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 |