Domenico Campagnola

Henry Hamal (1744-1820), Liège (L.1231);

Private collection;

sale, London, Sotheby's, 13 March 1975, lot 246;

with Pietro Scarpa, Venice, Disegni e quadri antichi, 1975, no. 11;

Private collection;

sale, London, Phillips, 7 July 1993, lot 125;

Private collection, London;

sale, New York, Christie's, 22 January 2004, lot 9;

with Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd., London, Old Master Drawings, 2004, no. 1,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 3 (entry by Kathleen Stuart);

Northampton, Massachusetts, Smith College Museum of Art; Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Drawn to Excellence: Renaissance to Romantic Drawings from a Private Collection, 2012-2013, no. 3

E. Saccomani, ‘Domenico Campagnola disegnatore di ‘paesi’: Dagli esordi alla prima maturità’, Arte Veneta 36 (1982), p. 85, no. 34;

T. Nickel, Die Landschaftszeichnungen von Domenico Campagnola (1500-1564), unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Universität Wien 2018, pp. 31-2, no. 14

Domenico Campagnola, a pupil of his adoptive father Giulio Campagnola (c. 1482-after 1515), trained in early 16^th-century Venice under the influence of Titian (1485/90(?)-1576) and Giorgione (1477/78-1510). An engraver as well as a draftsman, his drawings share a strong compositional vocabulary with that of the print, as is particularly evident in the present work. Though this graphic handling displays his awareness of leading Northern printmakers, including Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Domenico was most influenced, particularly in such early works, by his stepfather, Giulio.

At the time of the Morgan exhibition (see Exhibited) Tobias Nickel was quoted as dating the Nixon drawing to 1517/1518. This dating was subsequently revised by Nickel to around 1516/1517 (see Literature). In either case the drawing dates from early in Domenico’s career, with the dense penwork and the clustered buildings reminiscent of Giulio’s engravings. Comparable landscape drawings with close stylistic parallels to the present work include Landscape with Two Youths Seated on the Ground, in the British Museum, London,¹ Landscape with Sunset, in the Teyler Museum, Haarlem,² and A Group of Farm Buildings on a Wooded Hill, sold at Sotheby’s in the 1970s.³

^1.London, British Museum, inv. no. 1895,0915.836

^2.See C. van Tuyll van Serooskerken, The Italian Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries in the Teyler Museum, Haarlem 2000, n. 426

^3.Sale, London, Sotheby's, 1 July 1971, lot 8