Ceres Seeking Her Daughter,

1610

This dramatic night scene is the prelude to an episode of divine punishment from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In searching for her daughter Proserpina, who had been abducted by Pluto, the goddess Ceres asked an old woman for a drink of water and was mocked by a boy for gulping down the liquid so quickly. Angered, she spat at the boy and turned him into a speckled lizard. Like all of Goudt’s prints, this one reproduces a work by the German painter Elsheimer, with whom Goudt studied in Rome between 1604 and 1610. Elsheimer’s innovative nocturnal interpretations of religious and mythological subjects, incorporating both natural and artificial light sources, were disseminated through Goudt’s so-called black prints; their inky darkness, here achieved with virtuoso engraving, influenced Rembrandt’s atmospheric night etchings.