Allegory of Birth, after Giulio Romano

Ghisi’s engravings invest the grand design of mid-century Italian printmaking with the meticulous craft of Northern production. Like Scultori’s David and Goliath, the Allegory of Birth first appeared in the decoration of the Palazzo del Te. In the middle of the composition, winged Genii hand a newborn to a personification of fecundity or nurture, while to the right a mother expires after childbirth, to the left a flame passes from one torch to another, and in the background Apollo’s chariot brings a new day. Consonant with this humanistic allegory are the evocation of antique low relief sculpture and the insistence upon classical figural types. Like most early engravers, Ghisi did not reproduce the painting directly or exactly, rather developed his plate from an intermediate drawing. By coincidence, that drawing, identical in size and reversed in orientation, came to the Blanton as part of the Suida-Manning Collection.