ROMANINO, Girolamo
(b. ca. 1484, Brescia, d. ca. 1559, Brescia)

Concert Champêtre

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Pen and brown ink with brown wash, over black chalk, 291 x 409 mm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

From Giorgione onwards, the subject of pastoral concert had a rich history in sixteenth-century Venetian art. This example is the most complex and ambitious of Romanino's drawings exploring the subject. It shows a group of three elegantly attired women and a satyr deployed in a circle in an expansive landscape that recedes to a distant background dotted with tiny rustic buildings. Each figure plays a viola da gamba.