Jacques
Callot
born 1592/93, Nancy, France
died March 24, 1635, Nancy
French printmaker who was one of the first great artists to practice the graphic
arts exclusively. His innovative series of prints documenting the horrors of war
greatly influenced the socially conscious artists of the 19th and 20th
centuries.
Callot's career was divided into an Italian period (c. 1609–21) and a Lorraine
(France) period (from 1621 until his death). He learned the technique of
engraving under Philippe Thomass in in Rome. About 1612 he went to Florence. At
that time Medici patronage expended itself almost exclusively in feste,
quasi-dramatic pageants, sometimes dealing in allegorical subjects, and Callot
was employed to make pictorial records of these mannered, sophisticated
entertainments. He succeeded in evolving a naturalistic style while preserving
the artificiality of the occasion, organizing a composition as if it were a
stage setting and reducing the figures to a tiny scale, each one indicated by
the fewest possible strokes. This required a very fine etchingtechnique. His
breadth of observation, his lively figure style, and his skill in assembling a
large, jostling crowd secured for his etchings a lasting popular influence all
over Europe.
Callot also had a genius for caricature and the grotesque. His series of plates
of single figures—for example, the “Dance of Sfessania,” the “Caprices of
Various Figures,” and the “Hunchbacks”—are witty and picturesque and show a rare
eye for factual detail.
With a few exceptions, the subject matter of the etchings of the Lorraine period
is less frivolous, and Callot was hardly employed at all by the court at Nancy.
He illustrated sacred books, made a series of plates of the Apostles, and
visited Paris to etch animated maps of the sieges of La Rochelle and the Ile de
Re.
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In his last great series of etchings, the “small” (1632) and the
“large” (1633) “Miseries of War,” he brought his documentary genius to bear on the
atrocities of the Thirty Years' War. Callot is also well known for his landscape
drawings in line and wash and for his quick figure studies in chalk.
