Landscape with a Satyr

Though generally attributed to Titian, who rarely signed his drawings, this sheet has also been associated with Domenico Campagnola (ca. 1500–1564) as a collaborator and as a sole author. The sheet depicts a satyr and the head of a goat in a sunlit landscape, evoking ancient literature, where satyrs often appear as lustful, drunken figures. Here, the satyr sits with an urn, likely filled with wine, his muscular, hairy form rendered with vigorous crosshatching. The drawing has been cropped on the left side, producing a sheet about four inches smaller than the standard quarto commonly used at the time. The cropping exaggerates the discrepancy of scale between the satyr and the background. Thin, swift pen strokes convey the gently rolling hills and a fortress amid rugged cliffs in the distance. This pastoral scene—a popular genre in the sixteenth-century Veneto—paired with the iconography of the satyr may have been meant to convey a moral message intelligible to a contemporary audience.