Artist Index
A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z
Paintings
Danae receiving Jupiter as a shower of gold
Dying Adonis
Hercules and Cacus
Juno receiving the eyes of Argus from Mercury
Jupiter and Antiope
Lot and his daughters
Mercury
Minerva
The Fall of Man
Venus and Adonis
Vertumnus and Pomona
Hendrik Goltzius (January or February 1558 – January 1, 1617, Haarlem), was a Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, or Northern Mannerism, noted for his sophisticated technique and the "exuberance" of his compositions. According to A. Hyatt Mayor, Goltzius "was the last professional engraver who drew with the authority of a good painter and the last who invented many pictures for others to copy".[1] In middle age he also began to produce paintings.
Personal history
Goltzius was born near Venlo in Bracht or Millebrecht, a village then in the Duchy of Julich, now in the municipality Brüggen in North Rhine-Westphalia. His family moved to Duisburg when he was 3 years old. After studying painting on glass for some years under his father, he learned engraving from the Dutch polymath Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, who then lived in Cleves. In 1577 he moved with Coornhert to Haarlem. In the same town, he was also employed by Philip Galle to engrave a set of prints of the history of Lucretia.
Goltzius had a malformed right hand from a fire when he was a baby (his drawing of it is below), which turned out to be especially well-suited to holding the burin; "by being forced to draw with the large muscles of his arm and shoulder, he mastered a commanding swing of line".[2]
At the age of 21 he married a widow somewhat advanced in years, whose money enabled him to establish at Haarlem an independent business; but his unpleasant relations with her so affected his health that he found it advisable in 1590 to make a tour through Germany to Italy, where he acquired an intense admiration for the works of Michelangelo, which led him to emulate that master in the grotesqueness and extravagance of his designs. He returned to Haarlem in August 1591, considerably improved in health, and laboured there at his art till his death.
Goltzius' painting Lot and his daughters
Goltzius Lot and his Daughters manipulated version. Goltzius' painting Lot and his daughters (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam) shows Lot being seduced by his two daughters. Sodom and Gomorrah are shown burning in the background, with Lot's wife who had turned into a pillar of salt, in front.
His portraits, though mostly miniatures, are masterpieces of their kind, both on account of their exquisite finish, and as fine studies of individual character. Of his larger heads, the life-size portrait of himself is probably the most striking example. His masterpieces, so called from their being attempts to imitate the style of the old masters, have perhaps been overpraised.
Goltzius brought to an unprecedented level the use of the "swelling line", where the burin is manipulated to make lines thicker or thinner to create a tonal effect from a distance. He also was a pioneer of "dot and lozenge" technique, where dots are placed in the middle of lozenge shaped spaces created by cross-hatching to further refine tonal shading.
Goltzius's self-portrait of his right hand
Hollstein credits 388 prints to him, with a further 574 by other printmakers after his designs.
In his command of the burin Goltzius is said to rival that of Dürer's. He made engravings of Bartholomeus Spranger's paintings, thus increasing the fame of the latter - and his own. Goltzius began painting at the age of forty-two; some of his paintings can be found in Vienna. He also executed a few chiaroscuro woodcuts. He was the stepfather of engraver Jacob Matham.
Notes
Citations
1. ^ Mayor, no. 420
2. ^ Mayor, no. 418. Other writers take his friend and biographer Karel van Mander's account to mean that he engraved with his right hand and drew with his left. [1]
References
* This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh ed.). Cambridge University Press.
* A Hyatt Mayor, Prints and People, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton, 1971, ISBN 0691003262
From Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
