1574
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Prophet Joel is a 1574 by Giorgio Ghisi, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This engraving shows a robed man with a long beard and scroll in hand. His pose mirrors Michelangelo’s Prophet Joel on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Ghisi carved this exact copy as part of a set of six prophet prints. The dark shadows and crisp lines make the figure pop off the page. He used a technique called chiaroscuro, where light and dark contrast sharply. Check the Cleveland Museum of Art for this print.
During the 1500s Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling was rarely open to the public and thus for the most part inaccessible. Artists, however, were generally allowed to visit the chapel to study and make drawings from the paintings. Giorgio Ghisi did so in the 1540s and created engravings of six of the chapel’s prophets and sybils. His Prophet Joel accurately reproduces the pose, costume elements, and architectural detail of the figure in a voluminous engraving technique, with dramatic darks and lights that evoke the three-dimensional forms of sculpture. Engravings such as this spread…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Giorgio Ghisi (1520 — 15 December 1582) was an Italian engraver from Mantua who also worked in Antwerp and in France.
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