The Holy Family, after Bartholomaeus Spranger

Trained in Antwerp, inspired by Italian Mannerism, Bartholomaeus Spranger cultivated a brilliantly artificial and highly subjective style. In long service to Rudolf II, he gave shape to the emperor’s erudite taste and more than any other artist defined the School of Prague’s extravagant style. By the late 1580s Hendrick Goltzius was celebrated as the greatest engraver of his time. He developed a commanding burin stroke, a strict organization of mark, and an unprecedented ability to convey pictorial properties. In reasserting the intellectual dimension of engraving, Goltzius’s style was itself one of the major developments of late Mannerism. One of the last of Spranger and Goltzius’s seven collaborations, this engraving is relatively simple in iconography and obviously Parmigianinesque in vocabulary. Identical in size, its contours indented from transferring the design, the drawing is the very sheet from which the plate was prepared. This superb impression of the print matches the rarified beauty of its prototype.