Domenico Campagnola (1500–1564) belonged to the Venetian printmaking family. Originally born to a German artisan living in Venice, Domenico was adopted by Giulio Campagnola, under whom he received his first artistic training. He must have absorbed much from Giorgione in early years as well, for many of his first independent works, drawings predating his group of prints of 1517-18, share in the pastoral mystery of the latter artist's poesie, especially the Landscape with Two Youths in the British Museum.(1) The prints, on the other hand, show a more independent mind at work.

Domenico moved from Venice to Padua in the 1520s, being documented in the latter city in 1528. Though he has long been though to have contributed to the frescoes in the Scoletta del Carmine, completed by 1520, doubts have emerged regarding this commission.(2) In Padua, Domenico worked more often as a painter than as a printmaker, it seems, and contributed to many of the fresco cycles underway in the city in addition to executing individual canvases. Nonetheless, his drawings and woodcuts of the 1530s and 40s show strong and continuing development especially in regard to landscape. His best-known paintings include the Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist now in Bologna and the Madonna with Saints George and Catherine of Alexandria now in Philadelphia, both of 1533–35, the frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti in the Palazzo del Capitanio of 1540–41, and the frescoes of the Oratorio di San Bovo of 1550–55. In 1564 he received a religious commission as prestigious as the governmental one from the Capitanio, for two paintings for the sacristy of Padua's cathedral, but died on 10 December before it was well underway.

Among sixteenth-century Venetian draughtsmen, Domenico's style is distinctive for its linearity. As befits his early training under a printmaker, the artist preferred pen and ink almost exclusively, gradually leaving behind the Giorgionism of his early years in favor of precision and careful, studied hatching as in the present drawing. This increasing boldness, perhaps less evident in his landscape drawings, comes through most of all in figural compositions placed in architectural settings.

The Crocker Presentation of the Virgin fits well with Domenico's later style exemplified in a series of drawings of the Life of Christ in Berlin and elsewhere.(3) In each case the group of figures is given legibility by its rhythmic integration into a boldly-defined architectural setting. Here, the entire action is traced by the line of figures that ascends from Joachim and Anna up the staircase, given impetus by the Virgin's step, the drape of the attendant figure, and the welcome of the priest above.

Domenico's composition compresses Titian's horizontal canvas of the Presentation of the Virgin completed for the Scuola Grande della Carità in 1534–38, focusing the composition to the staircase itself and moving the attendant figures from the square Titian creates at its foot to distribute them along the Virgin's path upwards. The resulting sequence of heads and bodies create a dynamic rhythm, a device Domenico had used as early as 1518 in his print of the Massacre of the Innocents.(4) Though many other possible precedents use the general device of a staircase seen diagonally, none shares the combination of a landing with three Corinthian columns seen directly behind found in Titian's canvas. Based upon this relationship, it seems most logical to date the drawing to after 1538, the date of the Carità project's completion.

The Crocker drawing, which belonged to the seventeenth-century Dutch collector and English court painter Peter Lely, bears later inscriptions to Titian and "...ssarotti," most likely the Bolognese Bartolomeo Passarotti who shares a boldly-hatched pen-and-ink style. Though the physical evidence is no longer in the Museum's curatorial files, Ruda reports that the drawing entered the collection as School of Titian and was first identified as Domenico Campagnola by Alfred Neumeyer.(5) The Presentation seems to have been unknown to the Tietzes, who published six other Venetian drawings from the Crocker collection.

William Breazeale, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010