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Lot Essay
This large and fanciful engraving is an outstanding example for the complex relations - personal, artistic and economic - between printmakers, painters, patrons and publishers in 16th century Italy and beyond. The model for Ghisi's engraving was a drawing by his compatriot from Mantua, the painter and architect Giovanni Battista Bertani. It is now in the collection of the Musei Civici del Castello Visconteo in Pavia. The design borrows various elements from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the same subject, while the figure of Cupid stems from a fresco in the Sala di Psiche in Palazzo Te by Giulio Romano, with whom Bertani had trained in Mantua and whom he eventually succeeded as art director at the Gonzaga court in Mantua. Ghisi however engraved the plate not in Mantua, not even in Italy, but during his period in Antwerp between 1550 and 1555, where he collaborated with the renowned publisher Hieronymus Cock, whose address can be read in the third state of the engraving offered here, in the tablet at lower left.
The present sheet is also an example for the censoring of depictions of nudity or any sexual content, which many prints had to endure in later, more prudish times. Genitals and even the breast of women were often covered with ink or wash or scratched out. In this case, an attempt has been made to gently remove the nipples of the goddesses, while the satyr's genitals had been completely obliterated, but have since been rather wittily and three-dimensionally replaced.
The present sheet is also an example for the censoring of depictions of nudity or any sexual content, which many prints had to endure in later, more prudish times. Genitals and even the breast of women were often covered with ink or wash or scratched out. In this case, an attempt has been made to gently remove the nipples of the goddesses, while the satyr's genitals had been completely obliterated, but have since been rather wittily and three-dimensionally replaced.