Baroque Prints by Jacques Callot at the Museum of Art in Rhode Island

Written by Herman Cunningham Thursday, 10 May 2012 00:12

Providence, RI.- Highlights from the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design extensive and superb collection of prints by the French artist Jacques Callot (1592-1635) are on view from June 17th 2011 through January 22nd 2012 in the exhibition "Jacques Callot and the Baroque Print". The exhibition explores the themes of Callot’s art alongside his technical innovations in the medium of etching. “This is the first time in more than 30 years that the RISD Museum’s outstanding collection of Callot’s work has been on view,” says the Museum’s Interim Director Ann Woolsey. “Visitors will be fascinated by Callot’s theatrical presentation, his mastery of intricate detail, and his serious as well as humorous subjects.”

Callot’s depictions of religious subjects, festivals, war, and distinct social types — all featured in the exhibition — shaped the subject matter and appearance of prints throughout Europe in the early 17th century. The works on view range from the rare "Large Thesis" (1625, Callot’s largest singlecopperplate etching) to a small-scale print series featuring comic dancers ("Balli di Sfessania", 1621). Callot hailed from Nancy, in the Duchy of Lorraine (now France), and studied engraving and etching in Rome under Philippe Thomassin. In 1614, he began working in Florence for the court of Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, making prints representing festivals, landscapes, and religious subjects. He perfected a new “stepped etching” technique by immersing copperplates in multiple acid baths and shielding certain areas from the chemical, which resulted in striking spatial qualities when the plate was inked and printed. Callot likely also invented the échoppe, a sharp tool with a curved tip that he would use to sweep through the hard etching ground to create curved and swelled lines. “With these technical innovations, Callot could carefully control sharp contrasts in the weight and scale of his figures, and create extremely ordered and vast pictorial spaces,” says Emily Peters, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. She says Callot’s innovations were quickly adopted by other artists to create astounding atmospheric effects in the etching medium.


Returning to his native Nancy in 1621, Callot made prints with dramatic subject matter that reflected the religious and political context in Europe. Depictions of martyrdoms, lavish pageants and festivals, and military exercises and battles dominated his later work. The most famous of these is Callot’s "Large Miseries of War" (1633), which, says Peters, “was a daring and extremely influential series both in Callot’s own time and centuries later.”  Prints by Jacques Bellange, Stefano Della Bella, and Claude Lorrain — Callot’s contemporaries — are included in the exhibition. Additional works by the Spanish master Jusepe de Ribera and the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, who departed from Callot’s technical and visual principles, provide a broader context for his work.

Southeastern New England's only comprehensive art museum, the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) was established in 1874. Its permanent collection of more than 86,000 objects includes paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume, furniture, and other works of art from every part of the world—including objects from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and art of all periods from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, up to the latest in contemporary art. The Museum also offers a wide array of educational and public programs to more than 100,000 visitors annually. The department of Ancient Art includes bronze figural sculpture and vessels, an exceptional collection of Greek coins (that grew out of the collection donated by Henry A. Greene), stone sculpture, Greek vases, paintings, and mosaics, a fine collection of Roman jewelry and glass, and teaching examples of terracottas. A number of objects represent the most outstanding examples in their categories. The department of Asian Art contains ceramics, costume, prints, painting, sculpture, and textiles. Created in 2000, the department of Contemporary Art oversees an eclectic collection of painting, sculpture, video, mixed media, and interdisciplinary work, dating from 1960 to the present. In addition, the department regularly organizes exhibitions that highlight important issues, trends and individual explorations in recent art. Represented in the collection are significant paintings by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Sam Francis, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Ronnie Landfield, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Wayne Thiebaud, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol, among others. The collection also includes important sculptural work by Richard Artschwager, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Tom Otterness, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Wilson. The museum’s video collection features experimental works by such pioneers in the field as Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Richard Serra, and William Wegman. The Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Latin American Art includes contemporary paintings by such important artists as Luís Cruz Azaceta, Fernando Botero, José Bedia, Claudio Bravo, Wifredo Lam, Jesús Rafael Soto, Joaquín Torres Garcia, and Roberto Matta Echuarren. Visit the museum's website at ... http://risdmuseum.org

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