Code: 10136
Dimensions:
AGOSTINO CARRACCI Bologna 1557 – 1602 Parma
The Madonna Appearing to Saint Jerome.
Engraving, after Tintoretto; 1588. Bartsch 76, T.I.B. 153, DeGrazia Bohlin 146, the first of four states, before the privilege and subsequent addresses. The artist’s masterpiece in engraving. A brilliant impression, with impeccable, fresh surfaces, trimmed just outside the border all around. The first state, before the privilege, may be considered a proof state, necessarily before wide dissemination of the engraving.
Active as a painter and draftsman, Agostino engraved with considerable frequency and great skill. He often collaborated with Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese, but his images remain infused with his own sense of form. Agostino understood Tintoretto’s compositional dynamism and combined it with his own taste for powerful contrasts of light and dark, by this date a central element of his engraving style.
The success of this engraving is not surprising, judging by the successive publishers who presented this engraving in ever less convincing impressions. The rare, early impressions dramatize the emotional immediacy of Saint Jerome’s ecstatic vision in which the grandly conceived figure of the Virgin, effortlessly suspended by angels, gestures to the Saint. The deep shadows which surround her and the Saint powerfully define the interaction between human and divine.
417 x 299 mm 16 3/8 x 11 ¾ inches
