A Proteus revealed: a traveling exhibition of the Mannerist artist Hendrick Goltzius offers an unprecedented survey of his influential career. Along with the prints that won him enduring fame, the show features lesser-known drawings and paintings that vitalized the artistic practices of his Dutch milieu

Art in America, Jan, 2004 by Faye Hirsch

The landmark exhibition "Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch Master (1558-1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings" is rich in art-historical insights, both about Dutch Mannerism and Goltzius himself. (Until Jan. 4, it is at the Toledo Museum of Art, the third and final leg of a tour that originated at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.) From the standpoint of contemporary art, as well, it arrives fortuitously, at a time when critics are hailing the revival of monumental drawing and many artists are showing pronounced historicizing tendencies. In Goltzius, a true graphic genius, one gets the sense of a determined yet mercurial sensibility intent not only on the mastery of all techniques but also all art history. No slavish dependency, his deliberate borrowing from past and present art fueled a practice that, in the end, transcended his sources and pioneered trends that would come to fruition in the following decades, the so-called Golden Age of Dutch art. It was an achievement that this show most pleasurably articulates.

The exhibition comprises more than 160 works spanning Goltzius's career from 1578, a year after the Rhineland-born artist followed his teacher Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert to Haarlem, through 1616, the year before Goltzius died there. It is accompanied by a hefty catalogue edited by Huigen Leeflang and Get Luijten of the Rijksmuseum. (1) Incredibly, this is the first major survey of Goltzius's work across mediums. At the Metropolitan Museum in New York last summer, the exhibition was installed in roughly chronological order, with some digressions. Goltzius began as an engraver, quickly mastering the existing techniques that had already grown formulaic by the 1570s, barely a century after their first flowering. Toward the mid-1580s he conceived a radical break, developing his signature style (the "bulbous" or "dough" style) of swelling grooves inter-spersed with dots and blank spaces that convey a robust if in places exaggerated three-dimensionality. After a life-altering trip to Italy in 1590-91, about which we know a good deal, thanes to his friend and biographer Karel van Mander (1548-1606), Goltzius tamed the excesses of his Mannerist style, turning out a series of virtuoso drawings and engravings in a more classicizing mode. Finally, in 1600, Goltzius gave up engraving altogether and devoted the last years of his life exclusively to drawing and, more significantly, to painting, a medium in which he had previously shown little interest.

While the prints from Goltzius's Mannerist period are his best known, the crisp impressions on view, culled mainly from caches at the Met and the Rijksmuseum, can only enhance their fame. Here is the engraving of The Great Hercules (1589), "a strange-looking bruiser," as the late, preeminent Goltzius scholar Emil Reznicek described him. (2) Possessing an outlandish musculature at a steroidal remove from normal human anatomy, he is a figure who could jolt any scholar out of the proprieties of professional locution. So famous was this Hercules, seen as a symbol of Netherlandish resistance to Hapsburg Spain, that he came to be affectionately nicknamed the Knollenman, or "bulbous man." Startling, too, are "The Four Disgracers" (1588), a suite of four engravings showing the falls of Tantalus, Icarus, Phaeton and Ixion, called "disgracers" for their overweening ambition. Tumbling through the vast day-and-night vistas depicted within framing tondi, posed identically but from four different angles, they could be a single character rotated like a plumped-up chicken on a spit. On the one hand, Goltzius miraculously transforms into two dimensions the experience of walking around a freestanding sculpture. On the other, his draftsmanship allowed for an expression so fluid and chiaroscuro effects so dramatic that, in essence, be was achieving painterly--some have said coloristic--effects in purely linear mediums long before he took up the brush. (3)

"The Four Disgracers" were based on vanished grisaille modelli by the painter Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, who, along with Goltzius and Van Mander, formed in the mid-1580s an "academy" whose exact nature has never been determined. The trio exemplified the era's fascination with Italian art and humanism, in "The Four Disgracers" represented by an anatomy that evokes Michelangelo and also by the sort of mythological subject matter favored by Titian. A burgeoning industry in reproductive prints during the previous decades allowed artists north of the Alps to gain exposure to transmontane developments even if they never made the pilgrimage. Yet that same industry created a market in which the few regional publishing monopolies that hired and fired printers hastened the ossification of the medium, favoring the tried-and-true over innovation. Antwerp printmakers held sway in the Northern Netherlands, and indeed Goltzius himself worked for the Antwerp publisher Philips Galle, among others, at the beginning of his career. By 1582, however, Goltzius had established his own publishing business in Haarlem. The key to his enormous success was that, from the beginning, he designed his own compositions in addition to acquiring those by other artists, as was the custom. His enterprise was, by definition, original. As Leeflang writes, after 1594 "virtually no designs by other artists were issued" by his business. (4) Goltzius became famous, successfully challenging the monopoly of Antwerp and effectively setting the stage for future printmaking innovators like Hercules Seghers and Rembrandt van Rijn. (5)