The most esteemed Dutch printmaker of the late sixteenth century, Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) sought to elevate the medium of engraving as a rival to the arts of sculpture and painting. He succeeded in a series of colossal prints of extraordinary virtuosity. And while the theory that his celebrated musclemen were influenced by the lesser known bronze statuettes of Delft sculptor Willem Danielsz. van Tetrode (c. 1525-1580) has been debated in the literature, the extent to which Tetrode mediated between the great classical and Italian Renaissance sculptural models and the prints of Goltzius has not been fully demonstrated until now.
Published to accompany a groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, this catalogue explores the transmission and translation of both subject matter and style-Tetrode's adaptation of models like The Farnese Hercules into a full-blooded Northern Mannerist idiom; and Goltzius's adaptation of sculpture into print, as well as his revolutionary conception of engraving as a plastic art.
The prints discussed date from the late 1580s, a period during which Goltzius and his fellow members of the so-called Haarlem Academy were intensely interested in representing the male nude. Their preoccupation is reflected in Goltzius's reproductive engravings after Bartholomeus Spranger and Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, as well as in his important original compositions such as the cycle of The Roman Heroes (1586), The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1587-89), Ovid's Metamorphoses (1589), and The Great Hercules (1589). With more than seventy illustrations, including exceptional new photographs that provide detailed comparisons between the two artists' figures, the book offers a rare look at the artistic process in the late sixteenth century.
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