Christ and the Samaritan Woman
c. 1510
Medium
Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
Dimensions
Plate: 13.2 × 18.6 cm (5 1/4 × 7 3/8 in.); Sheet: 13.8 × 19.4 cm (5 7/16 × 7 11/16 in.)
Classification
engraving
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
53294
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
This print depicts Jesus traveling through the ancient region of Samaria, where he stopped at a well and asked a local woman for a drink of water. The woman recognized Jesus as a prophet and summoned the villagers to listen to what he had to say. Here, Giulio Campagnola set the encounter outside a lagoon city that strongly resembles Venice, depicting the woman in contemporary 16th-century dress. Campagnola devised an innovative way of engraving with minute dots that enabled soft tonal transition...
About the Artist
Giulio Campagnola · 1482–1515
Giulio Campagnola (c. 1482–c. 1515) was born in Padua, within the Republic of Venice, to Girolamo Campagnola, a noted humanist scholar and writer who may have been an amateur painter. Exceptionally gifted from youth, by age fifteen he was praised as a poet, musician, linguist in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and skilled in painting, engraving, and gem-cutting, prompting efforts to secure him a positio...