Hendrick Goltzius

Hendrik Goltzius made his name as an engraver and started designing chiaroscuro prints around 1588. At this time he was increasingly interested in tonal effects, often drawing with brush and wash, pen and ink on colored papers and then adding white highlights. Over the next 15 years he produced at least 18 chiaroscuro prints.

These imagined landscapes were probably created about 1597, when Goltzius was also designing 14 illustrations for Karel Van Mander’s translation of Virgil’s pastoral poems, The Ecologues and Georgics. The earliest states were printed on blue paper with just the black line block, before Goltzius added the tone blocks. Bartolomeo Coriolano later copied at least three of the four landscapes in the series, which suggests that they were popular and probably had found a ready market