Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill
c. 1508
Fra Bartolommeo
Fra Bartolommeo (Italian, 1472–1517)
Drawings
Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill, c. 1508. Fra Bartolommeo (Italian, 1472–1517). Pen and brown ink; sheet: 22.3 x 29.4 cm (8 3/4 x 11 9/16 in.); secondary support: 27.5 x 41.2 cm (10 13/16 x 16 1/4 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund, Purchase, Dudley P. Allen Fund, Delia E. Holden Fund and L. E. Holden Fund 1957.498 This is a significant early example of pure landscape drawing in Europe, as it is dedicated completely to the depiction of nature for its own sake, without suggestion of a biblical or historical narrative. The rapidity and regularity of strokes used for the evergreen and deciduous trees and the sweeping lines in the foreground suggest that the landscape in Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill was made directly from nature. The sheet comes from an album of 41 landscape studies by Fra Bartolommeo assembled by an eighteenth-century collector and disbound for sale in the mid-20th century. A member of the Dominican Order, Fra Bartolomeo likely produced these drawings during his travels in and around Florence, often to Dominican establishments. The artist who made this drawing, Fra (Friar) Bartolommeo, left his successful Florentine studio in 1500 and renounced painting in order to join the Dominican Order.
- Maker/Artist
- Bartolommeo, Fra
- Classification
- Drawing
- Formatted Medium
- pen and brown ink
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 22.3 x 29.4 cm (8 3/4 x 11 9/16 in.); Secondary Support: 27.5 x 41.2 cm (10 13/16 x 16 1/4 in.)
- Inscribed
- Inscription: a bird in ink lower left recto
- Departments
- Drawings
- Accession Number
- 1957.498
- Credit Line
- Gift of the Hanna Fund, Purchase, Dudley P. Allen Fund, Delia E. Holden Fund and L. E. Holden Fund
- Exhibitions
- Department of Prints and Drawings Opening Exhibition, Drawings from the Museum Collection: 15th-17th Centuries, Drawings, Old Master Drawings, Drawings: France, Italy, Netherlands, Prints and Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art Collection, Old Master Prints and Drawings, Drawings from the Museum Collection, Italian Prints and Drawings, Florence and the Arts: Five Centuries of Patronage, Italian Drawings Selected From Mid-Western Collections, The Draftsman's Eye: Late Italian Renaissance Schools and Styles, Idea to Image: Preparatory Studies from the Renaissance to Impressionism, National Schools of Style, Italian Drawings from the Permanent Collection, Drawings by Fra Bartolommeo, Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Treasures on Paper from the Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Fra Bartolommeo: The Divine Renaissance, cma 1958-59; New York 1959a, 16-18, pl. ix, no. 13; cma 1960b; cma 1962a; cma 1964; cma 1965b; cma 1966-67a; cma 1968b; Cleveland 1971, no. 57; Saint Louis 1972, no. 2; cma 1978b; Cleveland 1979a, 13, 16, 21, 25, 27-28, no. 3; Cleveland 1980, 39-42, no. 42; cma 1983f; cma 1986-87b; Rotterdam et al. 1990-92, 107, 375-77, 379, 393-94, no. 111.
- Rights Statement
- CC0
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