Mars and Venus
Medium
Engraving
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1927
Accession Number
27.78.2(180)
Tags
Art Historical Context
In the bustling world of 16th-century Italian printmaking, *Mars and Venus* (1543), an exquisite engraving attributed to Enea Vico or Giovanni Battista Scultori captures the timeless allure of classical mythology. Vico, a prolific Mannerist engraver from Parma, and Scultori, a Mantuan master known for his reproductive prints, both excelled in translating paintings into intricate prints. This work, housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Drawings and Prints department, the era's technical prowess in engraving—a labor-intensive intaglio process where metal plates are incised with a burin to c...
About the Artist
Enea Vico|Giovanni Battista Scultori · 1523–1567
Enea Vico (1523–1567) was born in Parma and came of age during the final, energetic decades of Italian Renaissance printmaking. By 1541 he had made his way to Rome, where he entered the orbit of the engraver and publisher Tommaso Barlacchi and began his professional career. In Rome, Vico encountered the work of the most celebrated printmakers of the preceding generation—Marcantonio Raimondi, Agost...