De Barbari, Jacopo

DE BARBARI, JACOPO. - Venetian painter and engraver, born in all likelihood in Venice between 1440 and 1450, died after 1511. Known in Germany, where he lived for a long time under the name 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 at Nuremberg. From 1504 he was court painter to the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, and then to Count Philip of Brandenburg. In 1508 he was at Frankfurt on the Oder in the service of Joachim I of Brandenburg. In 1509 he went to the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, who in the following year granted him a pension. He also worked at Torgau, Nauburg, Weimar, Wittenberg and Dresden.

Among his earliest works is to be placed a Madonna and Child, two saints and a donor of the Frederick Museum in Berlin, to which a Sacred Conversation in the Louvre may be linked as regards figurative scheme, though it is certainly later. Stylistically more advanced are the Portrait of a Young Man dated 1502 which is in a Hungarian collection, the Christ of Dresden (1503), contemporary with the images of Sts. Barbara and Catherine in the same gallery. Also of 1503 is the Old Woman Embracing a Young Man in the Johnson collection in Philadelphia, while the prodigious Still Life of the gallery of Munich is of 1504. In the following year he painted a portrait of a young man in the gallery of Vienna; in 1507 the portrait of Henry of Mecklenburg, today in the Heldring collection in Amsterdam, and in 1508 that of Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg in the gallery of Basel. To this series of paintings, all signed or initialed by the master, few others can be added: a Head of Christ in the museum of Weimar, a portrait of a young man in the gallery of Berlin, a Golsteto in that of Dresden. The field of his activity as an engraver is also extremely interesting. Thirty-three of his works are known, of which 30 are in copper and 3 on wood. This production can be divided into three groups. To a first period, before the influence exercised on him by Dürer, works such as the Redeemer, the Judith, the St. Catherine, the Apollo with Scepter, etc., would be assigned. To a second period 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 order to pursue tonal effects by means of a sfumato rendered through cross-hatching. To the third period, finally, should belong the engravings that show characteristics analogous to the Pegasus, the Mars and Venus, the Centaur Pursued by Dragons, and so on.

Educated in the Venetian environment that had in Giovanni Bellini its most significant representative and yet also sensitive to the art of Bartolomeo Vivarini and of Antonello, Jacopo must have had very early contacts with the Germanic world, perhaps at first through frequent periodic journeys and then by settling definitively beyond the Alps. So much so that in his images, besides in his acute manner of drawing, also in his physiognomic types, frankly Alemannic characteristics often appear. Nevertheless his manner of coloring, solid and deep, which truly models the images, always remained Venetian. Having lived on the border of two epochs and of two artistic and spiritual worlds as different as the Venetian and the German, he gives us to understand that he felt and attempted to resolve the contrasts arising from them, and this was certainly no small merit on his part.

Emilio Lavagnino