A mountainous landscape dominated by a large rock with an arch at one side, a chapel on the top, various human figures, one possibly a botanist collecting samples, and a stream in the foreground, in pen and brown ink with watercolour in green, blue, yellow and pale purple/pink, on paper. Italy, mid-late 16th century.
CIBO, (Gherardo)
16TH CENTURY ITALIAN LANDSCAPE WATERCOLOUR
(125 x 77mm.). Pen and brown ink and watercolour, on paper mounted on thin card.
A fine landscape watercolour by Gherardo Cibo (1512-c. 1600) artist, poet, musician, and passionate botanist who is characterised by Tomasi as having, "profound artistic sensibility, scientific knowledge and technical skill". His landscapes drew upon Northern European influences and, in his work, "many of the themes which were to become an essential part of the pictorial vocabulary of the seventeenth century - such as scenes of ruins or the genre of 'veduta' - were anticipated". Although the artist's name was at the time still unknown, Jaap Bolten published an analysis of his style and works in 1969, and this was followed by the firm attribution to Cibo and an comprehensive exhibition of his works in San Severino, Marche, in 1989.
Gherardo Cibo was born into an aristocratic Genoese family, his great-grandfather was Pope Innocent VIII, and he studied in Rome and Bologna. He spent his childhood and early youth between Rome and the Marches, a region of Italy running along the Adriatic Sea. Here he is recorded as having explored the wild and most inaccessible parts of the Apennines in search of new plant species which he then painted. Lelio Tasti, the seventeenth century historian from Rocca Contrada (modern Arcevia, where Cibo lived for much of his life) describes the expert skill with which Gerardo painted 'mountains, valleys, trees and flowers', using colours prepared by his own hand from the juices of various herbs and fruits (Tomasi). Bolten also notes from his investigation of a large album of landscape drawings in the Biblioteca Communale of Jesi that, "the very large part of the oeuvre is taken up by sketches of fragments of landscape: quick studies of sites, sketches of rocks, trees, houses, mills, churches and hamlets". It was relatively unusual for a 16th century Italian artist to choose to paint landscapes for their own sake, and not as background to another subject, and here Cibo also stands out for using real places, but often adds a fantastic element to his scenes. Cibo may have been inspired by his travels, in the 1530s he had attended the court of Charles V in Germany, the Low Countries and in Spain, and would have been influenced not only by the changing landscapes but also by the exposure to the work of Northern European artists, who were more advanced in their treatment of landscape.
Cibo was also an important botanical artist. His tutor Luca Ghini (c1490-1556) of Bologna, was thought to be the first person to consider mounting dried specimens onto paper perhaps as a means of instructing students in the use of herbal treatments. It was Cibo who, c. 1532, prepared a herbarium of c. 2000 specimens which survives in five volumes in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome (MS 2344-2348, where it is regarded as one of their major treasures and is currently the subject of a major digitilisation project). Two herbals in the British Library (Add. Ms. 22332 and 22333) contain perhaps the greatest corpus of Cibo's botanical drawings, all in the first volume set against landscapes. Cibo knew Aldrovandi and Matthioli and corresponded with them, Celani notes that Matthioli, after receiving examples of Cibo's drawings from his brother Scipione Cibo in 1563 described them as a "mirror of purest crystal". Tomasi concludes that Cibo's work in the BL manuscripts was that "of a man who united the skills of both the artist and the scientist and who thus represented the very prototype of the scholarly dilettante, or the 'curioso' interested in the natural sciences. Tomasi also adds much interesting information on Cibo's library and his volumes of herbals such as Matthioli's to which he often add landscape backgrounds to the woodcuts ( I Discorsi , Rome 1568, now Biblioteca Alessandrina, Rome).
Ref: Jaap Bolten, "Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli, a Bypath in the History of Art" Master Drawings , VII, 1969, pp.123-47. Arnold Nesselrath, Gherardo Cibo, alias Ulisse Severino da Cingoli , San Severino Marche, in 1989. Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, Gherardo Cibo: visions of landscape and the botanical sciences in a sixteenth-century artist, Journal of Garden History , 1989, vol. 9, No. 4, pp.199-216. E. Celani ' Sopra un Erbario di Gherardo Cibo...', 1902, pp. 181-226.
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