The Four Disgracers

These prints from the series The Four Disgracers by Dutch engraver Hendrik Goltzius reveal the artist at the height of his talents. With boldly swelling lines, intricately detailed hatching, and dramatic foreshortening, the artist conquers the challenge of capturing nude bodies falling through space in contorted and unusual poses. Drawn from ancient myth and illustrating the fate of four humans who dared to enter the realm of the gods, the series was the result of a collaboration between Goltzius and the Dutch painter Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1563–1638). In the exaggerated musculature, dramatic movement, and high contrast, one detects the strong influence of Italian mannerism on the art of Northern Europe during the early Baroque period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like Charles-Joseph Natoire’s (1700–1777) later rococo paintings of the eighteenth century, Goltzius’s mannerist printmaking equally reveals the continued vitality of the ancient influence on art following the Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity.