Pénélope défaisant son ouvrage

Leandro Bassano's Pénélope défaisant son ouvrage, dated 1601 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, depicts Penelope from Homer's Odyssey at her famous act of loyal deceit: unraveling by night the weaving she has performed by day to delay the suitors demanding she choose a new husband. The subject was a model of female fidelity and marital devotion, celebrated in humanist literature and art as an antidote to the faithless wives found in other mythological stories. Leandro's treatment brings the Bassano workshop's characteristic domestic warmth to the mythological subject: Penelope is shown in an intimate interior setting, the weaving apparatus and dim light of the work emphasizing the ordinary human labor that enacts heroic loyalty. The Rennes holding reflects French collecting of Venetian painting, active from the sixteenth century onward.

Oil on canvas, the work deploys warm, interior candlelight or lamplight — the Bassano specialty — to illuminate Penelope's figure from below and to one side, creating the intimate nocturnal atmosphere appropriate to her secret nighttime unraveling. Paint handling is fluid and atmospheric in shadow passages, more precise in the figure's face and hands.