Princes and Paupers: The Art of Jacques Callot
Diane Wolfthal and Dena Woodall
Yale University Press
2013
Jacques Callot, a seventeenth-century artist active in Italy and France, revolutionized etching. This catalogue focuses on two poles of his work: his aristocratic commissions and his images of the marginalized and impoverished. A consummate draftsman, he produced more than 1400 prints that reveal his fascination with a broad range of subjects, from the miseries of war to aristocratic pageantry; from saints to beggars; from biblical narratives to gypsies and dwarfs. Callot organized his imaginative, witty, and inventive prints into series that explore a narrative or variations on a theme. My co-author is a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts.