Jacopo de' Barberi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jacopo de' Barberi (probably born in Venice, died in the Netherlands before 1516) was an Italian painter and printmaker with a highly individual style. He moved from Venice to Germany in 1500, making him the first Italian Renaissance artist of stature to work in Northern Europe. His few surviving paintings (about twelve) include the first known example of trompe l'oeil since antiquity. His twenty-nine engravings and three very large woodcuts had a considerable influence.
Contents |
[edit] Life
His place and date of birth are unknown, but he was described as a Venetian by contemporaries, including Dürer ("van Venedig geporn"), and as 'old and weak' in 1511, so dates of between 1450 and 1470 have been proposed. Since the earlier part of the range would have him achieve sudden prominence at the age of nearly fifty, the later part would seem more likely. There have also been suggestions he was of German extraction; but it now seems clear he was Italian; there are surviving documents of his in Italian addressed to Germans.<ref name="NGA">Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art; JA Levinson (ed); National Gallery of Art, 1973,LOC 7379624</ref>
Nothing is known about his first decades, although Alvise Vivarini has been suggested as his master. He left Venice for Germany in 1500, and thereafter is better documented. There he worked for the Emperor Maximilian I in Nuremberg for a year, then in various places for Frederick the Wise of Saxony in 1503-5, before moving to the court of the Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg for about the years 1506-08.
He may have returned to Venice with Philip the Handsome of Burgundy, for whom he later worked in the Netherlands.<ref name="Landau">David Landau in Jane Martineau (ed), The Genius of Venice, 1500-1600, 1983, Royal Academy of Arts, London</ref> By March of 1510 he was working for Philip's successor Archduchess Margaret in Brussels and Malines (Megchelen). In January 1511 he fell ill and made a will, and in March the Archduchess gave him a pension for life, on account of his age and weakness ("debilitation et vieillesse"). By 1516 he had died, leaving the Archduchess in possession of twenty-three engraving plates, which since many of his plates were probably engraved on both sides, means some engravings may not have survived.
[edit] Work
His earliest documented work is his huge (1.315 x 2.818 metres, from six blocks) and impressive woodcut aerial view Map of Venice, for which a privilege was granted to its publisher in 1500, recording that the work had taken three years.[1] This clearly drew on the work of many surveyors, but was a spectacular feat nonethless, and caused a considerable stir from the first.<ref name="SB">Suzanne Boorsch in KL Spangeberg (ed), "Six Centuries of Master Prints", Cincinnati Art Museum, 1993, no ,ISBN 0931537150</ref> It was later updated by others to reflect major new building projects in a second state of the print.
By the time it was published de' Barberi had already left for Germany, where he met Albrecht Dürer, who he may have already known from Dürer's first Italian trip (a passage in a letter of Dürer's is ambiguous). They discussed human proportion, not obviously one of de' Barberi's strengths, but Dürer was evidently fascinated by what he had to say, though he recorded that de' Barberi had not told him everything he knew. Twenty years later Dürer tried unsucessfully to get the Archduchess Margaret, Hapsburg Regent of the Netherlands to give him a manuscript book on the subject by de' Barberi, by then dead, she had; the book has not survived.
De' Barberi spent a year in Nuremberg, where Dürer lived, in 1500-01, and influences flowed in both directions between him and Dürer for a number of years. None of his engravings are dated, so much of the dating of them depends on resemblences to dated prints by Dürer; this is complicated by uncertainty in some cases as to who was influencing who. Five of his engravings were in a album of Hartmann Schedel's , which was bound up in December 1504, which gives further evidence as to dating. De' Barberi had probably made some engravings before leaving Italy, but his best engravings (and perhaps all of them) were probably done after his move to Germany in 1500. Some of his paintings are dated as: 1500, 1503, 1504, 1508.
Apart from the Map of Venice, he produced two other woodcuts, both of men and satyrs, which were the largest and most impressive figurative woodcuts yet produced, and which established the Italian tradition of fine, large, woodcuts for the following decades.
His style is related to his possible master, Alvise Vivarini and to Giovanni Bellini, but has a langourous quality all its own. The influence of Mantegna also appears in what may be a middle period around the turn of the century.
His engravings are mostly small, showing just one or two figures. Earlier ones show figures with "small heads and somewhat shapeless bodies, with sloping shoulders and thick torsos supported by slender legs" - also seen in his paintings<ref name="SB"/>. Probably from a middle period come several nudes, the most famous being Apollo and Diana[2], St Sebastian[3] and the Three Bound Captives. In a final group, the style becomes more Italianate, and the compositions more complex. These have an enigmatic, haunting atmosphere, and a very refined technique. Levenson has proposed that they date from his period in the Netherlands and were influenced by the young Lucas van Leyden.<ref name="NGA"/> Truculent satyrs feature in several prints; there are a number of mythological subjects, including two Sacrifices to Priapus.
He painted a live Sparrowhawk [4]( National Gallery, London), which is probably a fragment of a larger work, and a very early still-life of a Partridge, gauntlets, and crossbow bolt (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). This is also probably the first small scale trompe l'oeil painting since antiquity. In the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin there is a Portrait of a German Man and a religious subject. The Louvre has a religious group, and Philadelphia a pair of figures.
[edit] References
<references/>
