“One of the most splendid of his plates is the St. John the Baptist, with a dignity of design whose origin may probably be traced back to some drawing by Mantegna, though the landscape is of course thoroughly Paduan or Venetian in its character.” Arthur M. Hind.
Reproduced from the impression in the Print Department,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Size of the original engraving. 13⅝ × 9⁵⁄₁₆ inches
Giulio and Domenico Campagnola. Shepherds in a Landscape
“It is Giorgione again whom we see reflected in the Shepherds in a Landscape, a plate which seems to have been left unfinished by Giulio and completed by Domenico Campagnola. There is a drawing in the Louvre for the right half of the print, and there is every reason to think that this drawing as well as the engraving of that portion of the landscape is by Giulio. But the group of figures and trees on the left is entirely characteristic of the looser technical manner of Domenico.” Arthur M. Hind.
Size of the original engraving, 5⅜ × 10⅛ inches
One of the most splendid of his plates is the St. John the Baptist, with a dignity of design whose origin may probably be traced back to some drawing by Mantegna, though the landscape is of course thoroughly Paduan or Venetian in its character. More completely characteristic, and the most purely Giorgionesque of all his prints, is the Christ and the Woman of Samaria, one of the most wonderfully beautiful of all the engravings of this period.
It is Giorgione again whom we see reflected in the Shepherds in a Landscape, a plate which seems to have been left unfinished by Giulio and completed by Domenico Campagnola. There is a drawing in the Louvre for the right half of the print, and there is every reason to think that this drawing as well as the engraving of that portion of the landscape is by Giulio. But the group of figures and trees on the left is entirely characteristic of the looser technical manner of Domenico. The existence of a copy of the right-hand portion of the plate alone points to the existence of an unfinished state of the original, though no such impressions have been found. In any case it distinctly supports the theory that the other part of the original print was a later addition.
We may have to admit in conclusion that there is nothing in Italian engraving before Marcantonio quite on a level with the achievement of Albrecht Dürer, but the indefinable allure that characterizes so much of the work of the minor Italian artists of the earlier Renaissance is more than enough compensation for any lack of technical efficiency. With Marcantonio we find this efficiency in its full development, joined to a remarkable individuality in the interpretation of sketches by Raphael and other painters. Yet we could ill afford to lose the charm of the early Florentine Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne for all the finished beauty of Marcantonio’s Lucretia, and it is still the youth of artistic development, with its naïve joy and freshness of outlook, which holds us with the stronger spell.