1508
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Venus Reclining in a Landscape is a 1508 by Giulio Campagnola, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This engraving shows Venus lying in a grassy meadow, one arm resting behind her head. The trees behind her fade softly into the distance, thanks to tiny dots and flicks in the metal plate—Campagnola’s "dot manner" trick. It makes light feel gentle, like smoky haze. This isn’t an oil painting. It’s a print, carved on metal. That’s rare for a nude Venus in 1508. The dots shape her body and shadows almost like paint. To see more of these early Venetian experiments, check sfumato online.
The Venetian artist Giulio Campagnola introduced the "dot manner," an engraving technique by which shading is created with dots and flicks produced with the point of the burin. This innovation allowed for a much greater range of tone and subtler gradations from dark to light. The effect imitated sfumato, a painting technique for creating soft atmospheric effects practiced by Venetian artists, such as Giorgione, at the time. The influence of and perhaps even the engraver’s collaboration with Giorgione is reflected in the extraordinary beauty and refinement of this rare early impression of…
This artist's training as a gem cutter prepared him well for the relatively new art of engraving, which required carving into a copperplate with a sharp instrument called a burin.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Giulio Campagnola (Italian: ; c. 1482 – c. 1515) was an Italian engraver and painter, whose few, rare, prints translated the rich Venetian Renaissance style of oil paintings of Giorgione and the early Titian into the…
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