Landscapes by Wolf Huber and Domenico Campagnola, Invented, Copied, and Replicated Christopher S
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312 | Christopher S. Wood | 313 Landscapes by Wolf Huber and Domenico Campagnola, invented, copied, and replicated Christopher S. Wood Wolf huber and Domenico Campagnola, ver - lost huber originals. among huber’s drawings, satile and inventive artists, developed new ap - the landscapes and near-landscapes were the proaches to the replication and marketing of most likely to survive: Winzinger lists only eight images, recalibrating the relations between preparatory drawings for the paintings and fif - drawings and prints; between preparatory teen “free studies” of bodies, drapery, and so drawings, drawn copies of drawings, and drawn forth. copies of prints; between drawings that stay in the shop and drawings that are sent out into the Wolf huber’s earliest landscape drawings are world; and between artists and non-artist col - fantastic inventions involving impossibly steep lectors. landscape was the semantically rela - crags, romantic castles, and expressive pollarded tively neutral field where all this was worked trees. he also made topographical drawings, out. Some of huber’s and Campagnola’s land - depicting real places. Both kinds of landscape scape drawings may be understood – in fact drawing stored ideas that could be used in were understood in their time, it is proposed prints or paintings. Beginning in the mid-1510s here – not as the carriers of workshop processes he created landscape drawings which synthe - of transfer and translation but rather as pictures sized the two types: they appear to be based on of those processes. the notion of a drawing that a real motif but are developed as compositions, represents the functions of drawing is the basis that is, as depictions, which do not borrow their of a new definition of the independent drawing internal structure from reality but create it out in the Renaissance. of their own resources. In these drawings an equilibrium between two-dimensional pattern 1 WOLF HUBER, FOREST HUT, C. 1514, PEN AND INK, 159 X 220 MM. MUNICH, STAATLICHE GRAPHISCHE SAMMLUNG, INV. 32459 Wolf huber was born in the 1480s in Feldkirch and a depicted virtual three-dimensional reality in the alpine province of Vorarlberg, and lived dominates the suggestion of a transcription of and worked mostly in Passau in lower Bavaria. reality. a good example is the Forest Hut in Mu - he painted altarpieces, independent devotional nich ( fig. 1). 1 a composition has a formal theme pictures, and portraits. huber also designed that may or may not be coordinated with thirteen woodcuts. of the 162 drawings attrib - themes generated by the represented content of uted to huber by Franz Winzinger, nearly 50 the drawing. In this drawing, form endorses are landscapes or tree or foliage studies, and content. a forest hut is a refuge. huber brings about 20 more are subjects conspicuously set out the vulnerability of that outpost of civiliza - in landscapes. In addition, Winzinger lists 30 tion by plunging the hut into a maelstrom of landscape drawings by other hands which he inward collapsing vectors. the bending of the believes reflect lost originals by huber. a fur - fence, the logs, the path, the trees, and the rays ther group of landscapes in the same manner of the sun suggest great forces bearing down on Winzinger detaches from huber, but in fact the little structure, threatening it. the distorting they too may derive directly or indirectly from foreshortening of the hut redoubles the formal 314 | Christopher S. Wood lanDSCaPES BY WolF hUBER anD DoMEnICo CaMPaGnola | 315 although some of the copies of huber land - by mechanical replication or by hand-copying. scapes are dated, none are initialed, as many We will return to him later. huber originals are. the corpus was assembled by Peter halm in 1930 5 and revised by Domenico Campagnola was born probably Winzinger in 1979. at some point Winzinger around 1500 in Venice. his father was German; will need to be overhauled. But for a long time he was adopted by the artist Giulio Campagno - there have been no significant new studies and la. his earliest works, a group of engravings and few discoveries. huber’s landscape drawings woodcuts , are dated or dated to 1517–18. By pose many puzzles. how long did they stay in 1523 he is documented in Padua as pittore ; a the workshop? Where were the copies made, number of murals and oil paintings have been and by whom? Were they ever sold or given to attributed to him. Domenico’s early landscape non-artists? drawings are close to titian, for example this Landscape in the Uffizi in which transcription Unlike his contemporary albrecht altdorfer, competes with composition ( fig. 4). 8 the moun - who issued nine landscape etchings at the be - tains and city in the background are lifted from ginning of the 1520s, huber made no landscape other works, but the mass of earth and stumps prints. Some ideas developed in his landscape in the foreground suggest direct observation. drawings, however, were published in his wood - the function of such a sheet was basically to cuts, for example the St George and the Dragon , store ideas for paintings and prints. titian’s dated 1520 ( fig. 3). 6 the lone soaring tree, the drawings and woodcuts provide the clue. Some heaped-up crag, and the roiled clouds and ra - themes in landscape drawings by titian resur - 2 WOLF HUBER, FOREST HUT, 1519, PEN AND TWO SHADES OF BROWN INK ON IVORY LAID PAPER, 140 X 195 MM. PRINCETON (NJ), diating light of this woodcut are all familiar face in woodcuts of the 1520s and subsequent PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM, INV. X1952-85 from the drawings, for example the Mountain decades. an example is the Landscape with Landscape in Berlin, a copy which bears the date Milkmaid , usually dated c. 1525, cut by niccolò theme of pressure from above. the artistic in - sitions attributed to huber by Winzinger, about of the lost original by huber, 1517. 7 In the Boldrini after a design by titian. 9 In later terest of the drawing, which far exceeds the in - half were copied, in some cases more than once woodcut, the subject matter is overwhelmed by decades about a dozen large landscape-oriented terest of a drawing that pragmatically stores in - (in ten cases the original by huber survives as the landscape: either huber lacked the will or woodcuts were published after designs by formation about nature for later use, derives well, in thirty cases only the copy or copies). the the cutter lacked the skill to profile St George Domenico Campagnola. a good example is the from the interaction between the theme gener - copies are often dated, as are huber’s originals: and the dragon clearly against their vegetal Landscape with St John the Baptist (fig. 5). 10 In ated on the level of the signifier and the theme 30 of his landscape drawings are dated in his background. this woodcut broadcasts to a wide these compositions Biblical, mythological or pas - proposed by the content. own hand, ranging from 1505 to 1552. 2 the ear - audience artistic ideas which, if they were con - toral subject matter is engulfed by the drama of liest date on a copy is 1519; there are dated copies fined to a single pen drawing, would be seen by terrain, vegetation, and weather. Whereas titian’s Who is the composed landscape drawing for? from the 1520s, 1530s, and 1540s, as well as from very few people. a print, however, is unable to Landscape with Milkmaid sat on a stable ground this drawing is artistically complete and yet 1568 and 1609, long after the artist’s death in capture many of a drawing’s most appealing fea - plane, Campagnola’s Landscape with St John the bears traces of its own genesis in improvisation 1553. there are four copies of the Munich Forest tures, for example, the traces of the artist’s hes - Baptist is tumultuous, lawless. among such veg - and discovery, marks of hesitation and haste. It Hut ; Winzinger attributes none of them to hu - itating or experimenting hand. Moreover, a etation and terrain, subject matter is supereroga - lacks the degree of finish expected in the early ber. 3 In fact he considers none of the landscapes print – altdorfer’s etchings were for a long time tory, as suggested coyly by John the Baptist him - sixteenth century of publicly displayed works to be a self-copy by the artist. the copy of the the only exceptions – could not simply omit self, who points out to the approaching initiates of art in any medium. Forest Hut in Princeton, dated 1519, is certainly subject matter. landscape in a print had to their destination, invisible to us (though why are not by huber ( fig. 2). 4 the drawing simplifies make room for a story. I believe that huber was they walking away from the River Jordan?). to answer this question we begin by noting that its model. the cluster of five trees behind the well aware of these problems and that his land - huber’s landscape compositions were frequently hut becomes three trees. the hut has been stead - scape drawings bore an evolving, reactive rela - there is a large corpus of landscape drawings copied. of the nearly eighty landscape compo - ied, draining the composition of drama. tion to the possibilities of publication, whether in more or less this manner, datable mostly to 316 | Christopher S. Wood lanDSCaPES BY WolF hUBER anD DoMEnICo CaMPaGnola | 317 4 DOMENICO CAMPAGNOLA, LANDSCAPE, C. 1520, PEN AND INK, 222 X 368 MM. FLORENCE, GALLERIE DEGLI UFFIZI, GABINETTO DEI DISEGNI E DELLE STAMPE, INV. 1404E the second quarter of the sixteenth century, added. Such realized drawings are often de - whose attributions over the centuries have drift - scribed by scholars as presentation drawings or ed around titian and Campagnola.