Attributed to Baccio Baldini Italian, c. 1436-1487
About this artwork
This engraving was part of a group of Florentine round and oval prints with secular themes meant to be pasted on cylindrical boxes. These held sweetmeats or toiletries and were exchanged by lovers or given as wedding favors. The prints could have been colored or illuminated and completed with the recipient’s coat of arms before being affixed to boxes, though in the one displayed here the shield hanging on the tree at right remains empty. Holofernes literally lost his head to Judith’s well-timed act of seduction, and she hoists the sword she used to remove it, the blade softly echoing the curve of the printed border.
Engraving in blue-gray on ivory laid paper, laid down on cream laid paper
Dimensions
132 × 132 mm (image/inner border); 137 × 137 mm (sheet)
Credit Line
Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Potter Palmer, II
Reference Number
1945.359
Extended information about this artwork
Jean Duchesne, Voyage d’un iconophile (Paris: Heideloff et Campé, 1834), p. 209.
Henri Delaborde, La gravure en Italie avant Marc-Antoine (1452-1505) (Paris and London: Librairie de l’art, 1883), p. 60.
Sidney Colvin, A Florentine Picture Chronicle by Maso Finiguerra (London: B. Quaritch, 1898), pp. 38-39 (ill. 74).
Sotheby & Co. Catalogue of the Celebrated Collections of Old Master Engravings … 19th Century Watercolour Drawings … 18th Century Mezzotint Portraits / date of sale: November 7, 1945 (London: Sotheby & Co., 1945), lot no 129 (ill.).
Carl O. Schniewind, “A Great Print Collection Comes to the Art Institute,” Bulletin of The Art Institute of Chicago, vol XLII, no 1 (Jan. 1948), p. 6 (ill.).
Harold Joachim, et al. Prints 1400-1800: A Loan Exhibition from Museums and Private Collections (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1956), no. 75 (ill. 31).
E.P. Richardson, “Bertoldo and Verracchio: Two Fifteenth Century Florentine Bronzes,” The Art Quarterly, vol. XXII, no. 3 (1959), p. 205, (ill. 8).
A. Hyatt Mayor, Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), fig. 89.
Jay A. Levenson, Prints of the Italian Renaissance: A Handbook of the Exhibition, (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 1973), no. 56.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota, “Prints 1400–1800: A Loan Exhibition from Museums and Private Collections,” also traveled to The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago, November 1956–March 1957, plate 31, cat. 75 (ill.).
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, “Prints of the Italian Renaissance,” June 23–October 7, 1973; also traveled to San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, November 10, 1973–January 13, 1974, cat. and handbook.
The Art Institute of Chicago, “Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life,” April 30-July 10, 2011, p. 55, fig. 45 (ill.).
Hind A.IV.I
Passavant V.37.80
Bartsch XIII.147.13
Kristeller 14
Bartsch, illustrated 2403.010
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