Nature
ca. 1545–50
Medium
Engraving
Dimensions
sheet: 3 3/16 x 3 3/16 in. (8.1 x 8.1 cm) trimmed just outside platemark
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949
Accession Number
49.97.369
Tags
Art Historical Context
Enea Vico's *Nature* (ca. 1545–50) is a exquisite small-scale engraving, measuring just over 3 inches square, that captures the Renaissance fascination with classical allegory. Vico, a leading Italian engraver active in Rome and Venice, renowned for his precise reproductive prints after designs by masters like Parmigianino and Michelangelo. This work personifies Nature as a graceful female nude, embodying the humanist ideal of harmony between humanity and the natural world—a theme rooted in ancient mythology and revived during the 16th century. Engraving, Vico's favored medium, involved metic...
About the Artist
Enea Vico · 1523–1567
Enea Vico (1523–1567) was born in Parma and came of age during the final, energetic decades of Italian Renaissance printmaking. By 1541 he had made his way to Rome, where he entered the orbit of the engraver and publisher Tommaso Barlacchi and began his professional career. In Rome, Vico encountered the work of the most celebrated printmakers of the preceding generation—Marcantonio Raimondi, Agost...