Triumph of Galatea,

1592

This engraving is one of the fruits of Goltzius's trip to Italy, which he made in 1590, when he was in his early thirties and already well-known. The yearlong visit was mostly devoted to sketching, and van Mander expressed his wonder at the volume and quality of drawings the artist had managed to produce. When Goltzius signed this plate, engraved after Raphael's famous fresco in the Palazzo Chigi on the outskirts of Rome, he noted that he had copied it in person. Eyewitness accuracy was one of the work's selling points, since at least seven other reproductions-not all of especially high quality-were already in circulation. With his generous parallel hatching and attention to the flow of draperies and water, Goltzius caught the powerful, gracious movement of Raphael's image. It depicts the scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses in which the beautiful Galatea escapes the monster Polyphemus in a dolphin-drawn chariot (here powered by a High Renaissance water wheel).