The Nativity

Engraving, 1500 – 1510 circa, signed on a shutter of the window above the Virgin’s head: I I / C A.

A great impression, printed on contemporary laid paper, irregularely trimmed to the platemark, very good condition.

The Navitivity is a fairly crude piece of workmanship, indebt to, but at some distance from, the style of Mantegna and his following; it has nothing whatsoever to do with Giulio Campagnola, to whom Bartsh and others assigned it.

The system of shading with straignt, oblique parallels is the chief clue to the Mantegnesque background of the artist, and the curious moiré-like crosshatching on the drapery and the tree at the right may also be found in the Mantegna School, as do such details as the cloud at the upper left, the rocky terrain, and the drapery of St. Joseph. The composition may derive in part from Mantegna’s  Adoration of Magi, for it shares with it the procession of worshippers descending a mountain path, tha angels praying on a cloud above the Virgin, and the motif of barren trees growing from rocky ledges.

Master II CA appears also to have studied the works of Bartolomeo and Benedetto Montagna. The mother and Child in this engraving may reflect Bartolomeo’s Holy Family of 1500 – 1505 circa, in which worshippers approach on horseback from a rocky hill containing a square cave. The facial type of I I C ‘s St. Joseph also appears in several of Benedetto’s prints. Moreover, the tecnique, despite its obvious Mantegnesque elements, is similar to the manner found in Benedetto’s second group of engraving, dated to the early cinquecento.

According to Zucher, in TIB, however, contact with Benedetto does not seen essential to an explanation of the style, and the print may well have been executed independently of Benedetto, perhaps around 1500.

Zucher notes that curiously the insect by Virgin’s left foot is copied in the same direction from Dürer’s Holy Family with the Butterfly of circa 1545 (TIB 1001.044), which Master II CA later used for the background of his St. Lucy ; yet Dürer’s influence in not otherwise present in the Nativity as it will be in the St. Lucy.


The unidentified monogrammist is known from two engravings containing the initial II CA: the Nativity and a St. Lucy; a third, unsigned print representing the Justice is also a plausible, though not a certain, attribution.

Beginning with Bartsch, there has been a good deal of conjecture about the Master’s identity and a number of unconvincing interpretations of his monogram: Bartsch misread the first I in the Nativity as F Fecit Iulius Campagnola, others read the letters I I as H and that imply Hieronymous Campagnola; Filippini identified the artist as Jacopo Cabrini, a Bolognese glass painter, but all interpretations seem weak.