Giovanni Battista Palumba

Giovanni Battista Palumba, also known as the Master I.B. with a Bird (or the Bird etc.), was an Italian printmaker active in the early 16th century, making both engravings and woodcuts; he is generally attributed with respectively 14 and 11 of these. He appears to have come from northern Italy, but later worked in Rome. He specialized in subjects from classical mythology, as well as the inevitable religious subjects. Despite his relatively small output, he was a sophisticated artist, whose style shows a number of influences and changes, reflecting awareness of the currents in artistic style at the start of the High Renaissance. The signed prints are usually dated to around 1500–1511.

His earlier name comes from the monogram with which most of his prints are signed, the initials IB followed by a small image of a pigeon-like bird. The Italian word palumbo means 'pigeon' (the Latin name of the common wood pigeon is Columba palumbus), and in Latin the initial for Giovanni ('John' in English) is I, for Iohannes. He is not to be confused with the Master I.B., a German printmaker active in Nuremberg c. 1523–1530.

He is also attributed with various woodcuts for book illustrations from both before and after the 1500s, though all of these are rejected by some, and he is generally accepted as the author of a drawing in the British Museum related to his print of Leda and the Swan, with their Children.

Master I.B. with a Bird had long been known, and is catalogued by Bartsch. In the 18th century the famous print collector Pierre-Jean Mariette had already proposed that the monogram hid a name with an avian meaning such as "Joannes Baptista Palumbus", and in 1923 Arthur Mayger Hind speculated: "One thinks of Passeri [sparrow] or Uccello [bird] as possible surnames". In the 19th century an artist from Modena called Giovanni Battista del Porto was believed by many to be Master I.B. with a Bird. In the 1930s James Byam Shaw, who published on the prints, thought he might be Jacopo Ripanda, known as a painter and designer of antiquarian prints from Bologna, who mixed in the Roman humanist milieu that the prints reflect; ripanda is an Italian term for a water-bird.

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