1508
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill is a 1508 by Fra Bartolomeo, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This is a soft sketch of a farmhouse on a hillside. Thin lines show the house’s sloping roof and crooked chimney. The trees look quick and lively, like the artist drew them right there. It’s rare because Fra Bartolommeo mostly painted holy scenes. Here he only shows nature—no stories, no people. If you like this, check out work by the same hand at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
This is a significant early example of pure landscape drawing in Europe, as it is dedicated completely to the depiction of nature for its own sake, without suggestion of a biblical or historical narrative. The rapidity and regularity of strokes used for the evergreen and deciduous trees and the sweeping lines in the foreground suggest that the landscape in Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill was made directly from nature. The sheet comes from an album of 41 landscape studies by Fra Bartolommeo assembled by an eighteenth-century collector and disbound for sale in the mid-20th century. A member of…
The artist who made this drawing, Fra (brother) Bartolommeo, left his successful Florentine artistic studio in 1500 and renounced painting in order to join the Dominican Order.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Fra Bartolomeo or Bartolommeo (UK: , US: , Italian: ; 28 March 1472 – 31 October 1517), also known as Bartolommeo di Pagholo, Bartolommeo di San Marco, Bartolomeo di Paolo di Jacopo del Fattorino, and his original…
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