This large and impressive drawing illustrates an episode from the fable of the unfortunate nymph Callisto, as recounted by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. She was one of Diana's chaste and beautiful maidens, who was seduced by the ever-lusty Jupiter, who deceived her by assuming the guise of her mistress. When the resulting pregnancy was discovered, Callisto was cruelly banished by Diana; and having subsequently given birth to a son, Arcas, she was punished again by Jupiter's jealous wife Juno, who transformed her into a bear. In Campagnola's drawing we see Juno leaping from her chariot drawn by peacocks to grasp a lock of Callisto's hair, whereupon the maiden's arms immediately began to sprout fur. Once her metamorphosis was complete, Arcas no longer recognised her, and she spent the next fifteen years desperately wandering the wilderness. Eventually they met, he as hunter, she as potential prey, but at this point Jupiter finally intervened to avert further tragedy and immortalised Callisto by transforming her into the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear.
The present drawing has, with good reason, been associated with a sheet by Campagnola in Detroit, very close in style and of almost exactly the same dimensions, illustrating a slightly later moment in the story: a distraught Callisto, now fully transformed into bear, is shown before her startled infant son Arcas, who naturally enough fails to recognise her. A third drawing that must have formed part of the same series — presumably the first in the sequence —is now in a private collection. Its subject has been described as Cephalus and Procris, but in fact it must represent the seduction of Callisto by Jupiter in the guise of Diana, witnessed by Jupiter's eagle and the nymph's hunting dogs. The setting is the dense virgin woodland where Callisto had laid down to rest, as described by Ovid. Campagnola portrays Jupiter wearing flowing, effeminate garments, but with his own bearded features rather than those of Diana, presumably to facilitate recognition of the story. All three of these drawings carry old inscribed attributions to Titian; those on the sheets in Detroit and in a private collection are clearly in the same hand. The series must have originally included at least one additional episode, for it is highly unlikely that the crucial scene of the exposure of Callisto’s pregnancy - as represented by Titian in one of his great poesie for Philip II (Diana and Callisto (1556), NG 2844) – would have been omitted.
The dating of all but the earliest of Campagnola's landscape drawings and prints is problematic. The Edinburgh drawing was at one time placed at the very end of his career, by analogy with a pair of landscape drawings in the Albertina, Vienna, one of which is dated. However, the similarities are not especially close, and the Callisto drawings seem to fit better stylistically into the artist's middle period, perhaps around 1540. With their dense and varied compositions and masterly evenness of touch, the quality of the draughtsmanship is higher than that of the two sheets in Vienna, and of other landscape drawings generally assigned to Campagnola's last years. The rather large scale of the figures relative to the landscape - particularly in the Edinburgh sheet - also supports an earlier dating. As has been noted in relation to the drawing in Detroit, the style is similar in many respects to a Landscape with an Old Woman Holding a Spindle in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which in turn is particularly close in handling to a group of Campagnola's landscape woodcuts that have been dated to the 1530 and early 1540s.
It is conceivable that the Callisto drawings were themselves intended as designs for a series of ambitious woodcuts, never realised: but it is perhaps more likely that they were made as independent works in their own right, to be displayed framed or kept in a portfolio in some connoisseur's study, to be perused at leisure. One imagines that it was drawings of precisely this kind that were so admired by collectors during Campagnola's lifetime. As early as 1537, for example, the Venetian writer Slarcantonio Michiel noted landscapes by Campagnola in both pen on paper and in distemper on canvas in the house of the Paduan collector Marco Benavides; similarly, the patrician Gabriele Vendramin owned a large number of Campagnola's landscape drawings, some of them apparently kept in a long, narrow (presumably landscape-format) volume.
This text was first published in The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art From Scottish Collections (2004)