Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ZOLTÁN KÁRPÁTI: A Late Drawing by Domenico Campagnola

Among Campagnola's later works related to his Budapest and Haarlem drawings, the unpublished Annunciation in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (MA), should finally stand here (fig. 44).

14 The drawing derives from the celebrated Venetian Sagredo collection, where it was preserved as a drawing by Titian, as one could read on its inscription from the mid-seventeenth century. The drawings pasted into the albums of the collection were dispersed following the eighteenth century. The Cambridge sheet turned up in 1985 on the French art market, and from here, an American collector, Paul J. Haldeman, purchased it as the drawing of a follower of Titian, later donating it to the Fogg Art Museum, where it was subsequently inventoried as a work by Campagnola. The unnaturally contorted posture of Mary kneeling in Annunciation quotes the Haarlem Mary Magdalene. At the same time, recognisable in the drawing are the influences of Titian's Annunciation commissioned by the Convento di Santa Maria degli Angeli on Murano in 1537, by today, known only from copies, and also of a contemporaneous engraving by Jacopo Caraglio (1505-1565).

15 Campagnola situated this composition, however, within a landscape similar to his Haarlem drawing. All this is not by chance, as Campagnola was known as a specialist of landscape drawing. As opposed to his early drawings produced for the most part in the manner of Titian, taken from a low vantage point, the background dominated by curtain-like groupings of trees, from the 1530s, Campagnola's landscapes unfolded onto wider panoramas. Rooted in the Venetian landscape art of the turn of the sixteenth century, enriched wdth secular or biblical scenes, his quasi-panoramic landscapes, popular also in the circle of his contemporary collectors, however, are also connected along numerous strands with the German landscape, first and foremost the works of Albrecht Altdorfer (ca. 1480-1535) and Wolf Huber (ca. 1485-1553). All this, however, has not in the least amounted to a one-way borrowing of motifs: through their drawings and prints, this can much rather be viewed as stimulating a mediated dialogue. Clarification of the origin of autonomous landscape drawing unfolding in the first decades of the sixteenth century, and of the manifold, far-reaching connections between Campagnola and his contemporaries still awaits resolution. Zoltán Kárpáti is curator of Early Italian Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.