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.