GHERARDO CIBO, Rocca Contrada (1512-1597).
Travellers approaching a rock formation, a mountainous river landscape beyond.
Red Chalk, pen and black ink, watercolor and bodycolor on paper.
With numbers "49" & "125".
8 3/8" x 11 1/4" sheet, 17 1/2" x 20 1/2" framed.

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In the foreground of this luminous, animated sheet, a solitary traveler descends a winding path, while a second figure stands nearby, both dwarfed by a dramatic outcrop of striated rock that rises across the center of the composition. A wayside cross, planted between two boulders and partly overshadowed by vegetation, marks the path junction in the middle distance, serving both as a devotional landmark and a compositional anchor that guides the eye into the scene. To the right, a slender tree leans away from the rock mass, its canopy rendered with the delicate, stippled brushwork characteristic of Cibo’s hand. Beyond the crags, the landscape opens into a broad river valley with blue-grey mountains receding in atmospheric perspective, and what appears to be a fortified town or castello can be discerned on the distant hillside to the right. The whole is realized in red chalk underdrawing, reinforced with pen and black ink, and then animated with transparent watercolor washes and bodycolor, a technique that gives Cibo’s landscapes their distinctive quality of softly suffused natural light.

The two inscribed numbers, ‘.49’ at the upper right and ‘125’ at the lower right, are consistent with foliation or inventory markings that appear on other sheets from Cibo’s landscape albums. Cibo is known to have assembled his drawings into bound volumes; a diary entry from 1553 records that a visitor, the cavalier Geronimo Ardoino, “came here to Rocca Contrada…and asked me if he could borrow my large volume of landscapes in pen and ink, which I lent him, having first removed certain sketches on bits of paper that were inside.”

Gherardo Cibo was born in Genoa in 1512 into one of the most illustrious families of Renaissance Italy. His paternal great-grandfather was Giovanni Battista Cibo, better known as Pope Innocent VIII, and through his mother, Bianca Vigeri Della Rovere, he was related to the Della Rovere dukes of Urbino. After early years in Genoa, Cibo moved to Rome, where he stayed with his aunt, Caterina Cibo da Varano, Duchess of Camerino, and initially considered an ecclesiastical vocation. War disrupted these plans and led him to Bologna, where he studied botany under the pioneering naturalist Luca Ghini (1490–1556), one of the founders of the systematic study of plants in Italy. Cibo subsequently traveled widely on behalf of Emperor Charles V, undertaking military and diplomatic missions in Germany, France, and Flanders, and it was during this period that he encountered Northern European landscape art, a tradition that would prove formative for his own drawing practice.

In 1540, Cibo withdrew permanently from public life and settled in Rocca Contrada (today known as Arcevia), a small hill town in the Marche, where his mother and sister Hortense may already have been residing. As one scholar has described it, in this secluded haven Cibo passed the remainder of his long life, “free to concentrate on his botanical and artistic pursuits: the painting of plants, trees and landscapes; the colouring and decoration of the images in important printed botanical texts; short excursions with friends into the neighbouring countryside on collecting expeditions; and the preparation of medicaments based on herbs.”

The herbarium that Cibo began assembling in 1532, in which he pressed and dried plant specimens and annotated them with observations on habitat, season, and use, is the oldest surviving example of this method of botanical documentation in Italy and is today preserved in Rome. Cibo subsequently illustrated several printed botanical texts, most notably multiple editions of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli (The Discourses of M. Pietro Andrea Mattioli), the enormously influential Italian translation and expansion of Dioscorides’ ancient pharmacopoeia De materia medica (On Medical Material). Copies of the 1548, 1558, and 1573 Venetian editions, as well as the magnificent 1568 Valgrisi folio edition, all survive with Cibo’s hand-applied watercolor illustrations. In these, Cibo not only colored the printed woodcut engravings of plants but added richly imagined landscape backgrounds of his own invention, peopling the vignettes with botanists, travelers, shepherds, and villagers going about their daily lives, set against crags, rivers, and distant fortified towns of a kind closely comparable to those in the present sheet.

Mattioli himself was unstinting in his praise of Cibo’s work. In a letter of June 24, 1565 addressed to Cibo’s brother Scipione, he wrote: “It really seems to me that they are so alive and natural, that one could not ask for anything better; and most importantly that one can perceive an elegance afforded to them by the decoration with pleasant village landscapes that cannot be felt in the presence of natural images alone. For this reason I tell you that even though I have received coloured drawings of plants from many different places, there is such a difference between these and the former, as one can see between lead and silver or, even better, between lead and gold.”

Cibo’s autonomous landscape drawings, of which approximately 360 are known today, were long attributed to a fictitious artist named Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli, a name inscribed on one of three albums of his drawings preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale in Jesi. It was only in 1989 that Arnold Nesselrath definitively established the correct attribution to Cibo. As Nesselrath observed, “Partly because he was an engaging person, partly because he was intrigued by nature, Gherardo would perhaps never have called himself an artist.”

The landscapes fall into two broad categories: topographically accurate records of specific sites in the Marche, often inscribed with place names and astrological day-symbols tied to Cibo’s plant-collecting excursions, and more composite or wholly imaginary compositions built from accumulated observation. The present drawing, with its generalized rocky scenery and staffage figures, belongs to the latter type, though the wayside cross, the winding path, and the distant hilltop fortification are motifs drawn from the lived landscape of the central Apennines.

Cibo’s working method was unusually systematic and self-reflective for an artist of his time and station. He prepared his own pigments using botanical knowledge, and late in life compiled a technical treatise on landscape painting and miniature technique, later incorporated into the Mariani-Cibo treatise, a workshop manual produced for the court of Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. Recent scientific analysis of one of his colored landscape drawings using X-ray fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, and infrared spectroscopy has confirmed a preparatory layer of lead white and a palette of both inorganic and organic pigments, with the characteristic alteration products of lead-based compounds observable in areas of shadow.

Cibo’s landscape drawings are today held in major collections worldwide, including the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Szépmuvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, the Uffizi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. As a landscape draftsman active in the Marche during the second half of the sixteenth century, Cibo has been recognized as an important forerunner of the regional landscape tradition that culminated in the early work of Federico Barocci (c. 1535–1612). He died at Rocca Contrada in January 1600, at the age of eighty-eight, having devoted the last six decades of his remarkable life to the patient, joyful study of nature.
1. Gherardo Cibo, handwritten diary, begun 1553 (now lost). Quoted in Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, artist entry for Gherardo Cibo. 2. Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, artist entry for Gherardo Cibo. 3. Pietro Andrea Mattioli to Scipione Cibo, letter of 24 June 1565. Siena Municipal Library, cod. miscell. D, vii, 2. Quoted in I Discorsi di P. A. Mattioli (Aboca Museum, 2015), commentary volume. English translation from the Aboca edition. 4. Jaap Bolten, “Messer Ulisse Severino da Cingoli,” Master Drawings VII (1969): 123–48. 5. Arnold Nesselrath, Gherardo Cibo alias Ulisse Severino da Cingoli, exh. cat. (San Severino Marche: Centro Studi Lorenzo e Jacopo Salimbeni per le Arti Figurative, 1989).