View of a Castle (recto); Eight-Sided Cup (verso) (1513): Art, History and Details

View of a Castle (recto); Eight-Sided Cup (verso) (1513) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Wolfgang Huber (Austrian, 1490–1553).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This drawing depicts a castle in southern Germany in the area around the Danube River known for its wooded and rocky heights and dramatic views. Wolfgang Huber's meandering, pen and ink lines describe the contours of the earth and the lushness of summer foliage in a horizontal layout that focuses on the middle distance with a barely recorded foreground. Huber may have made the drawing during a journey between Feldkirch and Vienna as he traveled along the Danube. In 1513 when this drawing was made, landscape was rarely depicted as a subject in and of itself, but artists in the Danube region such as Huber exhibited a profound sensitivity to nature. A drawing on the reverse of the sheet depicts a cup studded with gems and a poem written in a contemporary hand telling the mythological story of Actaeon's transformation into a stag when he intruded upon the goddess Diana and her nymphs bathing.

Object facts

• Title: View of a Castle (recto); Eight-Sided Cup (verso)
• Date: 1513
• Creator attribution: Wolfgang Huber (Austrian, 1490–1553)
• Culture: Austria
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 13.1 x 21.2 cm (5 3/16 x 8 3/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - Austrian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1951.277

A detail from the museum

This sheet of paper, with drawings on both sides, as well as a poem, shows how artists in the Renaissance often used one sheet of paper for various purposes.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Weinberger, Martin. Wolfgang Huber. Leipzig: Im Inselverlag, 1930.
• Halm, Peter, "Die Landschaftzeichnungen des Wolfgang Huber. Mit 35 Abbildungen," Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst VII (1930): pp. 1-104.
• Horn, Adam, "Eine Wiederentdeckte Alte Ansicht der Burg Harburg im Ries," Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben LVII (1950): pp. 35-37.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.