Markante Köpfe

Portrait Art in Black and White: a graphic cycle of Flemish Baroque. The Dutch artist Anton van Dyck (1599–1641) is not only renowned for his outstanding and often life-sized portraits in art history, but he also remains unforgettable in the field of printed likenesses through his Iconographia. Over a hundred portraits of famous contemporaries are united in this graphic cycle. In addition to monarchs, statesmen, scholars, and philosophers, it also features artists who were particularly significant to van Dyck. Although most of the portraits were engraved after designs or paintings by van Dyck, the master himself took to the etching needle for some of the artist portraits. The result of this spontaneous, unprejudiced approach to the art of etching is some extremely rare trial prints avant la lettre. The development of the Iconographia resembles an adventure story with numerous unresolved questions to this day. The motivation behind embarking on this ambitious project around 1632 can only be speculated. Van Dyck, who was well acquainted with the tradition of portrait books, likely recognized in the medium of printmaking the opportunity to successfully market his celebrated portrait art. The publication is released in conjunction with the exhibition "Striking Faces. Anton van Dyck and His Illustrious Circle in Portrait" (April 24 – June 28, 2013), organized by the Graphic Collection of ETH Zurich in collaboration with guest curator Carme Rodríguez-Pàmias. Thanks to the generous donation from Zurich banker Heinrich Schulthess-von Meiss (1813–1898), the Graphic Collection possesses a particularly rich stock of sheets that can be attributed to the Iconographia. Among them are numerous extremely rare trial prints, as well as sheets from the first complete edition of the Iconographia published by Marten van den Enden.