EIN PROSPECT AN DER TIBER OHN WEIT ROMGELEGEN

Panoramic view of Orte and the Tiber, engraved by Melchior Küsel after Johann Wilhelm Baur.

Etching, circa 1670, signed on plate at lower right. A fine impression on contemporary laid paper, very good condition.

The work is part of the suites of landscape views of Italy, executed by Johann Wilhelm Baur in the 1630s, and engraved a generation later by Melchior Küsel (1636–1683). Baur was born at Strasbourg in 1607 and was trained by Friedrich Brentel as a draughtsman and miniature painter. About 1630, he went to Italy, living first at Naples, then in Rome under the patronage of the Colonna and Orsini families. In 1637, he returned north via Venice to Vienna, where he died in 1642. Baur made hundreds of drawings during this sojourn, some highly finished and intended for presentation to his noble patrons, others to be used for prints.

The engraver Melchior Küsel acquired about two hundred of Baur’s drawings after the death of the artist, including scenes of the life, miracles and Passion of Jesus Christ, classical mythology, views of the harbours, villas, and gardens of Naples, Rome, and Venice, the landscape around Livorno, Ancona, Lucca, Florence, and of the Friuli and Istrian peninsula.

In 1670 Küsel published at Augsburg the Iconographia, dedicated to the emperor Leopold, and comprising 148 engravings after Baur’s designs of which sixty-eight were Italian views and the rest religious or historical subjects. New editions of the Iconographia appeared under Küsel’s imprint in 1671, 1672, and 1682, and under the imprint of his son-in-law Johann Ulrich Kraus in 1686 and 1702.

Bibliografia

F.W.H. Hollstein, German etchings, engravings & woodcuts 1400–1700, XX (Amsterdam 1977), p.111, nos.476–490.