Allaert Claesz
Netherlandish, active c. 1520-55
After Marcantonio Raimondi
Italian, 1470/82–1527/34
Allegory with a Woman in Roman Dress on a Triumphal Chariot
INV-2024
Allaert Claesz
Netherlandish, active c. 1520-55
After Marcantonio Raimondi
Italian, 1470/82–1527/34after 1520
Allegory with a Woman in Roman Dress on a Triumphal Chariot
Allaert Claesz Netherlandish, active c. 1520-55 After Marcantonio Raimondi Italian, 1470/82–1527/34 →engravingpaper
Date
after 1520
Medium
Engraving in black on ivory laid paper, laid down on ivory laid paper
Dimensions
Image/sheet, trimmed within platemark: 9.7 × 8 cm (3 7/8 × 3 3/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
The Amanda S. Johnson and Marion J. Livingston Fund
Religion, piracy, and print technology intersect in Allaert Claesz’s reinvention of a detail from Marcantonio Raimondi’s Quos Ego, itself after Raphael, from the poet Virgil’s Trojan War epic. Raimondi’s print showed the goddess Venus pleading with Jupiter for her son Aeneas’s life, so that he can fulfill his destiny of founding Rome. Rather than reusing this pagan content in an exact reverse copy, Claesz has instead turned it into a Christian Triumph. God the Father and the crucified Christ appear in a formerly blank bank of clouds, and the woman’s hand stretches out to them in praise, rather than to Jupiter in supplication.