Three Ovid Metamorphoses Engravings after Crispijn van de Passe, circa 1610

About this sheet

A set of three original antique copper engravings from the illustrated Ovid of Crispijn van de Passe, sold together and not separately. Each small landscape plate carries a scene from the Metamorphoses with two lines of Latin elegiac verse engraved beneath it, and the series line Crispian van de Passe inven. exc. appears on the sheets, with Ovid Metam. libr. 14 on the third. The engraving is very fine, worked almost entirely in crossed line with no stipple, in the Netherlandish manner of the opening years of the seventeenth century. They are three original sheets sold together as one lot, and the set is never split.

The first plate shows bodies strewn along a river bank beneath a sky torn by cloud, with a winged chariot falling at the upper left and a river god reclining among the rocks; the Latin couplets engraved beneath describe the waters rushing and the soul rising to the ether. The second shows the ark riding a flooded landscape with birds wheeling above it and a procession of animals, oxen, horses, a camel and a lion, gathered on the hillside below, the couplets beneath telling of the four footed beasts lowing and seeking the shore. The third shows a naked figure standing in the shallows between two rocky headlands, with the sea god Glaucus rising from the water at the left and a town along the shore behind; the engraved couplets name Glaucus, Scylla and the poisons of Circe, and the line beneath reads Ovid Metam. libr. 14.

Crispijn van de Passe the Elder was the head of a family that dominated Netherlandish printmaking for two generations, working first at Cologne and then at Utrecht. His Metamorphoseon Ovidianarum was issued with a plate for each story and became the standard visual source for Ovid in northern Europe, copied and adapted by painters for a century afterwards. The plates are packed with incident at a scale of a few centimeters, which is the particular pleasure of them. These are old master prints, and they belong in a group of three where the eye can move from one story to the next. Framed uniformly with wide mounts they look far larger than they are.

Light uneven toning, browner towards the edges. Marked handling soiling along the edges of all three sheets. Scattered foxing in the margins of all three sheets. Slight wear at the corners of one of the three sheets.

These are original antique prints, not modern reproductions. This item is sold unframed. Any framed or interior images are shown for presentation and inspiration only, unless the listing explicitly states that the item is sold framed.