Giovanni Battista Palumba, also known as the Master I.B. with a Bird (or the Bird etc.), was an Italian printmaker active in the early 16th century, making both engravings and woodcuts; he is generally attributed with respectively 14 and 11 of these.[1] He appears to have come from northern Italy, but later worked in Rome.[2] He specialized in subjects from classical mythology,[3] as well as the inevitable religious subjects. Despite his relatively small output, he was a sophisticated artist, whose style shows a number of influences and changes, reflecting awareness of the currents in artistic style at the start of the High Renaissance.[4] The signed prints are usually dated to around 1500–1511.[5]
His earlier name comes from the monogram with which most of his prints are signed, the initials IB followed by a small image of a pigeon-like bird. The Italian word palumbo means 'pigeon' (the Latin name of the common wood pigeon is Columba palumbus), and in Latin the initial for Giovanni ('John' in English) is I, for Iohannes.[6] He is not to be confused with the Master I.B., a German printmaker active in Nuremberg c. 1523–1530.
Atalanta and Meleager hunting the Calydonian boar, woodcut, Palumba's largest (270 × 445mm) and perhaps most accomplished print.
He is also attributed with various woodcuts for book illustrations from both before and after the 1500s, though all of these are rejected by some, and he is generally accepted as the author of a drawing in the British Museum related to his print of Leda and the Swan, with their Children.
Identification and known biographical facts
Master I.B. with a Bird had long been known, and is catalogued by Bartsch. In the 18th century the famous print collector Pierre-Jean Mariette had already proposed that the monogram hid a name with an avian meaning such as "Joannes Baptista Palumbus",[8] and in 1923 Arthur Mayger Hind speculated: "One thinks of Passeri [sparrow] or Uccello [bird] as possible surnames".[9] In the 19th century an artist from Modena called Giovanni Battista del Porto was believed by many to be Master I.B. with a Bird. In the 1930s James Byam Shaw, who published on the prints, thought he might be Jacopo Ripanda, known as a painter and designer of antiquarian prints from Bologna, who mixed in the Roman humanist milieu that the prints reflect; ripanda is an Italian term for a water-bird.[10]
The question was settled in 1936 when Augusto Campana published a gloss in a manuscript of poetry by Evangelista Maddeleni dei Cappodiferro in the Vatican Library which identified Palumba by referring to his print of Leda and the Swan, and this identification is now universally accepted.[11] Campana dated the epigram on the Leda to 1503, based on the sequence in the manuscript, but Konrad Oberhuber argues for a date around 1508–10, based on the style of the print itself, and its closeness to datable prints of that period by Marcantonio Raimondi.[12]
Identifying Master I.B. with a Bird with Palumba brought almost no extra biographical information, as there are no other documentary records with the name.[13] The same Vatican manuscript credits Palumba with a painted portrait of a Sicilian servant, perhaps of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna (1456–1508). A Pietro Paolo Palumba, who published prints in Rome dated between 1559 and 1584, describes himself as "Palumbus successor Palumbi".[14]
Extrapolating from the stylistic influences visible in the prints, he is believed to have had a background in or close to Milan or Bologna, with some claiming unsigned woodcut book illustrations published there or in Saluzzo between 1490 and 1503 are by him.[15] Hind thought that one early engraving "with its niello-like background, suggests a goldsmith's education," and that "it seems rash to dogmatize on the locality of so eclectic a spirit"[16] Goldsmithing was a common background for engravers as the technique was first used on metalwork, and formed part of their normal training. This early period was followed by a move to Rome by about 1503; one print shows some "freaks of nature" that were news there in 1503.[17] The dates estimated for his independent prints finish around 1510,[18] though the portraits in Illustrium Imagines would have been from some years later, if they are his.
Palumba has also been suggested as the author of the long series of imagined profile head portraits of famous people in Andrea Fulvio's Illustrium Imagines (1517), though this idea has been rejected by other writers.[19] He was proposed by Campana as the author of other woodcut book illustrations published in Venice and Siena between 1521 and 1524, though A.M. Hind disagreed. Oberhuber concludes that "It seems to be clear, at least, that after about 1510–11 Palumba's production of single woodcuts and engravings ceases".[20]
A drawing in the British Museum of Leda and the Swan, with their Children had been attributed to Giorgione, Sodoma, and "Anonymous: Milanese School", before Hind's attribution to Palumba was generally accepted. The composition is very similar to the engraving of the same subject (in reverse), as are the style and mood, though the background and minor details in the poses of the figures are different.[21]
Prints and style
Engravers generally worked the plates for their designs at this period, and it is assumed Palumba did the same. Conversely, like many or most designers of woodcuts, he probably did not cut the blocks himself; some of his woodcuts have other initials, presumably those of specialist block-cutters.[22] He seems to have practised both techniques throughout the period of the prints with monograms.[23] There is a single late chiaroscuro woodcut of Saint Sebastian, with one line and one tone block; this is very early for Italy, and a "truly pictorial" print.[24]
Many of the prints taken to be relatively early show clear debts, especially in the landscape backgrounds, to the prints of Albrecht Dürer, especially those from the last five years of the 15th century; these were widely circulated in north Italy and had a strong and immediate influence on many printmakers.[25] The religious subjects are mostly regarded as early, a woodcut of the Crucifixion having many similarities to Andrea Solari's painting (now Louvre) made in Milan in 1503.[26]
A number of the prints follow the fashion for imagining the varieties of humanoids of classical mythology in their family lives, already set by Dürer, Jacopo de' Barbari and others. Palumba's prints include families of tritons, fauns, and satyrs, though in most the females and children appear anatomically human. These and other prints "reflect the taste for the antique, mixed with a feeling for the bizarre and delicately beautiful" of Filippino Lippi, Pinturicchio, Peruzzi and Ripanda.[31] He is also interested in Ovidian transformations, with two prints of Leda, and others of Europa being carried off, and Actaeon half-transformed.
The approximate chronology proposed by Friedrich Lippmann in a paper of 1894 on the woodcuts has remained largely accepted, and Oberhuber is content to add the engravings to it. The prints are divided into chronological stages or groups, A to E.[32]
His woodcuts have been described, by Mark McDonald, as "amongst the most important produced in Italy (Rome) during the early years of the sixteenth century",[33] but most Italian makers of independent prints (as opposed to book illustrations) preferred to use engraving.[34] Exceptions include Titian, who experimented with woodcuts (executed by others, but with his encouragement) in these years. One link between the two artists is the unusual size of their woodcuts. At 270 x 445mm and carved on a single block, Atalanta and Meleager hunting the Calydonian boar takes the woodcut near the edge of what is technically feasible; most woodcuts this size use multiple blocks. There was a fashion, mostly in Germany, for even larger woodcuts that were conceived as murals, either pasted to walls or mounted on textiles like Chinese paintings.[35]
Leda and the Swan was a subject that fitted Palumba's taste in subjects, and he engraved it twice; it was fashionable in the period, and a number of artists made depictions. The first is grouped in Lippmann's stage D, perhaps from around 1508, and shows the couple making love enthusiastically in a landscape. The second is from stage E, perhaps around 1510, and is one of his last and most highly praised prints. The British Museum drawing clearly relates to the print, and is "tentatively attributable to Master I.B.'s own hand".[36]
Leda had also been a preoccupation of Leonardo da Vinci, who also worked on "a series of themes and variations on the subject of Leda and her children",[37]centering on two compositions, in the approximate period 1503–1510; these both featured the children in some versions. Neither survive as paintings by Leonardo, but there are a number of drawings for both by him, and copies in oils, especially of the second composition, where Leda stands.[38] Neither of Palumba's compositions borrow directly from Leonardo, but the second "appropriates the stylistic ideals created by Leonardo",[39] and "in its final form, represents a harmonious fusion of Leonardo and Dürer".[40] According to Vasari, Leonardo's disciple Cesare da Sesto was in Rome, probably around 1508–09, which is one possible route for Palumba's apparent awareness of Leonardo's designs.[41]
In the drawing the background is a Dürer-esque clump of trees and rocks, but in the print this is replaced by the famous Roman ruin known as the Temple of Minerva Medica, in fact a nymphaeum, given an invented coastal setting.[42] In the print "the classically inspired female nude and accompanying putti [the children] arrange themselves into the sort of tightly knit pyramidal configuration universally associated with principles of Italian High Renaissance design".[43]
↑ Oberhuber, 440–441 – The manuscript gave various characters nicknames, the actual names being given in notes in the margins. There was an epigram "Of Leda printed by Dares", with Palumba named in the margin; BM
↑ "There is not a single bit of written or printed source material that links Giovanni Battista Palumba to the portraits in Andrea Fulvio's Illustrium Imagines. The question remains with us as to how an art historian can link the aerated style of Palumba in the larger pictures with the dense black and white sketchy portraits in the Illustrium Imagines...", Spink Numismatic Circular, Volume 108, 2000
Albrecht Dürer, sometimes spelled in English as Durer or Duerer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints. He was in contact with the major Italian artists of his time, including Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Leonardo da Vinci, and from 1512 was patronized by Emperor Maximilian I.
Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces or rapes Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. According to many versions of the story, Zeus took the form of a swan and had sexual intercourse with Leda on the same night she slept with her husband King Tyndareus. In some versions, she laid two eggs from which the children hatched. In other versions, Helen is a daughter of Nemesis, the goddess who personified the disaster that awaited those suffering from the pride of Hubris.
In Greek mythology, Lotis was a nymph mentioned by Ovid.
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that the artist cuts away carry no ink, while characters or images at surface level carry the ink to produce the print. The block is cut along the wood grain. The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with an ink-covered roller (brayer), leaving ink upon the flat surface but not in the non-printing areas.
Events from the year 1515 in art.
Renaissance art is the painting, sculpture, and decorative arts of the period of European history known as the Renaissance, which emerged as a distinct style in Italy in about AD 1400, in parallel with developments which occurred in philosophy, literature, music, science, and technology. Renaissance art took as its foundation the art of Classical antiquity, perceived as the noblest of ancient traditions, but transformed that tradition by absorbing recent developments in the art of Northern Europe and by applying contemporary scientific knowledge. Along with Renaissance humanist philosophy, it spread throughout Europe, affecting both artists and their patrons with the development of new techniques and new artistic sensibilities. For art historians, Renaissance art marks the transition of Europe from the medieval period to the Early Modern age.
Marcantonio Raimondi, often called simply Marcantonio, was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker whose body of work consists largely of prints copying paintings. He is therefore a key figure in the rise of the reproductive print. He also systematized a technique of engraving that became dominant in Italy and elsewhere. His collaboration with Raphael greatly helped his career, and he continued to exploit Raphael's works after the painter's death in 1520, playing a large part in spreading High Renaissance styles across Europe. Much of the biographical information we have comes from his life, the only one of a printmaker, in Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
The Nuremberg Chronicle is an illustrated encyclopedia consisting of world historical accounts, as well as accounts told through biblical paraphrase. Subjects include human history in relation to the Bible, illustrated mythological creatures, and the histories of important Christian and secular cities from antiquity. Finished in 1493, it was originally written in Latin by Hartmann Schedel, and a German version was translated by Georg Alt. It is one of the best-documented early printed books—an incunabulum—and one of the first to successfully integrate illustrations and text.
An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition. The term remains current in the art trade, and there is no easy alternative in English to distinguish the works of "fine art" produced in printmaking from the vast range of decorative, utilitarian and popular prints that grew rapidly alongside the artistic print from the 15th century onwards. Fifteenth-century prints are sufficiently rare that they are classed as old master prints even if they are of crude or merely workmanlike artistic quality. A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term.
Giulio Campagnola 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 medium of engraving; to further his exercises in gradations of tone, he also invented the stipple technique, where multitudes of tiny dots or dashes allow smooth graduations of tone in the essentially linear technique of engraving; variations on this discovery were to be of huge importance in future printmaking. He was the adoptive father of the artist Domenico Campagnola.
Jacopo de' Barbari, sometimes known or referred to as de'Barbari, de Barberi, de Barbari, Barbaro, Barberino, Barbarigo or Barberigo, was an Italian painter, printmaker and miniaturist with a highly individual style. He moved from Venice to Germany in 1500, thus becoming the first Italian Renaissance artist of stature to work in Northern Europe. His few surviving paintings include the first known example of trompe-l'œil since antiquity. His twenty-nine engravings and three very large woodcuts were also highly influential.
Events from the year 1553 in art.
The decade of the 1470s in art involved some significant events.
Giovanni Antonio da Brescia was an Italian engraver of northern Italy, active in the approximate period 1490–1519, during the Italian Renaissance. In his early career he used the initials "Z.A." to sign some twenty engravings, and until recently Zoan Andrea was regarded as a distinct printmaker; it is now realized that they are the same person, and the "Z.A." stood for Giovanni Antonio, "Zovanni" being a north Italian spelling. Around 1507 he began to use formulae such as "IO.AN.BX.", and signed some prints more fully. The real Zoan Andrea was a very obscure painter, documented as working in Mantua in the 1470s, who produced no engravings.
Events from the year 1512 in art.
The story of Leda and the Swan was the subject of two compositions by Leonardo da Vinci from perhaps 1503–1510. Neither survive as paintings by Leonardo, but there are a number of drawings for both by him, and copies in oils, especially of the second composition, where Leda stands.
The Little Masters, were a group of German printmakers who worked in the first half of the 16th century, primarily in engraving. They specialized in very small finely detailed prints, some no larger than a postage stamp. The leading members were Hans Sebald Beham, his brother Barthel, and George Pencz, all from Nuremberg, and Heinrich Aldegrever and Albrecht Altdorfer. Many of the Little Masters' subjects were mythological or Old Testament stories, often treated erotically, or genre scenes of peasant life. The size and subject matter of the prints shows that they were designed for a market of collectors who would keep them in albums, of which a number have survived.
Benedetto Montagna was an Italian engraver and painter. Montagna was born in Vicenza, the son of the leading painter of the city, Bartolomeo Montagna, with whom he trained and perhaps continued to work. His approximately 53 engravings seem to have been produced in the period from about 1500 until his father died in 1523 and he inherited the workshop; in these years he was "the most prolific engraver of his generation in northern Italy". He ran the workshop into at least the 1540s, but his paintings fell behind the development of Italian styles as they largely follow his father's style, less successfully. Many do not survive. His prints are generally found more significant by art historians.
The Leonardeschi were the large group of artists who worked in the studio of, or under the influence of, Leonardo da Vinci. They were artists of Italian Renaissance painting, although his influence extended to many countries within Europe.
Master MZ was an engraver active in south Germany around 1500. He signed his 22 engravings with his monogram "MZ", and six are dated, all 1500, 1501 or 1503. He worked in Munich in Bavaria, and in 1500 seems to have been connected to the court of Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria. There are complicated but inconclusive arguments for and against identifying him with a goldsmith called Matthäus Zaisinger, a painter known as Master MS, and other figures.
AM Hind (1923), A History of Engraving and Etching, 1923, Houghton Mifflin Co., reprinted Dover Publications, 1963, ISBN0-486-20954-7
AM Hind (1935), An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, Volume II, 1935, Houghton Mifflin Co., reprinted Dover Publications 1963, ISBN0-486-20953-9
Landau, David, and Parshall, Peter. The Renaissance Print, Yale, 1996, ISBN0-300-06883-2
McDonald, Mark, Ferdinand Columbus, Renaissance Collector, 2005, British Museum Press, ISBN978-0-7141-2644-9
Oberhuber, Konrad, in: Jay A. Levinson (ed.) Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington (Catalogue), 1973, LOC 7379624
Zucker, Mark J., in K.L. Spangeberg (ed), Six Centuries of Master Prints, Cincinnati Art Museum, 1993, ISBN0-931537-15-0
Further reading
AM Hind, 'Early Italian Engraving', vol.V, 1948 (16 nos catalogued)
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