Eight-Sided Cup (verso)

1513

Eight-Sided Cup (verso), 1513. Wolfgang Huber (Austrian, 1490–1553). Charcoal; sheet: 13.1 x 21.2 cm (5 3/16 x 8 3/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 1951.277.b This drawing depicts a castle in Southern Germany in the area around the Danube River known for its wooded and rocky heights and dramatic views. Wolfgang Huber's meandering, pen and ink lines describe the contours of the earth and the lushness of summer foliage in a horizontal layout that focuses on the middle distance with a barely recorded foreground. Huber may have made the drawing during a journey between Feldkirch and Vienna as he traveled along the Danube. In 1513 when this drawing was made, landscape was rarely depicted as a subject in and of itself, but artists in the Danube region such as Huber exhibited a profound sensitivity to nature. A drawing on the reverse of the sheet depicts a cup studded with gems and a poem written in a contemporary hand telling the mythological story of Actaeon's transformation into a stag when he intruded upon the goddess Diana and her nymphs bathing. This sheet of paper, with drawings on both sides, as well as a poem, shows how artists in the Renaissance rarely wasted paper.