Title Page, from Passion of Christ
1575/1600
Medium
Engraving in black on cream wove paper
Dimensions
Plate: 16 × 11.8 cm (6 5/16 × 4 11/16 in.); Sheet: 17.2 × 12.5 cm (6 13/16 × 4 15/16 in.)
Classification
engraving
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
93091
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
A symbolically charged heraldic arrangement—including the spear, sponge, lash, and other instruments of Christ’s Passion—occupies the bulk of this oval design. Although the rest of the sheet contains significantly more text than the Sadeler and Gheeraerts signatures seen below the image in each subsequent print, it is similar in many ways to the grotesque imagery throughout the series. The blank background here makes one marked exception, as the other scenes play out before a unifying netting of...
About the Artist
Jan Sadeler, I · 1550–1600
Jan Sadeler I (1550–1600) was born in Brussels and became the most prominent member of the largest and most successful dynasty of Flemish printmakers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Sadeler family — which included Jan's brothers Aegidius and Raphael — produced an extraordinary volume of engravings that circulated across Catholic Europe, disseminating images of religious subjects, p...