Hendrick Goltzius

Dutch, 1558-1617

BiographyGoltzius was born in 1558 in Mühlbracht, present-day Bracht-am-Niederrhein. Called "a fat, wild, and lively child" by Van Mander, Goltzius fell into a fire when he was about a year old, after which he was never able to fully open his right hand, the one he would nevertheless use to draw, engrave, and paint.1

Recognizing Hendrick's artistic interest and ability, his father, Jan Goltz II, removed his son from school at age eight and allowed him to study drawing and glass painting, his own profession. About 1575 Goltzius was apprenticed to learn the art of engraving from the exiled polemicist and engraver Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert. Between October 1576 and June 1577 Goltzius joined Coornhert in Haarlem where Goltzius settled permanently. In 1579, Goltzius married Margaretha Jansdr., a widow, and became stepfather to Jacob Matham who would follow in Goltzius's footsteps as a printmaker. After working for the Antwerp-based publisher Philips Galle for a few years, Goltzius in 1582 began to publish his own engravings.

By 1585 Goltzius was working in the idealized international style now known as Mannerism. This flamboyant mode of representation had been introduced to Haarlem in 1583 when Van Mander settled there and brought with him drawings by the Flemish artist Bartholomäus Spranger, whom he had met and worked with in Italy and Vienna in the mid-1570s. Goltzius engraved a number of Spranger's compositions, and his own designs also began to derive inspiration from this aesthetic. With their calculated extremes of anatomical excess and distortion, intentionally ambiguous definition of space, and an all-encompassing devotion to surface ornamentation, Goltzius's engravings from this period, 1585 to 1590, epitomize the conscious avoidance of naturalism and the deliberate over-refinement of this anti-classical approach.

By decade's end a lessening of his "Sprangerism" is evident in Goltzius's engravings and drawings, a tendency that was reinforced by his journey to Italy. In January 1591 he arrived in Rome, where he sketched after Raphael, Michelangelo, and Polidoro da Caravaggio, and to an even greater degree from antiquities. Goltzius's colorful portrait drawings made on his way to and from Italy are of great beauty and significance as well. He returned to Haarlem by the end of 1591. With the assistance of his many followers, Goltzius throughout the 1590s experienced much success as an engraver and publisher, and his activity with chiaroscuro woodcuts was of consequence as well. By 1600 he enjoyed a far-reaching reputation as Europe's preëminent graphic artist.

Around the outset of the new century Goltzius created what are perhaps his most extraordinary works of art, his "Pen-wercken" on large parchments and prepared canvases. Goltzius's landscape studies of the environs of Haarlem drawn about this time demonstrate that he played a decisive role in the development of the 17th-century Dutch realist tradition. Also in or around 1600 the artist exchanged burin for brush and became a painter, a pursuit he followed until his death on New Year's Day 1617. While vestiges of Goltzius's Mannerist past are to be seen in some of his paintings, in particular certain of his early endeavors in this domain, the influences of his Italian sojourn, his on-going activity with drawing from the live model, as well as the critical impetus derived in 1612 from contact with Rubens during his visit to Haarlem, resulted in his painted coppers, panels, and canvases assuming a more classicizing idiom.

1 The central primary source material for biographical information on Goltzius is "T'leven van Henricus Goltzius" in Karel van Mander's Het Schilder-Boeck, Haarlem, 1604. See also: H. Miedema, ed., KAREL VAN MANDER, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters 5, Doornspijk, 1998, pp. 174-225; L.W. Nichols, "Hendrick Goltzius - Documents and Printed Literature Concerning his Life," Goltzius-Studies, Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 42-43 (1991-92), 1993, pp. 77-120; and E.K.J. Reznicek, "Hendrick Goltzius," The Dictionary of Art 12 (1996), pp. 879-84.

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