Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Jacopo de' Barbari's engravings, early 16th century

Jacopo de' Barbari
Satyr playing the Lira da Braccio, with Wife & Child
ca. 1501-03
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de'Barbari (ca. 1445-1516) became a successful engraver in Venice, producing monumental maps as well as mythological and religious subjects. Renaissance antiquarianism animated Jacopo's figures, sourced more perhaps from literature than from visual models. These beings seem immune to the relaxed and graceful deportment that already prevailed in the work of other up-market European print-makers.

Jacopo de' Barbari
Victory reclining amid Triumphs
ca. 1500-03
engraving
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Jacopo de' Barbari
Victory & Fame
ca. 1503-04
engraving
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Jacopo de' Barbari
Apollo & Diana
ca. 1503-04
engraving
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Toward the end of his life Jacopo de'Barbari traveled to courts in Germany and the Low Countries, where his "idiosyncratic face and figure types" exercised a  genuine (though brief) influence on northern European art, or so we are told. The floating caduceus  visible on most of these sheets  was his signature-mark.

Jacopo de' Barbari
Two Philosophers reading
ca. 1508-10
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Guardian Angel
ca. 1500
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Two Fauns
ca. 1501-03
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Sacrifice to Priapus
ca. 1501-03
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Judith with the Head of Holofernes
ca. 1498
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Holy Family
ca. 1500
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Venus, or, Vanity
ca. 1503-04
engraving
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Jacopo de' Barbari
St Sebastian
ca. 1510-12
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Three Prisoners
ca. 1501-03
engraving
British Museum

Jacopo de' Barbari
Triton and Nereid
ca. 1495-1510
engraving
British Museum