Moses and the burning bush

Andrea Meldolla (also Meldola), often popularly known as Schiavone (c. 1510-63), originally came from present-day Zadar in Croatia, but spent his highly successful working life in Venice. Although initially much influenced by Parmigianino and Italian Mannerism "he was also a strikingly daring exponent of Venetian painting techniques", and ultimately combined both in his works, influencing Titian, Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano amongst others. His works "shocked some contemporaries and stimulated others". By the 1550s, he had achieved a new synthesis of Raphael and Titian's compositional elements with his own interest in atmosphere, effecting a "fusion of form with a dense atmosphere in a pictorial fabric whose elements tend to lose their separate indenties".

In <em>Marcantonio and Italian engravers of the sixteenth century </em>(1912), the great print scholar Arthur M. Hind wrote of him: "Schiavone for his little oblong panel-paintings of landscape and mythology, is even more mannered than Parmigianino, and less secure as a draughtsman. He was one of the first engravers to work with the dry-point, a process little used until the time of Rembrandt. His subjects are etched in a scratchy and irregular style, somewhat  intensified by the irregular surface of his plates, which tradition has described as of pewter. But with all their faults, there is a touch of fire and a sense of motion in his pictures and prints, which render them peculiarly attractive".

Hind could well have been thinking of a print like this as he wrote this. The startled young Moses lies prostrate as he beholds an angel of the Lord - and the voice of God - in the burning bush, and calls on him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt into Canaan.

Meldolla's importance as an innovative etcher has also been reiterated more recently by Francis Richardson, who states: "His technique was unlike that of any contemporary: unsystematically he used dense webs of light, fine, multidirectional hatching to create a tonal continuum embracing form, light, shadow, and air. His etchings are the only real equivalent in printmaking of later 16th-century Venetian painting modes, and his technical experiments were emulated by 17th-century etchers such as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Rembrandt".

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_bush

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Schiavone

Francis E. Richardson, <em>Andrea Schiavone</em> (Oxford, 1980).

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art   June 2017