Usable according to the Creative Commons License Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike.
Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean verbal and visual printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments. The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of fin-de- siècle aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates; and critical introductions to each title and volume by experts in the field. All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer- reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. The site as a whole is peer- reviewed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual images, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, magazines are available on the site as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for those who wish to review and/or adapt our tag sets. In order to make ornamental devices, such as initial letters, head- and tail- pieces, searchable, we have developed a Database of Ornament in OMEKA, and linked it to the relevant pages of each magazine edition. As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process; Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015) is completed and Phase Two (2016-2021) is underway.
writer's acquaintance)
absimilis: quin praeter litteras tum latinas tum graecas
impuber iste et
lyram tractare et in ea canere, versus edere, et-quod caecus non
potest,
scribere, pingere, statuas atque signa fingere, sic per se magis ut puto
duce
natura quam arte perdidicit, ut temporibus nostris omnibus illi
tantis in rebus simul
possit meo judicio conferri nemo.'- (Letter of
Matteo Bosso to Girolamo, the father of
Giulio, about
1494.)
THE fond admiration of his seniors paints for
us, in a
few letters and verses, the figure of
Giulio Campagnola’s prodigious
youth. At
eleven or twelve a scholar, a musician, a
singer, a
poet, a painter, a sculptor in the
round and in relief; at thirteen
not only
conversing freely in Latin and Greek, but
reading
Hebrew ‘as if he had sucked its
principles with his mother’s milk’;
able to
reproduce exactly the works of the most famous painters and to
equal their creations ‘if he liked to take the pains’; skilled in
making portraits ‘so like that you could always recognise them,’
he seemed to those friends securely chartered for illimitable fame,
a
wonder of inspiration and untaught genius. We can see that, far
from
being this child of solitary nature or miraculous grace, he
really
grew up in a hot-bed of culture. His father, an official of
the
Venetian rule in the city of Padua, was a scholar and dilettante
in
his tastes, delighting in Ciceronian correspondence with his friends;
author also of a translation of the Psalms, of a tract on the Jews,'
of a volume in Praise of Virginity, and other excursions of learned
curiosity. He was, moreover, the student, under Squarcione, of art
inspired by a recovered antiquity, and dedicated to a collector friend
a description, now lost, of certain works of art then to be seen in
Padua.
plishment in the arts as readily as in other surroundings a boy
becomes
a cricketer or a shot. If speech were an art practised only
here and
there, all children who could chatter would be prodigies. The
arts
of painting and music were themselves in the vigour of their
spring,
and must have swept many a boy into their train— mere
playfellows of
that contagious youth. It is clear that Giulio became
at least an accom-
plished mimic in painting. Of original work we have
no trace, the two
miniatures on kid, described by the Anonimo of
Morelli, being after
drawings by Giorgione
a pupil in painting, Domenico Veneziano by name, who also
figures as
a copyist in that Paduan catalogue. It has been conjectured
that this
Domenico was the well-known Domenico Campagnola, possibly a son,
brother, or other relative of Giulio; that some relation beyond the
name united them is certain, since two plates exist in which one and
the
other had a hand. Domenico’s drawings and engravings, wrought
in free
undulating lines, differ much in style from Giulio’s, but the
inspiration
of his art has a common source with that of his namesake.
signature on a few prints has secured his identity and made him dear
to the collector as the developer of an unusual stipple-technique. It
is within these technical limits that his invention would seem chiefly
to have worked; designs he was ready to adopt from Mantegna, Durer,
John Bellini; it amused him to refit figures taken from one, with a
land-
scape from another, or
craftsman whether making
miniatures on kid or breaking up the burin
line into dots. Variations
in technique, however, have their significance,
and this tentative of
stipple is the response of engraving in sensitive hands
to the impulse
of a new kind of painting. The Tuscan art of line was
the very stuff
for the severe burin of a Marcantonio; the painting of Gior-
gione,
with its tenderly fused and rounded forms, its lustre and shadow,
called on the graver for a new language if its essential beauty was to
be preserved. A more adequate answer to the problem was the mezzo-
tint technique, invented much later; stipple engraving is but a bastard
form, which became none the better for being systematised. But these
first gropings for a new method with the old tools in the work of
Giulio
Campagnola have no little charm. The question of absolute
originality
is of small importance. Dotted work with a punch and
hammer was a
device of the engravers of metal work. In the work of
several contem-
poraries or predecessors of Giulio there is an
occasional use of the dot;
Durer has recourse to it here and there, as
when he grains the block of
stone in his
used the procedure as to subordinate the line, cover it up, or replace it,
so that the main effect is one of stipple. The plate of the
player,
parts of other plates are
worked in stipple only.
man; he is safest with the more easily conventionalised forms, such
as the weedy acanthoid growth of his foliage. This has a pretty
effect in the semi-heraldic stag chained to a tree; in a companion piece
of a grazing stag there is an odd mixture of more natural and more
arbitrary shapes. Stipple doubtless pleased him for this reason as
well as for others, that he could fumble for his drawing and leave
it vaguer.
new character in painting that we associate with the name of Giorgione,
the chief interest after all in these plates lies in what they echo of the
master's imagination. Any fragments overheard from that poet must
be welcome, even were the eavesdropper much less capable than Giulio.
The
bear the authentic stamp. Not alone the greater truth of aspect in his
painting struck Giorgione’s contemporaries; they were captured or
repelled by his conception of the image, his dealings with the subject
of painting. The shock of this is measured by the puzzled vexation of
Vasari before the frescoes on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Naturalistic
rendering or ingenious solutions of problems like that of painting all
sides of a body at once he could appreciate, but over the subjects of
the new painting he shook his head like any ordinary modern painter or
critic in like case. ‘Giorgione,’ he says, ‘ set hand to the work accordingly,
but thought only of executing fanciful subjects, calculated for the
display of his knowledge in art, and wherein there is of a truth neither
arrangement of events in consecutive order nor even single representa-
tions depicting the history of known or distinguished persons, whether
ancient or modern. I, for my part, have never been able to understand
what they mean, nor, with all the inquiries that I have made, could
I find any one who did understand or could explain them to me.
Here is a man, there a woman, in different attitudes; one has the head
of a lion beside him, near another is an angel, but which rather resembles
a cupid, so that one cannot divine what it all means.’ Cut adrift from
the histories of eminent persons, he can find no significance in the
anonymous attitudes of here a man, there a woman, or in the angel
which rather resembles a cupid. Nor, perhaps, will it ever become
common property of thought that the language of painting, possessing,
as it does, no verb, is badly handicapped for narrative statement;
possessing no conjunction save 'and,’ is ill fitted for logical statement.
With some strain of its resources, the art may suggest Eve and Adam
instead of Adam and Eve; but thus to present the objects conjoined in
one strict order does not come natural to it, and so simple an opposition
of thought as ‘Black
give, and the features summed up in the judgment ‘comely’ — that is all.
What the mind can take and make of the sheer presence and expression
to the eye of silent, immobile things is the characteristic field of paint-
ing, and to make a merit of this still conjunction, so that vision feeds
and broods upon it in a speculation, independent of story or argument,
is the franchise and triumph of the art.
his canvas with images of youth, of love-making, of music-making
in a golden air and a holiday world. Mr. Pater wrote his admirable
essay on the painter to the curious text that ‘all art constantly
aspires towards the condition of music.’ It is easy to see from his
examples what he meant by the formula, but the language is mis-
leading. The complete analogue of music exists in the arts of design
when form and colour are combined in arbitrary decoration. Painting
differs from these by employing images, and must aspire to a musical
condition at their expense. Now, there are certainly draughtsmen, the
forms of whose images do dissolve into caligraphic lines like a reflec-
tion carried away and twisted in running water; there are painters in
whose carpet of colour the image has little significance beyond a station
and a shape. But Giorgione is not one of these. If he shakes free of
‘events in consecutive order’ and ‘the history of known or distinguished
persons,’ it is that he may come at the figures dear to himself. They
and their setting are chosen with intense purpose and liking, and all
the decorative parts of painting are employed to recommend them
to our delight. Himself a musician when Venice was mad for music,
and her fiddlers, says Diirer, wept to hear themselves play, he paints
the piper and the lutanist. Beside them he paints all of the naked
beauty of women that he could compass in a romance of Arcadian
woodland. ‘Here there is a man, there a woman, in different atti-
tudes,’ the dream of an angel who rather resembles a cupid.
conscious of its quiet and profound appeal independent of that interest,
he none the less profited by the accumulated signs and traditions of the
art to stimulate and guide the fancy. It is his secret that those pleasure-
parties retain something of a hieratic composure, each figure rapt into a
dream and absence, as if remembering that once it was a martyr or a
saint. The effect is that of hearing church music carried through the doors
to the river-side, or of the solemn hymn melodies that first served for
invention of these pieces, it is perhaps certain witty afterthoughts of
combination, more pointed still, that we owe to him. We find a liking in
his work for the epigram of a death’s-head, or, as in the plate given here,
an old man slipped in at the feet of piping youth. In a version by
another engraver the old man does not appear. And we might sup-
pose his the daring scene-shifting by which the pipers are banished from
the well side, and the Woman, lingering, is confronted by another figure.
The figure intended is poorly acted by this mincing person, a fact which
goes to heighten the probability that he is an intruder; but it was an apt
trick of fancy playing upon the Giorgionesque Woman at the Well that
turned her back into religious history and hit on the most credible part
for her to play. The Prophet has put to flight the piper, and comes to
trouble that easy Samaritan mind. If the figure of the
Woman be Giulio’s own, we have done scant justice here to an artist
capable of great conceptions.
Giulio Campagnola, students may be referred to an article by Galichon
in the
considerably to the lists of Bartsch and Ottley, brings up the number
to fourteen. To these may be added the
Museum collection, which he does not catalogue. This collection, not
counting copies and different states, contains eleven plates, among them
the unique
Giulio at Chatsworth. There are many by Domenico, and several that
may be Giulio’s, catalogued under other names, Italian or Flemish.
But without more knowledge of the man’s style of drawing, it is
impossible to identify these with any certainty. In the Museum of
Rennes, however, there is a drawing of two dismounted cavaliers in a
landscape, labelled ‘Campagnole’ by some collector, and very probably
Giulio’s. The delicate scratchy style differs altogether from Domenico’s.
In the same frame a drawing labelled ‘Campagnole dit le vieux’ is pro-
bably by Giulio after Mantegna. It should be possible, with a little
study, to add examples from other collections. There is said to be
one at Christ Church, Oxford.
at the Well.