The Seven Liberal Arts Persecuted by Pluto and Bacchus
ca. 1554–91
Medium
Etching
Dimensions
Sheet: 2 1/2 × 11 11/16 in. (6.4 × 29.7 cm)
Classification
Prints|Ornament & Architecture
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949
Accession Number
49.20.25
Tags
Art Historical Context
In Jost Amman's etching *The Seven Liberal Arts Peruted by Pluto and Bacchus* (ca. 1554–91), the Swiss artist vividly captures a dramatic allegory from the Renaissance era. Amman, a prolific woodcutter and engraver active in 16th-century Germany, depicts the classical Seven Liberal Arts—grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry,, and astronomy—under siege by the gods Pluto (ruler of the underworld, symbolizing greed or death) and Bacchus ( of wine, embodying revelry). Surrounding them are mischievous satyrs and fierce boars, representing primal vices that threaten intellectual pursuit...
About the Artist
Jost Amman · 1539–1591
Jost Amman (1539–1591) was a Swiss-born woodcut designer, engraver, and illustrator who became one of the most prolific and influential graphic artists of sixteenth-century Germany, producing an output of extraordinary range and technical virtuosity that shaped the visual culture of the later Reformation era. Born in Zurich, Amman moved to Nuremberg around 1560, the city that had been the center o...