Hendrick Goltzius

Biography

Goltzius was born near Viersen in Bracht or Millebrecht, a village then in the Duchy of Julich, now in the municipality Brüggen in North Rhine-Westphalia. His family moved to Duisburg when he was 3 years old. After studying painting on glass for some years under his father, he learned engraving from the Dutch polymath Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, who then lived in Cleves. In 1577 he moved with Coornhert to Haarlem in the Dutch Republic, where he remained based for the rest of his life. In the same town, he was also employed by Philip Galle to engrave a set of prints of the history of Lucretia.

Goltzius had a malformed right hand from a fire when he was a baby (his drawing of it is at right), which turned out to be especially well-suited to holding the burin; "by being forced to draw with the large muscles of his arm and shoulder, he mastered a commanding swing of the line".

In the 1580s, Goltzius with his friends van Mander and the painter Cornelis van Haarlem, founded an art academy in Haarlem in emulation of those in France and Bologna, where the human figure could be studied from life and artists could meet to discuss both practice and aesthetics.

At the age of 21, Goltzius married a widow eight or nine years his senior. Her money enabled him to establish an independent business at Haarlem, but the marriage itself was unhappy. Feeling that the unpleasant atmosphere at home had affected his health, he found it advisable in 1590 to make a tour through Germany to Italy, where he acquired an intense admiration for the works of Michelangelo. He returned to Haarlem in August 1591, considerably improved in health, and worked there until his death.

His portraits, though mostly miniatures, are masterpieces of their kind, both on account of their exquisite finish and as fine studies of individual characters. Of his larger heads, his life-size self-portrait is probably the most striking example.

Goltzius brought to an unprecedented level the use of the "swelling line", where the burin is manipulated to make lines thicker or thinner to create a tonal effect from a distance. He also was a pioneer of the "dot and lozenge" technique, where dots are placed in the middle of lozenge-shaped spaces created by cross-hatching to further refine tonal shading.

Hollstein credits 388 prints to him, with a further 574 by other printmakers after his designs.

In his command of the burin, Goltzius is said to rival Dürer. He made engravings of Bartholomeus Spranger's paintings, thus increasing the fame of the latter – and his own. Goltzius began painting at the age of forty-two; some of his paintings can be found in Vienna. He also executed a few chiaroscuro woodcuts. He was the stepfather of the engraver Jacob Matham. He died, aged 58, in Haarlem.

Public collections

Most major print rooms will have a group of Goltzius's many engravings.

• Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
• Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
• Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
• University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• British Museum, London
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Gallery

File:Horatius Cocles De Romeinse helden (serietitel), RP-P-OB-10.336.jpg|Horatius Cocles, from The Roman Heroes, 1586 File:Goltzius Ikarus.jpg|Icarus (1588) from the series The four disgracers File:Hendrick Goltzius - Farnese Hercules - Google Art Project.jpg|Engraving of the Farnese Hercules, File:Hendrick Goltzius, Dutch (active Haarlem) - Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus (Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Would Freeze) - Google Art Project.jpg|Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus (Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Would Freeze), 1600–03, Philadelphia Museum of Art File:Hendrick Goltzius - Portrait of the Haarlem Shell Collector Jan Govertsen van der Aer - Google Art Project.jpg|Portrait of the Shell Collector Jan Govertsen van der Aer, 1603, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen File:'Jupiter and Antiope', oil on canvas painting by Hendrick Goltzius.Jpg|Jupiter and Antiope, 1612, National Gallery, London File:The Fall of Man-1616-Hendrik Goltzius.jpg|The Fall of Man, 1616, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. File:Hercules Killing Cacus by Hendrick Goltzius, Honolulu Museum of Art.JPG|Hercules Killing Cacus, a chiaroscuro woodcut, 1588 File:Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) Mother of God in the care of Joseph.jpg|Divine Mother of God, and the faithful care of Joseph. All [things] feed who feeds all, 1589, pen and black ink on laid paper File:Hendrik Goltzius, A Foxglove in Bloom, 1592, NGA 94900.jpg|alt=Illustration of a foxglove plant|A Foxglove in Bloom, 1592, pen and brown ink on laid paper. File:Hendrik Goltzius, The Great Hercules, 1589, NGA 70311.jpg|The Great Hercules, 1589 [[File:The_Emperor_Commodus_as_Hercules_(B._144;_Holl._146;_S._313).jpg|thumb|The Emperor Commodus as Hercules 1592]]

Notes

References

Sources

References

1. Mayor (1971), no. 420
2. (1 September 2023). "Way to Happiness: Work and Diligence".
3. "Allegorische voorstelling van de rijkdom en de vlijt".
4. Melion, Walter S.. (1991). "Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander's Schilder-Boeck". University of Chicago Press.
5. Cohn, Marjorie B.. (June 2014). "An Interpretation of Four Woodcut Landscapes by Hendrick Goltzius". [[Print Quarterly]].
6. "Collection: Hendrick Goltzius".
7. "Hendrick Goltzius".
8. "Past Exhibitions, 2003: Prints from the Leo Steinberg Collection, Part 1".
9. "Hendrick Goltzius".
10. "Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617)".
11. "Collections Object : Landscape with a Waterfall".
12. "Hendrik Goltzius".
13. "Hendrik Goltzius".
14. (21 September 2018). "Hendrick Goltzius".