Shepherds in a Landscape

This engraving of a quintessentially Venetian idyll on the terraferma is based on a famous drawing in the Louvre which was at times attributed to Giorgione himself. Today it is generally accepted to be by Giulio Campagnola, although the painter and the engraver probably cooperated throughout their short careers. The beautiful landscape with the large hilltop building and the view into the distance is nearly identical to the drawing, although reversed in the printing process. The figures in the foreground and the edge of the forest at left however are quite different from Giulio's preparatory work, not just in composition, but in style. It was Giulio's adopted son Domenico who completed the half-finished engraving, probably following his father's death at the age of only thirty-three. Domenico brought the figures much closer to the foreground than Giulio had intended and added a nervous energy to the dream-like tranquility of his father's landscape. This is not just a question of different artistic personalities, as Konrad Oberhuber pointed out, but of a new spirit: 'There is also a difference between Giulio's interest in detailed observation and his serene representation of objects and Domenico's feeling for the vitality which unifies both figures and nature; this is characteristic of the contrast between the world of Giorgione and that of Titian, between the spirit of the first decade of the cinquecento and that of the new period to follow.' (Oberhuber, ibid., p. 413.) This rare engraving, through the combination of two hands, is a seminal work which marks a change in sensibility during one of the most fascinating periods of art in Italy.