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Etching with drypoint, circa 1648-50, first state, on laid paper with indistinctly legible watermark including a circle ca. 50 mm in diameter, possibly an anchor and a letter M within. Signed in plate lower center P. Testa fecit. Image and sheet 265 x 417 mm, trimmed on the plate mark. Original unobtrusive vertical center fold and vestige verso of another old crease off center; small ink splotch and skinned spot at lower edge at the letters "fec"; archivally matted (43 x 49 cm); unidentified miniscule ink inscription "I-B. 533" verso center; otherwise fine condition. See Cropper, Elizabeth, Pietro Testa 1612-1650: Prints and Drawings (Philadephia Museum of Art, 1988), no. 121, pp. 262-5, 290 (state I). Hailed already by peers as draftsman and printmaker, Testa ranks with Castiglione in Italian 17th-century etching. This plate concludes Testa's possibly truncated series, near the end of his life, of three Scenes from the Life of Achilles. It illustrates the Iliad at Book 22, lines 395-404, translating, as Cropper says (op. cit. at p. 262), the walls of Troy from Greek into Latin in the form of the Colosseum, the Torre delle Milizie, and the Pantheon. In Testa's highly original invention, reminiscent nevertheless of Rubens's and Poussin's renditions of the Death of Hippolytus, Achilles guided by crowning Victory must yet be prescient of his own inexorable fate as the frenetic horses plunge the chariot downwards to the shade of darkness. Cropper observes of this plate (op. cit. at p. xxviii) that Testa determined to emphasize the closed, muscular forms of figures through bold systems of hatching in which the direction of lines turns in every plane. Increasingly, he adopted the drypoint, not to produce a rich, burred line but to perfect this modeling. The very fine lines drawn on the plate for The Suicide of Cato and Achilles Dragging the Body of Hector around the Walls of Troy, for example, establish an extra foreground plane on the limbs of Cato and Hector that is even closer than the most delicately etched lines to the fully illuminated areas of flesh to which these lines are juxtaposed. Testa died in 1650 at age 36 shortly after executing this plate, possibly a suicide, without a known will. The plate bears neither the privilege nor a dedication that would buttress lifetime publication. Its printing history is speculative from Testa's death until the printer-publisher Arnoldus van Westerhout acquired the plate and added his second-state credit in the early 1680's (see Francesca Consagra, The Marketing of Pietro Testa's Poetic Inventions, Cropper, op. cit., p. xciv and n. 63 at p. c). Cropper lists 11 institutions holding the first state of the present etching, selecting for pride of illustration the example held by the British Museum (V,10.139). The present impression has been closely compared digitally with large-format images from the British Museum (id.), Yale University Art Gallery (2017.93.2), Wesleyan University Davison Art Center (1973.7.2) and Detroit Institute of Arts (09.1S1147). The British Museum copy is more heavily inked and forcefully pressed than the one recently acquired by Yale, but digitally these examples demonstrate the same superb clarity. There is one remarkable difference. In the British Museum example the horse's hoof in the very left bottom corner has several added vertical lines, perhaps to amend an awkward original intent that the oval bottom of the hoof face the viewer. A possible conclusion is that the quality of an impression from this plate in first state, up to the time of van Westerhout in the early 1680's, depended foremost on the techniques of whichever professional printer pulled the copy. The present example, compared closely with the others indicated above, is a very good impression with strong contrast, not as superb as the Yale copy or the more softly printed yet equally clear Wesleyan example, but distinctly superior in clarity and contrast to the one in Detroit. Seller Inventory # ABE-1538000788746
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