Old Master Mythological Printmaking

The reproducible medium of engraving, etching and chiaroscuro woodcut as practiced by European old master printmakers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who took Greco-Roman mythological subject matter, often reproducing or adapting a painted or sculpted composition by another artist, as one of their central and most marketable themes, circulating classical narrative in multiple impressions across Europe far more widely than any single painting or sculpture could travel. Leading practitioners of this narrower graphic tradition include the Netherlandish printmaker Hendrick Goltzius, whose chiaroscuro woodcut series The Deities reworked classical gods in a deliberately antique styled idiom, and Italian reproductive engravers such as Giulio Bonasone, Giulio Sanuto and Giovanni Battista Galestruzzi, who translated compositions after painters including Polidoro da Caravaggio into widely disseminated prints. Divinity Atlas artworks placed in this group are prints, whether engravings, etchings or woodcuts, that a holding museum dates to this sixteenth to seventeenth century old master printmaking period and that take a Greco-Roman mythological subject as their theme, distinguished from painted and sculpted originals and from later eighteenth and nineteenth century printmaking gathered elsewhere in this atlas.