Landscape with John the Baptist

Author: Surya Stemerding

John the Baptist stands on a hill among trees in the foreground of this landscape, with a broad stretch of countryside behind him. He looks down to his left and points up with his raised right hand to a Virgin and Child on a crescent moon among clouds at top left. The pentimenti in the saint’s legs indicate that they were originally longer. The rounded top of the sheet shows that it could have been the design for an altarpiece or part of a polyptych.

Santagiustina Poniz (1981) published this drawing, which was listed as sixteenth-century Venetian in the inventory of the Koenigs Collection, as an autograph work by Domenico Campagnola (c.1500-1564). She related the schizzato (sketchy) style to drawings from his later years, between 1550 and 1564. She also considered the perspective of the panoramic landscape and the arrangement of the composition to be typical of Campagnola’s late work, and the ‘signature’ to be autograph but worked up by a later hand. She saw a relationship with landscapes by the brothers Hieronymus (c.1510-1570) and Matthijs Cock (1480-1521), which were also circulating in the Veneto after 1550 and were often used as sources of inspiration. However, the drawing looks a little careless for Campagnola, whose parallel hatching is usually more regular, so one wonders whether this could be the work of a later follower.^[1]