Monday, September 16, 2019

Domenico Beccafumi (1486-1551) - Siena (Woodcuts)

Domenico Beccafumi
St Philip
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (key-block only)
British Museum

Domenico Beccafumi
St Philip
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (russet)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Domenico Beccafumi
St Philip
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (green)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Domenico Beccafumi
St Philip
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (brown)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Domenico Beccafumi
St Peter
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (green)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Domenico Beccafumi
St Peter
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (brown)
British Museum

"This is one of the defining features of an extraordinary set of chiaroscuro woodblock prints of the Apostles which embody much of Beccafumi's thinking about line and color.  Chiaroscuro as a structure for visual experience is a leitmotif of his images in all the many media he used, and so in this case printmaking is bound up closely with the artist's way of thinking about how images are coaxed from the materials with which they are made.  The woodcut Apostles are monumental figures on small pieces of paper.  They seem to fill every available  inch of space, created from abstract folds of material that does not always behave like fabric, so heavy it hangs still in the air that moves St Philip's beard, yet is thin enough to cling revealingly to the bones and muscles of his leg, seeming to become flesh on the shoulder of St Paul.  They are strange prints, unusual today and for the time in which they were made.  Beccafumi sent them out into the world, I believe, as teachers of his most fundamental ideas about shadow and its roles in representation."

– Evelyn Lincoln, The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (Yale University Press, 2000)

Domenico Beccafumi
Apostle at the Base of a Column
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (blue)
British Museum

Domenico Beccafumi
Apostle at the Base of a Column
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (brown)
British Museum

Domenico Beccafumi
Apostle holding a Tablet
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (grey)
British Museum

Domenico Beccafumi
Apostle holding a Tablet
ca. 1545-49
chiaroscuro woodcut (green)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Domenico Beccafumi
Four Fathers of the Church
(St Ambrose, St Jerome, St Augustine, St Gregory the Great)
ca. 1542-46
chiaroscuro woodcut
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Domenico Beccafumi
Seated Sibyl
ca. 1545-50
chiaroscuro woodcut
British Museum

Domenico Beccafumi
Reclining Nudes
(derived from the story of Abraham in the pavement of Siena Cathedral)
ca. 1545-50
chiaroscuro woodcut
British Museum

Domenico Beccafumi
Two Nude Figures in a Landscape
ca. 1537
chiaroscuro woodcut and engraving
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge