Venetian School, 16th Century

Giorgio Dalla Bella (L.3774 on the verso)

A few hinges at the top and on the side. The bottom right corner missing and made up. A loss made up on the left bottom corner. The drawing must have been partly attached to an old mount now lost, and there is some thinning of the paper which has been reinforced from the back with small pieces of Japan paper. Some grey studio stains and light brown scattered around. Media still quite well preserved white heightening still quite fresh.
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Studies from nature such as this are generally made directly from life and not in preparation for any specific painting.  Although Italian artists ever since the Quattrocento have always been interested in landscape, especially the Venetian and Florentine masters, the survival rate of such landscape drawings from the sixteenth century appears to have been relatively low, compared to figure studies.  In Venice especially, a great tradition for landscapes flourished under artists such as Giorgione and Titian, and subsequently by Domenico Campagnola, who created a genre of landscape drawings executed in pen and ink as well as numerous landscape woodcuts and engravings.

This sheet, executed with the point of the brush and brown wash heightened with white on blue paper, is also technically analogous to the landscape drawings of Barocci, another great and poetic interpreter of these subjects, though the execution and the way the white heightening is applied here is more closely reminiscent of Veronese's style and use of these media.