Bust of a young woman with elaborate headdress, looking down.
Medium
Etching; only state
Dimensions
Plate: 2 1/2 × 1 7/8 in. (6.4 × 4.8 cm) cut on platemark
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917
Accession Number
17.50.18-75
Tags
Art Historical Context
This delicate etching, created in 1645 by Wenceslaus Hollar after a design by Ludovico Mazzolino, captures the bust of a young woman gazing downward beneath an ornate headdress. Measuring just 2½ by 1⅞ inches, the print exemplifies the intimate scale often favored in 17th-century reproductive etchings. Hollar, a Bohemian artist renowned for his precise and detailed printmaking, rendered the subject with fine lines that convey both the texture of the headdress and the gentle tilt of the figure’s head. As a work classified among the Metropolitan Museum’s prints and drawings, this piece reflects...
About the Artist
Ludovico Mazzolino|Wenceslaus Hollar · 1480–1528
Ludovico Mazzolino (c. 1480–c. 1528), also known as Mazzolini da Ferrara or Il Ferrarese, was an Italian Renaissance painter whose highly personal and sophisticated style made him a favorite at the court of Ferrara. Born around 1480 in Ferrara, Mazzolino spent almost his entire life in this culturally rich city, where he developed a distinctive approach that looked back to the calligraphic precisi...