Rocky Landscape with Hills and a City on a Lake

Author: Albert Elen

This landscape was inventoried in the Koenigs Collection as ‘anonymous Italian’, dated around 1500, and exhibited as such in 1934. Meijer (1985) pointed to the stylistic resemblance to a similar but smaller landscape in Vienna,^[1] which was already referred to in the 1934 catalogue and was then likewise regarded as anonymous Venetian. The similarities between the two pen-and-ink drawings, particularly evident in the rendering of the trees, the detailing of the buildings in the distance and the definition of the outlines of the mountains in the background, are indeed sufficiently convincing to justify an attribution to one and the same artist – not, however, to Sodoma (1477-1549), to whom the drawing in Vienna has meanwhile been attributed, but to Basaiti, as convincingly argued by Meijer.

A pen-and-ink drawing of St Jerome in the Wilderness, with similar parallel and cross-hatching, is also by the same hand. Until 2002, this work was in the collection of Jak Katalan (New York), where it was erroneously regarded as a work by Sodoma, apparently because of the Vienna drawing currently in his name.^[2] However, there are no known comparable landscapes by Sodoma. By contrast, the three drawings do fit in well with paintings by Basaiti with the same type of trees in the landscape background, such as a sacra conversazione from around 1508, now in Cambridge, or similar rocks with a town and a lake, as in the large painted landscape The Calling of the Sons of Zebedee (c.1515), now in Venice.^[3]

Meijer (1985) and Luijten (1990) pointed to the visible influence of German prints, especially those by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). These prints circulated in Italy especially after the artist’s second visit to Venice in 1506, and provided several artists, our draughtsman among them, with inspiration. Dürer’s engraving Samson and the Lion, datable to around 1496 is a good example. It shows a mountain landscape with a fortress high up on the right, while in the distance on the left there is a town on a lake against a background of mountains with a tall tree as a repoussoir in the middle ground – an arrangement that broadly corresponds with that of the Rotterdam drawing. The draughtsman must have known this and other prints by Dürer, such as the engraving The Vision of St Eustace datable to around 1501 and the engraving Hercules at the Crossroads of around 1498.

As Luijten noted, the composition of the Rotterdam drawing is unbalanced. It seems to be a combination of two landscape drawings: one for the foreground and one for the background. The upper section with the town on the water’s edge and the crown of the central tree is worked out in much greater detail than the sketchily indicated foreground, where the stone bridge over a ravine and a lift bridge to the left of the tree are barely discernible.