Published to accompany the first monographic exhibition of Hendrick Goltzius’s dazzling prints, drawings, penwercken, and paintings, this catalogue consists of a useful biographical sketch followed by brief essays and entries describing successive phases of the artist’s career. The book aims, in the words of the directors of the three host institutions, “to present a comprehensive and balanced picture of Hendrick Goltzius as a draughtsman, printmaker, and painter” (5). Given this stated objective, we might well ask what impression of the artist the visitor to the exhibition and reader of the catalogue are invited to form. Deeply susceptible to artistic influence and driven by rivalrous emulation of selected models, the figure who emerges would seem to be chiefly concerned with the imitation of nature and art and with technical experimentation in all pictorial media. His eminent portrait subjects—William of Orange and Charlotte de Bourbon, among others—along with his dedication of the Roman Heroes of 1586 to Emperor Rudolf II and his acquisition of the imperial privilege in 1595 would certify the ambition to secure the most prestigious clientele, if not patronage, available at home and abroad. Goltzius’s close observation of classical exempla—Roman statuary, the facciate of Polidoro da Caravaggio, and selected effigies by Michelangelo—and also the attention he paid to Renaissance and contemporary masters would indicate a preoccupation with canons and a commitment to canon formation, an abiding concern he shared with his close friend Karel Van Mander.

If the catalogue explicitly and implicitly encourages us to formulate this image of Goltzius, it fails to address crucial questions raised by certain scholars, whose work the authors either belittle or ignore. How might the master’s theory and practice of imitation arise from the nature and functions of reproductive engraving, as this branch of printmaking was codified in Italy and the Netherlands? Rather than simply ascribing Goltzius’s variations on handelinghen—the several manners after which he drew, painted, and engraved—to an emulative impulse tout court, is it possible to differentiate between his early prints after Italianate northern masters, his prints of the later 1580s after the pen-and-wash drawings of Bartolomeus Spranger, and his protean prints of the 1590s after northern and Italian masters famed for their mastery of colorito? Instead of barely acknowledging the sacred content of many of Goltzius’s most ambitious prints and drawings postdating his Italian journey, or merely gesturing toward the religious iconography of his paintings while scarcely considering their devotional context or function, would it not be more productive to examine how and why he portrays events from the Incarnation and Passion, calculated to appeal to devout beholders and connected in Catholic meditative literature to themes of pious viewing and divine image-making? Regarding the artist’s collation of sculptural and pictorial examples, what principles of selection are applied? These and other fundamental questions, by their very absence, operate like a distorting lens, resulting in lacunae on the one hand and some strange conclusions on the other.

Take the Danaë, for instance, interpreted by Lawrence W. Nichols, author of the entries on Goltzius’s paintings, as an allegory of the “power of money” (284). Although he calls attention to the beauty of the nude Danaë, who rivets the gazes of all who surround her, including the viewer, he neglects to engage fully in his essay with Eric Jan Sluijter’s compelling account of the picture. Sluijter expounds the Danaë as a poësia that celebrates the beauty and seductive properties of painted flesh, further alluding wittily to the currency of desire transacted between painting and viewer; his larger argument situates the painting within Goltzius’s conception of the kinship among love, vision, and picturing, embodied allegorically in the compound personification of Venus-Visus-Pictura. Moreover, it is surely worth adding, the Danaë operates as a summa of colorito, whose elements are enumerated by Van Mander in his account of the perfections of Italian painting avidly memorized by Goltzius during his travels in Venice, Bologna, Florence, and Rome. Bound up with the Venetian critical discourse attached to colorito, as Van Mander and Goltzius certainly knew, was the neo-Petrarchan assumption that the painter best demonstrates his art by rendering the venustà of the female body, the beauty that incites desire and delight, moving the beholder to love what he sees. For Goltzius, the transit of desire is also the circulation of coinage, for wealth is the reward secured by the seductive charm of coloring. Finally, the beauty of Danaë embodying the venustà of Goltzius’s art consists of a syncretic amalgamation of regional styles that suggestively compares with the synthetic ideal fundamental to the Carracci reform of art. Just as Ludovico, Agostino, and Annibale sought to supplant the maniera statuina of their predecessors by harmonizing Florentine disegno, Lombard morbidezza, and Venetian colorito, so Goltzius brings an ancient statue, the so-called Cleopatra, to life by leavening the pose of Michelangelo’s Aurora with the facile grace of Raphael, the tender fleshiness of Correggio, the intense coloring and variegated tonality of Titian, and the descriptive textures of Veronese.

In fact, Goltzius had already displayed his command of colorito in prints and drawings of the 1590s, chief among them the Pygmalion and the Ivory Statue of 1593, as I have argued elsewhere. Although Nichols notes in his essay on the paintings “the degree to which [Goltzius] manipulated the burin in startlingly new ways with the aim of achieving surprising colouristic effects” (266), he still characterizes the artist’s move from engraving to painting as the climactic step in a teleological narrative leading from the burin to the greater prestige of the brush, from the limited tonality and coloring of prints to the spectral and tonal richness of painting. I think a different case can be made: the transition from one medium to another would better be seen as a negotiation between the tanto artificio of the burin and the facilità of the brush (these terms come from Ludovico Dolce’s Aretino of 1557, the foremost theoretical text on colorito). Whereas Goltzius had achieved stunning coloristic effects in prints and penwercken, such as the Pygmalion and the Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres of 1593, these earlier dimostrazioni, precisely because they display the mastery of difficulty (e.g., polychrome effects in a monochrome medium, pliable textures and lustrous surfaces with mere hatches), must always be perceived as an artifice of coloring. On the contrary, the highest standard of true facility in colorito, as Dolce had argued, was the art that concealed art. Goltzius’s reform of his burin-hand in the Judgment of Midas of 1590, a manifesto affirming that true art is modest and silent (vera verecunda est ars, et taciturna), and his distillation of Italian colorito in the Life of the Virgin series that imitates (in the manner of Proteus-Vertumnus), rather than emulates, masters such as Parmigianino, Jacopo Bassano, and Federico Barocci, attest his implementation of the paradigm of the art that conceals art. On this account, the shift to painting can best be construed as complementary to ideals already espoused in the 1590s.

This conception of the relation between burin and brush brings me to the very strange analysis of the Life of the Virgin proffered by Huigen Leeflang in his entry on this series. Although he states in his essay on the virtuoso engravings of 1592–1600, accurately in my view, that the series constitutes a “commentary on the history and status of printmaking” (208) while also noting that Goltzius was following in the footsteps of forebears like Lucas van Leyden, who was praised by Giorgio Vasari and Van Mander for his skillful rendition of optical effects more commonly associated with painting, Leeflang’s entry then concludes that Goltzius, notwithstanding Van Mander’s assertion that the master returned from Italy with a mnemonic fund of Italian paintings, worked exclusively from reproductive engravings after masters such as Federico Barocci. But reproductive engraving, as perfected by its foremost practitioners—Cornelis Cort, Enea Vico, and Agostino Carracci, for example—involved the translation of painterly effects, especially colorito. Pietro Aretino’s famous letter of 1545 to Francesco Salviati and Domenicus Lampsonius’s letters of 1567 and 1570 to Titian and Giulio Clovio clearly make this point. It is within this lineage that Goltzius’s epitomes of Italian handelinghen can be most productively situated.

Let me hasten to state in closing that the catalogue has its virtues, though these are found in the details rather than in any overarching interpretative program. The authors have enlarged the documentary record, citing two previously unstudied publications—Arnoldus Buchelius’s Vitae eruditorum Belgicorum of ca. 1630 (?) and Matthias Quadt von Kinkelbach’s Die Jahr Blum of 1605. It is fascinating to learn, with regard to The Creation series of ca. 1589, that Goltzius consulted a collection of prints, perhaps organized by subject, as part of the process of invention. In addition, Leeflang’s discussion of some of the later prints provides further evidence of the artist’s interest in manipulating a canon of regional styles.