Pluto,

ca. 1588–90

These prints belong to a series depicting seven classical deities; here, Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, and Tethys, a Greek water goddess. Goltzius worked in a sensuous style that exaggerated musculature and proportions. Pluto, shown from behind with accentuated buttocks and feet firmly planted on the ground, overlooks a fiery landscape and stands next to an urn from which flow the four rivers of Hades. In the print below, Tethys glides across the sea on a shell-form chariot drawn by fantastical dolphins, with her sea-nymph daughters in the background. The associations of the prints with fire and water relate to Goltzius’s interest in alchemy and elemental transformations. Goltzius used the chiaroscuro woodcut technique—printing multiple blocks inked in different tones—to give the works their characteristic coloring, described in the seventeenth century as a kind of “printed painting.”