Jacques Callot (Nancy 1592 – 1635) - pair of etchings

Pair of etchings. Dimensions: 20x10cm with frame 40x30cm Jacques Callot (Nancy, 1592 – Nancy, 1635) was a French engraver. He was born into a noble family related to the duke's. At the age of fifteen, he entered the workshop of the goldsmith Demange Crocq, where he learned the basics of drawing with Jacques de Bellange and Claude Deruet, as well as the use of the burin. Subsequently, in 1608, he was in Rome, at the engraver Philippe Thomassin from Troyes, where he perfected his practice with the burin, copying the works of Italian and Flemish masters. At this stage, he was attracted by the works of Agostino Carracci. In 1612 he moved to Florence, remaining there for nine years under the protection of Christine of Lorraine. Here he engraved, at the engraver Giulio Parigi's, in 1616 about the Temptation of Saint Anthony, in 1617 the series of Capricci, inspired by the theater, popular costume and Carnival, between 1619 and 1620 the six plates accompanying the first edition of Prospero Bonarelli's Solimano, and finally in 1620 the Fair of Impruneta. In Florence he experimented with the etching technique which will become one of his favorite expressive modes. His engravings highlighted a rather personal and original artistic language, halfway between the gallant and the grotesque, supported by an extremely refined compositional taste. [1] In 1621 he settled in Nancy, where he engraved the drawings brought from the peninsula: the Gobbi, the Balli di Sfessania and the Great Passion. With the Zingari cycle he intensified his interest in everyday events and in an increasingly realistic vision of the world. In 1624 he married Catherine Kuttinger. In 1627 he was in Breda where he engraved the siege of the city, later using the same technique, he fixed on paper both the siege of Saint-Martin-de-Ré and that of La Rochelle, always commissioned by King Louis XIII. Between 1628 and 1631 he stayed in Paris several times, where he entrusted Israël Henriet with the edition of his plates. Returning to Nancy in 1632, where he witnessed both the French invasion of the Duchy of Lorraine and the plague, he executed The Miseries of War in 1633 and the second version of the Temptation of Saint Anthony dedicated to Louis Phélypeaux. The so-called Callot figurines, which are comic or grotesque miniatures made to decorate snuffboxes and small boxes, in gold or in silver, or painted on porcelain, derive from his surname. In Italy they are also known as caramogi.