Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill

c. 1508

Fra Bartolommeo

(Italian, 1472–1517)

Italy, Florence, 15th century

pen and brown ink

Support: Cream(3) laid paper, perimeter mounted to cream(2) laid paper (F.M.N.Gabburri's mount)

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.)

Gift of the Hanna Fund, Purchase, Dudley P. Allen Fund, Delia E. Holden Fund and L. E. Holden Fund 1957.498

Location: not on view

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Did You Know?

The artist who made this drawing, Fra (brother) Bartolommeo, left his successful Florentine artistic studio in 1500 and renounced painting in order to join the Dominican Order.

Description

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.