Giulio Campagnola was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 engraver and painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, whose few, rare, prints

Old master print

An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition . A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques concerned are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are...

 translated the rich Venetian Renaissance style of oil paintings of Giorgione

Giorgione

Giorgione was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work...

 and the early Titian

Titian

Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...

 into the medium of engraving

Engraving

Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...

; to further his exercises in gradations of tone, he also invented the stipple technique. He was the adoptive father of the artist Domenico Campagnola

Domenico Campagnola

Domenico Campagnola was an Italian painter and printmaker in engraving and woodcut of the Venetian Renaissance, but whose most influential works were his drawings of landscapes.-Life and work:...

.

Life

His early years are better documented than his adult life. He was born in Padua

Padua

Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...

, then subject to the republic of Venice

Republic of Venice

The Republic of Venice or Venetian Republic was a state originating from the city of Venice in Northeastern Italy. It existed for over a millennium, from the late 7th century until 1797. It was formally known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice and is often referred to as La Serenissima, in...

, and home to one of the three major European universities of the fifteenth century, the University of Padua

University of Padua

The University of Padua is a premier Italian university located in the city of Padua, Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 as a school of law and was one of the most prominent universities in early modern Europe. It is among the earliest universities of the world and the second...

. His father Girolamo was characterised by A. Hyatt Mayor

A. Hyatt Mayor

A. Hyatt Mayor was an American art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a leading figure in the study of prints, both old master prints and popular prints....

 as "a writer of some note, probably also an amateur artist, who belonged to what would now be called the intelligentsia"; letters by him in very good humanist

Renaissance humanism

Renaissance humanism was an activity of cultural and educational reform engaged by scholars, writers, and civic leaders who are today known as Renaissance humanists. It developed during the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and was a response to the challenge of Mediæval...

 Latin survive. According to Vasari

Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...

 seventy years later, his father was an artist, perhaps as an amateur, but this remark is the only evidence for that.

A number of sources, including Vasari, say that Campagnola was extremely accomplished in a number of artistic areas as a teenager. A letter written by a relative when he was fifteen describes him as a talented poet, singer and lute

Lute

Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....

nist, able to read Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and skilled in painting, engraving and cutting gemstones. This letter was sent to the court at Mantua

Mantua

Mantua is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy and capital of the province of the same name. Mantua's historic power and influence under the Gonzaga family, made it one of the main artistic, cultural and notably musical hubs of Northern Italy and the country as a whole...

 (where Andrea Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna

Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality...

 was then the court artist) in an attempt to find him a position there. It is not clear if he ever went to Mantua, although (like nearly all contemporary Italian printmakers) his work shows the influence of Mantegna. One engraving is certainly based (perhaps not directly, as there was another print of it) on a drawing by Mantegna or his workshop.

In 1499 he appears (rather briefly) in the accounts of the court at Ferrara

Ferrara

Ferrara is a city and comune in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital city of the Province of Ferrara. It is situated 50 km north-northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River, located 5 km north...

, another centre of North Italian printmaking

Printmaking

Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...

. There is then no documentation until 1507, when another Paduan recorded lending him a painting and three copper engraving plates. This was in Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

, where most writers assume he was living by then. His engraving of an Astrologer is dated 1509 on the plate, and the only later record comes from the will of Aldus Manutius

Aldus Manutius

Aldus Pius Manutius , the Latinised name of Aldo Manuzio —sometimes called Aldus Manutius, the Elder to distinguish him from his grandson, Aldus Manutius, the Younger—was an Italian humanist who became a printer and publisher when he founded the Aldine Press at Venice.His publishing legacy includes...

 in 1515, when Manutius asks that he be given the work of cutting the moulds for, or perhaps designing, some printing type

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

.

After this there is no further record, but an engraving plate that he had left half-finished was completed by his adopted son c. 1517, so he is assumed to have died by then at the latest, probably in Venice. He had adopted Domenico Campagnola

Domenico Campagnola

Domenico Campagnola was an Italian painter and printmaker in engraving and woodcut of the Venetian Renaissance, but whose most influential works were his drawings of landscapes.-Life and work:...

, apparently an orphan of German parentage, in about 1512. Another source claimed that he took holy orders

Holy Orders

The term Holy Orders is used by many Christian churches to refer to ordination or to those individuals ordained for a special role or ministry....

, but this is now discounted.

Fortunately, for those seeking to reconstruct his career, he was in the habit of signing, though not dating, his engravings, often with his full name and Antenor

Antenor

Antenor was an Athenian sculptor, of the latter part of the 6th century BC. He was named after the mythological figure also called Antenor. He was the creator of the joint statues of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton, set up by the Athenians on the expulsion of Hippias. These statues...

eus, a slightly showy learned reference to the Trojan whom Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

 designated the founder of Padua.

Professional or amateur?

Most writers see Campagnola as a professional artist, who received some sort of training in Mantua, Ferrara or Venice. Vasari describes him as a painter, and the Venetian connoisseur

Connoisseur

A connoisseur is a person who has a great deal of knowledge about the fine arts, cuisines, or an expert judge in matters of taste.Modern connoisseurship must be seen along with museums, art galleries and "the cult of originality"...

 Marcantonio Michiel

Marcantonio Michiel

Marcantonio Michiel was a Venetian noble from a family prominent in the service of the State who was interested himself in matters of art...

 mentions cabinet painting

Cabinet painting

A cabinet painting is a small painting, typically no larger than about two feet in either dimension, but often much smaller. The term is especially used of paintings that show full-length figures at a small scale, as opposed to say a head painted nearly life-size, and that are painted very...

s that were ascribed to him in Venetian collections in about 1530, but no paintings are generally attributed to him, although he is often brought into arguments about the many "Giorgionesque" paintings without an agreed attribution.

There are drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

s related to his prints, and in a similar style to them, but only a handful of these are generally agreed to be by him, with Titian, Giorgione and in one case Mantegna also being brought into contention. It is still possible to see Campagnola, as the late W.R. Rearick did, as a "dilettante" who probably mostly lived in Padua

Padua

Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...

, probably with another career altogether. This, however, remains a minority view.

Most of his prints have no surviving preparatory drawings, and in general the question of whether Campagnola designed them himself, or got other artists to provide him with drawings which he then engraved is still open, although most historians see him as an independent artist responsible for conceiving as well as executing most of his prints, rather than a precursor of Marcantonio Raimondi

Marcantonio Raimondi

Marcantonio Raimondi, also simply Marcantonio, was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker whose body of work consists mainly of prints copying paintings. He is therefore a key figure in the rise of the reproductive print...

 or Domenico Campagnola in acting as a technical collaborator with a greater artist who supplied the designs.

Work

The dating of his work is based very largely on the stylistic

Style (fiction)

In fiction, style is the manner in which the author tells the story. Along with plot, character, theme, and setting, style is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.-Fiction-writing modes:...

 arrangement of his work around the Astrologer, dated 1509, and his presumed death around 1515. Whilst the chronological sequence of his engravings set out by Arthur M. Hind has been generally accepted, the dating of them remains a subject for discussion.

His early work is heavily influenced by Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...

, and includes one direct copy of a Dürer engraving, and a few where landscape elements are copied in a 'cut and paste' way from Dürer.

The next group of engravings, which include the Astrologer, very successfully interpret the mood of Venetian painting of the first decade of the century in the medium of engraving. It is this group that he is most famous for, and that also introduce his stipple technique. Stippling means engraving

Engraving

Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...

 with dots or little flicks of the burin

Burin

Burin from the French burin meaning "cold chisel" has two specialised meanings for types of tools in English, one meaning a steel cutting tool which is the essential tool of engraving, and the other, in archaeology, meaning a special type of lithic flake with a chisel-like edge which was probably...

, rather than the normal lines. Campagnola is able to convey varying tone by different intensities of dots, rather than by techniques of hatching and cross-hatching usually necessary.

These engravings are in a combination of line and stipple work, and in the case of three of them (The Old Shepherd, The Young Shepherd and The Astrologer), there are first states which are purely in line-work. The plates were later reworked in stipple work, in at least one case after a considerable number of impressions of the first state had been taken.

The final group of prints are almost entirely in stipple, except for the main outlines.

There are also some prints in Campagnola's manner of which the authorship is disputed.

External links

• NGA Washington painting of Judith & Holofernes, by Mantegna or follower "possibly Giulio Campagnola"
• One drawing and several engravings by Campagnola on Zeno.org
• Three further engravings, with notes