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Asleep in the Grass of Arcady: Giulio Campagnola's Dreamer*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
The rarest figural view is that involving a protagonist seen from behind, not directing a look outward toward the spectator. One such example is Giulio Campagnola's engraving of a solitary woman in a landscape, seen in a three-quarters rear view (fig. i). Radically stripped of iconographic attributes as it is, this print is less narrative, or even lyrical, in its presence than many pastoral compositions. Here there is no warm, atmospheric, and mellow world of wish-fulfillment as in the Dresden Venus. Giulio offered no paper Giorgione but rather a place in which lush vegetation clashes against sharp turrets, and no Cupid attends upon dormant, soft female flesh. Giulio distanced the image from predigested literary conventions. Yet the art historical inclination is to assimilate Giulio's work to Giorgione's, and furthermore to understand Giorgione's importance as consisting in his visualization of the hitherto literary world of pastoral. Ut pictor poe'sis can be too handy an axiom.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1992
Footnotes
A version of this paper was delivered at the Renaissance Society Annual Meetings, Cambridge, MA, April, 1989. A longer lecture was delivered at Wellesley College in February, 1990, as part of the series “Court and Culture in the Renaissance.” My thanks for comments given on both occasions, for a reading by Peter Parshall scrupulous on multiple levels, and especially to David Feldman, who has helped throughout. My work on this subject extends back to my doctoral thesis at Columbia University, “Invention and the Italian Renaissance Print, Mantegna to Parmigianino” (1985), advised by David Rosand.