Trees Near a Pool of Water, Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)
Pen and brown ink, roughly 8×10″ (21x24cm).
Link is to zoomable version on Google Art Project; original is in the Harvard Art Museums, which also has a zoomable image — as well as a version here.
16th century Venetian Master Tiziano Vecellio, commonly known as Titian, gives us a tour-de-force pen study of foliage, reminiscent of Da Vinci’s studies of the natural forms of the world through which he moved.
Titian has artfully suggested the masses of leaves with gestural, directional notations, accented with hatching and contrasted with the more solid forms of the trunks and branches — also defined with directional hatching.
At the edges of the masses, the leaf forms are resolved with more definition. From these clues, our brains fill in the details.
