Probably by Bernardino da Asola, 'The Garden of Love', about 1535-50

Two elegantly dressed couples have been making music on the banks of a small stream. The young man in the foreground seems to have paused from playing his fiddle and turned to watch the amorous couple on the other bank. The lady reclines beside her lover, caressing his knee and apparently about to lay her head in his lap; a lute and music lie abandoned on the grass. Music and playing instruments are frequently associated with lovemaking in the art and writing of this period. The pair of doves beside the foreground couple and the roses held by the lady – both attributes of Venus – suggest that they are also lovers.

The two other pairs of figures standing in the distant meadows appear to be peasants or pilgrims as they are barefoot and one carries a staff. The four pairs of figures, decreasing in size, are positioned on a diagonal into the depth of the picture. With the implied diagonal formed by the trees and the mountain, this serves to draw our eye to the vanishing point on the horizon at the extreme right edge of the painting. The purpose of these diagonal lines meeting at a vanishing point is to create a believable sense of pictorial space. The artist has also used aerial perspective to enhance the sense of distance in the landscape – the mountains appear blue when seen from so far away.

The costume in this painting dates from about 1540 and is particular to the area around the north Italian city of Brescia. It is so provincial as to almost amount to regional dress. The standing lady wears a short gown, which is extremely unusual, revealing her stockings and shoes. Stockings appear very rarely in sixteenth-century paintings of women. When they do, it is usually because a longer dress has been looped up. The diagonal slashes and trimming on the male costumes are also very unusual – diagonal patterns are rarely seen in sixteenth-century Italian costumes. The trees also appear to be growing slanted on a diagonal.

This work belongs to the sixteenth-century Venetian tradition of pictures of couples making music outdoors in the countryside, the most famous example of which is Titian’s Concert Champêtre (Louvre, Paris) of about 1511. The painting was formerly thought to be Venetian and by a follower of Giorgione. However, the Brescian costume and subject matter suggest that it was painted by a provincial artist influenced by the work of Giorgione and Titian but working outside Venice. The buildings and other features of the background are similar to those in The Madonna and Child and the two doves resemble those in the basket in the Adoration of the Shepherds attributed to Bernardino da Asola.