DE BARBARI, Jacopo. — Venetian painter and engraver, born probably in Venice between 1440 and 1450, died after 1511. Known in Germany, where he lived for a long time under the name of Jacopo Walsch or Walch, in 1500 he engraved a large view of Venice on behalf of Antonio Koll. From that same year until 1504 he was in the service of Emperor Maximilian, probably in Nuremberg. From 1504 he was court painter to the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, and later to Count Philip of Brandenburg. In 1508 he was at Frankfurt an der Oder in the service of Joachim I of Brandenburg. In 1509 he went to the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands; the following year she granted him a pension. He also worked in Torgau, Naumburg, Weimar, Wittenberg, and Dresden.
Among his earliest works is a Madonna and Child with Two Saints and a Donor in the Federico Museum in Berlin, to which a Sacred Conversation in the Louvre may be related as a figurative scheme, though it is certainly later. More stylistically advanced are the Portrait of a Young Man dated 1502 in a Hungarian collection, the Christ in Dresden (1503), contemporary with the images of SS. Barbara and Catherine in the same gallery. Also from 1503 is the Old Man Embracing a Young Man in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia, while the prodigious Still Life in the Munich Gallery is from 1504. The following year he painted a portrait of a young man in the Vienna Gallery; in 1507 the portrait of Henry of Mecklenburg, now in the Heldring Collection in Amsterdam, and in 1508 that of Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg in the Basel Gallery. To this series of paintings, all signed or initialed by the master, a few others may be added: a Head of Christ in the Weimar Museum, a portrait of a young man in the Berlin Gallery, and a Galatea in that of Dresden. Also of great interest is the field of his activity as an engraver. Thirty-three of his works are known, thirty on copper and three on wood. This production can be divided into three groups. To a first period, before the influence of Dürer on him, would belong works such as the Redeemer, Judith, St. Catherine, Apollo Seated, etc. To a second period belong the View of Venice of 1500, the Presentation in the Temple, the Adoration of the Magi, etc., works in which the master attempts to abandon his subtle linear technique in pursuit of notable effects through cross-hatched shading. Finally, to the third period should belong the engravings that show characteristics similar to Pegasus, Mars and Venus, the Centaur Persecuted by Dragons, and so on.
Educated in the Venetian milieu, which had Giovanni Bellini as its most significant representative, but also sensitive to the art of Bartolomeo Vivarini and Antonello, Jacopo must have had very early contacts with the Germanic world, perhaps first through frequent periodic journeys and then by settling permanently beyond the Alps. So much so that in his images, as well as in his dry manner of drawing and in physiognomic types, Germanic traits often appear. Nevertheless, his method of coloring, consistent and deep, which actually models the images, remained always Venetian. Living on the border of two epochs and two artistic and spiritual worlds so different, such as the Venetian and the German, he seems to have felt and attempted to resolve the contrasts that arose from them, and this was certainly no small merit for him.
BIBL. G. Fiocco, s. V. ENOCH. Ital., XII (1931), pp. 433-35; P. K., s. V. in Thieme-Becker, II, pp. 461-64; E. Lavagnino, L'opera del genio italiano all'estero. Gli artisti in Germania, III, Roma 1943, pp. 13-26.