August

Leandro Bassano's August, dated 1597 and held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is part of a series of monthly allegories that represents one of the Bassano workshop's most sustained contributions to the calendar genre. August, the month of high summer and late grain harvest, provided material for depicting agricultural labor at its most intense — threshing grain, gathering the last wheat, preparing for autumn. Leandro Bassano, who had moved to Venice by the 1580s and built a significant career there independent of the family workshop in Bassano del Grappa, continued the pictorial traditions established by his father Jacopo while adapting them to Venetian taste. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which holds one of the finest collections of Venetian paintings assembled by the Habsburg court, acquired this and other Bassano seasonal works through the extensive Italian art-purchasing that characterized imperial collecting from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Oil on canvas, August as a calendar subject employs the warm, dazzling palette of high summer — bleached yellows of ripe grain, intense blue sky, the dusty ochres of harvested fields. Leandro's mature technique shares the broad, warm brushwork of the Bassano family tradition while showing his own slightly more polished surface treatment. Agricultural implements — scythes, flails, carts — are rendered with the material specificity characteristic of Bassano calendar painting.