The Judgment of Paris

This large engraving was made by Giorgio Ghisi after a drawing by the Mantuan painter and architect Giovanni Battista Bertani, held today in the collection of the Musei Civici del Castello Visconteo, Pavia. The design borrows elements from Marcantonio's engraving of the same subject and the figure of Cupid in the Sala di Psiche in Palazzo Te by Giulio Romano, with whom Bertani trained in Mantua and subsequently succeeded as art director at the Gonzaga court in Mantua. Ghisi engraved the plate during his period in Antwerp, between 1550 and 1555, where he collaborated with the publisher Hieronymus Cock, whose address is present in the third final state. Of the present, very rare second state Lewis & Lewis and Boorsch recorded only one impression in a major public collection (Albertina, Vienna), and one of the first state (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).