Hendrick Goltzius: Drawings, Prints and Paintings

This fully illustrated, 352 page exhibition catalogue, edited by Huigen Leeflang and Ger Luijten, accompanied the first major retrospective devoted to the Netherlandish virtuoso Hendrick Goltzius-one of the most versatile and accomplished figures in the history of art. "Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch Master (1558-1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings," an international loan exhibition of more than 160 works, spanned the artist's entire career and demonstrated his legendary mastery of a remarkably wide range of media, subject matter, and styles-from extravagantly complex mythological scenes in prints, to sensitively observed studies from nature, to sumptuously colored oil paintings on canvas and copper. Internationally acclaimed in his day as the leading artistic personality of the Netherlands, Goltzius's reputation was soon eclipsed by the achievements of the seventeenth-century painters of Holland's Golden Age. It is only in the last half-century that his pivotal importance as the supreme exponent of Netherlandish mannerism has been appreciated fully. It is less widely recognized that he was a pioneer in the rise of Dutch realism and classicism. Roughly half of the exhibition was devoted to Goltzius's important activities as printmaker, and included images such as the celebrated The Wedding of Cupid and Psyche, in which the mannerist love of artifice and exaggeration is most fully expressed. The group of sixty-nine drawings in the exhibition featured a number of his famous large-scale pen works-including the spectacular, seven-by-five-foot Venus, Ceres, and Bacchus-as well as postage-stamp-size portraits in metalpoint and some of the first realistic renderings of the Dutch landscape. The group of thirteen oil paintings-a medium Goltzius took up only late in his career-was the largest ever assembled, and included the magnificent Danaë, notable for its jewel-like colors and unabashed observation of the female nude.