop.

Bassano’s reputation today is therefore spotty, based on isolated works in private or public collections here and there--or, for those who have made the journey up the Brenta River, based on the group of paintings preserved in the Museo Civico and those found in regional churches. This show should help to change all that.

It also suggests that his gradual “rediscovery” since the 1957 retrospective is coincident with, buoyed by and instrumental to larger alterations in our view of what constitutes worthy art. That’s because prior claims of Bassano’s significance, which have rested on his forceful elevation of homely details and genre scenes to a position of artistic prominence, can only be maintained at the cost of not actually seeing his paintings.

Yes, they are loaded with naturalistic details. Incidental to the principal biblical story enacted in “The Supper at Emmaus” (1538) is a pudgy little dog at the lower left, who languidly eyes a white cat lurking beneath a bench across the room. Furthermore, the unusual composition pushes off to one side the main action of the story: the startling revelation of the identity of the risen Christ to his unsuspecting disciples. Through this odd composition, equal visual weight is given to a chubby figure of a tavern keeper, who--like us--is a passive observer to the scene.

“The Adoration of the Magi” and “The Flight Into Egypt” (both 1542) give prominence to a wealth of genre details: A burro idly munches on grasses, a peasant checks to see what has captured the attention of his sniffing dogs, a herder grabs the horns of his ox to slow his gait, the bare feet of Joseph are soiled and worn.

In the dark and foreboding “Lazarus and the Rich Man,” a hound even presses his nose into open sores on the aged beggar’s legs.

Sometimes, as in two examples from a late cycle of paintings of the four seasons, only prolonged looking will reveal, at the top of a misty hill off in the distance, a tiny scene of the sacrifice of Isaac, or of Moses receiving the tablets of the Law. These little vignettes are dwarfed by the foreground hubbub of farmers shearing sheep, baling hay and stomping grapes.

Still, naturalism is anything but the focus of these paintings. To convey the religious miracles his pictures always describe, Bassano used genre details to valorize a sense of their having occurred amid mundane ordinariness. Everywhere those details are deployed as elements in a richly costumed species of pictorial theater.

The theatricality of Bassano’s art is critical to its power and success. Imagine Veronese’s sumptuous Venetian pageantry as enacted on the farm, with chickens standing in for exotic monkeys and rude farmhands taking the place of silk-draped courtiers, and you’ll have some idea of the tone of these remarkable canvases. They might be rustic, but who could say they aren’t elaborate spectacles?

In typical Mannerist fashion, the compositions of Bassano paintings typically divide attention into small vignettes dispersed around the picture. Formally, he’ll paint the scruffy mane of a donkey with the same loving attention as the ethereal face of the Virgin; he’ll give the donkey the same prominence too.

Bassano, like many other artists of his generation, made extensive use of engravings of major paintings of celebrated artists, borrowing general compositional structure and more specific details. (The proliferation of such engravings was one reason he could live in the provinces and still keep up.) In his hands the effect is of a kind of cut-and-paste collage. His paintings rarely convey a seamless integration of figures in space.

The foreground is a stage for dramatic action, which is typically compressed and full of marvelously observed incident. But, it’s precisely the contrived theatricality of the image that results, and not the naturalism of the details, that sends Bassano’s best pictures into the aesthetic stratosphere.

In the two related, but slightly different versions of “The Adoration of the Shepherds”--the large one from 1546, the smaller from the year before--the classical form of the manger and the elegant Venetian light that gently illuminates the scene together comprise a high-toned setting for a peasant ritual of devotion. The dramatic insertion of common genre elements into this elegant display represents a radical accommodation to common tastes.

It only makes good sense: The painter was an exceptionally gifted artist, who had chosen to live and work in a rural region.

I wouldn’t exactly say Bassano was the Cindy Sherman of the 16th Century; his let’s-play-dress-up paintings don’t destabilize the relationship between image and beholder. In fact, they try to draw a tighter bond between them. Remember, in “The Supper at Emmaus” the prominent tavern keeper is shown passively watching the revelation of the risen Christ--effectively, shown doing exactly what we are doing.

The Kimbell exhibition also confirms that Bassano’s greatest and most compelling paintings will be found among his earliest mature works. They may have come from the rush of excitement in hammering out his own style amid the heady aesthetic updraft of the Venetian epoch--and in finding it successful.

His subsequent work, despite some inventive pictorial experiments and a few first-rate paintings, doesn’t often carry the same electric charge. You have the feeling that, once he got his workshop in gear (he employed his sons to help meet demand), he became cautious about producing for a stable market.

In the 1540s, however, when the artist was in his 30s, he made exciting picture after exciting picture. Indeed, the biggest disappointment of the show is the absence of the 1544-45 version of “The Flight Into Egypt” from Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum of Art. (The museum refused to lend, citing conservation worries.) In what is easily among Bassano’s greatest pictures, a preternaturally serene Madonna and Child seem to float atop the back of the gentle donkey, which is visually pushed along by a lively group of swains and a dramatic figure of the aged Joseph--all led through the wilderness by a wild, gesticulating angel.

The angel, who trails immense wings and a miraculously fluttering robe, is among the most amazing creatures in all of 16th-Century Italian art--and about as far from rustic genre scenery as painting could possibly get.

Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Ft. Worth, (817) 332-8451; through April 25. Closed Mondays.