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

Why did Goltzius give up engraving? Many theories have been advanced. But the most convincing one concerns the age-old esteem in which painting was held. Van Mander himself, quite ready to prize what he saw as the draftsmanly superiority of Northern artists in the Schilder-boeck, called painting "the highest point of art and the most choice means of all with which to come closest to representing Nature in all her aspects." (14)

By 1600, the "protean" Goltzius had accomplished seemingly everything that could be done in printmaking. Although he was in ill health and approaching old age, he remarkably began making paintings, on canvas, panel and copper, turning out some 50 that survive and another 50 that can be inferred from documents. Thirteen were on view at the Met, gathered for the first time. Compared to his graphic work, there is a greater percentage of religious scenes--the Crucifixion, Christ at his Tomb and the Suffering Christ, for example. But there is also the cheerfully sensuous rendition of Danae (1603), a monumental canvas aglow with color, which owes much to Titian.

The triptych Mercury, Minerva and Hercules and Cacus (1611-13) reprises some of Goltzius's favorite mythological characters. It was originally owned by--and perhaps commissioned by--Johan Colterman, governor of the town of Putten, whose features may have been used, to slightly absurd effect, in the face of the nearly naked Hercules, standing with his club on his shoulder, with the giant Cacus vanquished in a foreshortened position on the ground behind him. Given the point in Goltzius's life at which he undertook this new medium, such efforts are quite impressive, but somehow the paintings' derivative style seems to get in the way, which never happens in Goltzius's earlier graphic appropriations.

Of a different order entirely, however, are two very large "pen works" on canvas, in which Goltzius treats one of his favorite themes, Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus (Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus would freeze), a phrase taken from a comedy by the classical author Terence. It's an accessible enough premise: without food and wine, love cannot flourish. Here the artist creates a new category of object, quite a feat for a theme so light-hearted. As Nichols writes, "Goltzius without question revelled in the conceit of these original, category-defying enterprises, satisfied in the attention that his dexterity and invention brought him." (15) Especially mind-boggling is the version from 1599-1602, which is rendered in pen and brown ink heightened by brush and oils, on a roughly 41-by-31-inch canvas prepared with a blue-gray ground. (Once owned by Rudolf II, the work has wound up in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) It is a night scene in which the main characters--voluptuous Venus, her sidekick Cupid, Bacchus with his grapes and Ceres with her harvest form a cozy circle. Only the mischievous Cupid glances out to engage the audience. Carrying a torch with a flame painted in colors, he casts its light over the scene, rendered in an otherwise restricted palette: a silvery monochrome picked out here and there with color, as on Venus's golden torso and the figures' rosy lips. Whatever its moralizing implications, Goltzius was clearly drawn to the scene over and over (there are five versions in the exhibition catalogue) because of the possibilities it offered to explore the sensuous effects of his various mediums. Here the drawn lines and painted tones, hatching and scumbling, create a work both intimate and blaringly virtuoso. It is arguably the crowning glory of a career that never wanted for amazing feats of technical prowess and artistic inventiveness.