Landscape with the Baptism of Christ

The present sheet by Domenico Campagnola betrays Giulio Campagnola’s impact upon the young artist’s style, but also – after about 1520 – that of Titian. This sheet depicts the Baptism of Christ, and probably was made ca. 1525 almost certainly as an independent work of art, rather than as a study for a print.

Josiah Gilbert, who at the time believed the drawing to be by Titian, identified, under the distant jagged mountain peak at the left of the sheet, the small town beneath the peak as Titian’s native Cadore ¹. The rest of the lively landscape has not been related to a particular location and may have been the invention of the artist.

Footnotes:

1. Josiah Gilbert, Cadore, or Titian’s Country, London, 1869, 119, fig. 18 (detail).