Literature

The name of the Dutch painter and engraver Lucas van Leyden spread like wildfire during his lifetime. Scarcely had he engraved his first sheets as a young artist when they were already copied in Italy. And much later also this contemporary of Dürer was to be seen by the German Romantic movement categorized as a child prodigy in the descriptions of the artists’ novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798) by Ludwig Tieck. At the latest since Adam von Bartsch, who published the first catalogue raisonné of the copper engravings in 1798 at the same time as Tieck’s artists’ novel appeared, he has counted together with Albrecht Dürer and Marcantonio Raimondi as one of the three leading exponents of copper-engraving technique during the first half of the sixteenth century.

«[Lucas], who as a painter began to engrave, seems to have painted as an engraver»: thus it was that Max J. Friedländer characterized with fitting words a particularity of the engraved work of Lucas van Leyden. It is a feature that was already mentioned as being outstanding and exemplary by his contemporaries during the sixteenth century. Giorgio Vasari, the Italian artistic biographer, underlined that one could not have better represented aerial perspective, the bluish fading of ranges of hills in landscapes, by means of colour than did Van Leyden with his multitudinous gradations of tones of grey in his copper engravings. No less was Lucas van Leyden a highly gifted narrative artist, who understood how to combine the main and the secondary events on various levels of one and the same depiction. Besides his predilection for mythological motifs and for biblical narrative he possessed an appreciation of the unspectacular nature of everyday life, of the tranquillity and poetry of the moment. With his representations of beggars, animals or scenes of peasant life he was to be one of the most important forerunners of Dutch genre depictions of the seventeenth century.

Lucas van Leyden’s position as an engraver guaranteed him a prominent place in numerous private collections and print-rooms. Thus it is not by chance that the Graphische Sammlung of the ETH also possesses an extensive set of this artist’s sheets. This holding owes its existence to the passion for collecting and the demand for quality displayed by two related collectors. 115 sheets come from the gift received in 1885 from the Zurich municipal councillor Johann Heinrich Landolt. 158 sheets followed in 1894; they entered the Graphische Sammlung as part of the substantial bequest of the Zurich banker Heinrich Schulthess-von Meiss. The holding of Lucas van Leyden sheets is notable for its large number of early impressions of an excellent quality of printing. A complete series of the so-called Runden Passion of 1509, which was formerly in the collection of the Earl of Aylesford (1786-1859), is worthy of particular emphasis, as is (and this can be counted amongst the strokes of good fortune in the holding) the presence of the three earliest states of the sheet David vor Saul die Harfe spielend.