Jan van der Straet

Around 1590, drawings were regularly sent out of the city of Florence - pen-and-ink drawings, shaded in brown and blue - destined for the engraving workshops in Antwerp. Jan van der Straet sent some four hundred such designs across the Alps; in return came printed editions that were distributed across Europe and as far as the Far East. Van der Straet had first travelled this route himself, but in the opposite direction - a painter and designer of prints, born in Bruges around 1523.

His training began with his father in Bruges and led to Pieter Aertsen’s workshop in Antwerp; in 1545, the Guild of Saint Luke admitted him as a master. Shortly afterwards, he moved south, via Lyon and Venice according to his biographer Raffaello Borghini; in Venice, around 1550, a Flemish weaver from the Medici tapestry workshop lured him on to Florence. In Italy, Jan van der Straet became Giovanni Stradano, Latinised as Johannes Stradanus.

From 1557, he was Giorgio Vasari’s closest collaborator on the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio; his self-portrait appears right next to Vasari’s in a section of the ceiling of the Salone dei Cinquecento. In 1570, he signed a panel for the studiolo of the Medici prince Francesco I - his laboratory and cabinet of curiosities - with ‘Ioannes Stratensis Flandrus’, meaning ‘Jan van der Straet, the Fleming’ - his origins spelt out in full right in the heart of the Medici Palace. Such self-assurance came at a price: in Vasari’s circle, people mocked the overly Flemish character of his paintings, and Vasari even tried to take an altarpiece commission for Santa Maria Novella away from him - but Stradanus kept it.

In 1576, he entered the service of Don Juan de Austria, the victor of the Battle of Lepanto, in Naples; he followed him to the Netherlands later that same year - his first return home in twenty years - and, for his first major series of engravings commissioned by Philips Galle, delivered forty portraits of horses from the general’s stables. From 1583 onwards, he settled permanently in Florence once more and devoted himself primarily to creating engravings; the prints were produced in Antwerp by the Galle and Collaert families of engravers and by the Wierix brothers. His hunting tapestries for the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano thus developed, by 1596, into an encyclopaedia of hunting comprising 104 plates: the *Venationes* series. One of these is: ‘Men in heavy armour attack bears by stabbing them in the vital organs, Plate 26 from *Venationes Ferarum, Avium, Piscium*, engraved by Jan Collaert’. In the plate, the bears rear up like wrestlers against hunters in gleaming full-body armour; a slain animal lies in the grass in the foreground.

In the late 1580s, he designed the *Nova Reperta*, twenty plates on the innovations of the time - the compass, gunpowder, spectacles, the iron clock - first published in Antwerp in 1591; the series had been inspired by the humanist Luigi Alamanni, whose notes appear on the reverse sides of the sketches. A plate entitled *Impressio Librorum* depicts, of all things, the trade that brought Stradanus’s own images to the world: a printing workshop at work. On the left, the typesetters sit at their type cases, whilst a boy lays out freshly printed sheets; on the right, the printer strains against the press; the Latin caption celebrates the process with a comparison: just as a single voice reaches many ears, a single written text fills a thousand pages.

At the same time, Florence was reflecting on Dante’s afterlife. In 1587/88, Stradanus, again for Alamanni, drew a series on the Divine Comedy, focusing on the Inferno; in 1588, the young Galileo Galilei gave lectures at the Accademia Fiorentina, the city’s scholarly society, on the shape, location and size of Dante’s Hell. It is against this backdrop that the ‘Map of Hell, illustration from Dante’s Inferno, 1587’ belongs: The funnel of Hell opens out as a terraced abyss, ring upon ring, each circle labelled, with tiny figures crowding the ledges, and towards the bottom everything narrows to a single dark shaft. The planned series of engravings remained unfinished; only a single plate was ever published, depicting Dante and Virgil before Lucifer.

He worked right up until shortly before his death; he died in Florence in 1605 and was buried in the Chapel of the Foreigners at the Santissima Annunziata. The bust at his grave, modelled on a portrait by his son Scipione, emphasises his Bruges origins, and in the *Schilder-Boeck* of 1604, Karel van Mander’s collection of artists’ biographies, it is stated, in German translation, that Flanders may take comfort in having had such a remarkable citizen of Bruges, who made the beautiful city of Florence even more beautiful with his work.

His collection thrives on this long-distance trade in prints: engravings and hand-coloured engravings make up the bulk of it, and the most delicate aspect of them is precisely what was added in Antwerp - the line of the graver, which Stradanus himself never held in his hand; it was created by Galle, Collaert and Wierix. At Meisterdrucke, we therefore produce these prints using the giclée process without a screen, resulting in no visible dot pattern; every single line of engraving from the Antwerp workshops is rendered individually on fine natural white paper, every hatching, every cross-hatching.