Lambert Lombard’s engraving, “Venus and Cupid”

Lambert Lombard (1515–1566)

“Venus Cupid”, 1568, from the series “The Four Seasons”, published by Hieronymus Cock (1518–1570), Antwerp.

Engraving on fine laid paper, trimmed within the image borderline and lined on a conservator’s support sheet.

Size: (sheet) 25.7 x 19.1 cm

Inscribed within the image borderline: “H. Cock exeudebat. 156[8]”

(Note that the impression held by the Rijksmuseum has the inscription that is partially erased in this impression: “Lambertus Lombard Invent”)

Lettered below the image borderline: “VER PINGIT VARIO GEMMANTIA PRATA COLORE” (Anth. Lat. 569: “Spring paints the jewelled meadows in various colours”)

The Rijksmuseum offers the following description of this print:

“Presentation of the spring in a series with the four seasons. Venus and Cupid sitting under a tree in a spring landscape. Left behind is to create a group of young people music. Among the show a Latin verse from an epigram in the Anthologia Latina.” (http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.345524)

Riggs 173 (Timothy Allan Riggs 1977, “Hieronymus Cock, printmaker and publisher:,  p. 353, cat.nr. 173); Hollstein Dutch 19-22;  Hollstein 20.

Condition: good impression, trimmed slightly within the platemark. The sheet is in poor condition with many signs of its considerable age, but the wear, losses and tears have been conserved and the sheet is now lined on a support sheet of fine washi paper.  

I am selling this exceedingly rare engraving from the Renaissance era for the total cost of AU$326 (currently US$246.26/EUR230.35/GBP119.15 at the time of this listing) including postage and handling to anywhere in the world.

If you are interested in purchasing this rare print by a famous old master and the teacher of Hendrick Goltzius (amongst others), please contact me (oz_jim@printsandprinciples.com) and I will send you a PayPal invoice to make the payment easy. 

This print has been sold

This very rare engraving by Lombard exemplifies not only his contribution to Netherlandish art in the sense that crystallises his ideas about the Italian Renaissance (viz. the formality of the arrangement of the figures into a pyramidal form as well as the use of pictorial devices such as the rendering of the sky in fine horizontal lines) following his excursion to Rome in 1537 by order of the prince-bishop of Liège (Belguim), Erard de la Marck, to buy works of art, but it also exhibits a critical approach to engraving that was later to be developed  by one of his most celebrated students: the legendary, Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617).

Regarding Lombard’s influence on Goltzius, note for instance his treatment of Venus’ breasts. Here, the concentric circles that model the breasts are similar to those used by Goltzius in his treatment of form. Of course, Goltzius took these concentrically aligned contour marks and layered them and in his later prints famously added a dot in the diamond-shaped spaces arising where the curves crossed—a device that I have discussed in earlier posts: the “dotted lozenge.”

Another device that Goltzius arguably acquired from Lombard is a leaning to exaggerate the bumps and dents on the surface of forms; for example, note the treatment of Venus’ drapery. Goltzius developed this fascination with bumps to an extreme level in some of his later prints where forms seem almost lobulated with his obsession—his so-called “Spangerisms.”