Farmhouse on the Slope of a Hill
Fra Bartolommeo (Italian, 1472–1517)
c. 1508
- Medium
- pen and brown ink
- Classification
- Drawing
- 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.)
- Culture
- Italy, Florence
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of the Hanna Fund, Purchase, Dudley P. Allen Fund, Delia E. Holden Fund and L. E. Holden Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
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.
