Jacques Callot

The battle of Avigliana near the northern Italian city of Turin was a French victory in the broad struggle for European hegemony during the Thirty Years War. This etching depicts the engagement on July 10, 1630, between an allied German-Spanish-Savoyard army and a French army in the town of Avigliana, shown in the left middle ground. Callot included noticeable distortions in scale (such as the large size of the figures compared to the architecture and rock formations) in order to make the figures legible throughout the image. The portrait at the top of the composition and the arms below are those of Antoine Coëffier-Ruzé, marquis d’Effiat (1581-1632), a hero of the battle and probable commissioner of the print. Callot may have left the print without an inscription because the French Effiat soon led troops against Callot’s native Lorraine.