Een teruggevonden Laatste Oordeel van Hendrick Goltzius Goltzius' relatie met de Antwerpse uitgever Philips Galle

Abstract

Around 1577-78, Hendrik Goltzius made a set of 16 engravings with representations of human virtues and vices entitled Virtutum vitiorumque... encomia . The set is rounded off by a rendering of the Last Judgment, a print said in the literature to be lost, but which is reproduced here for the first time. Goltzius actually made two more engravings of the subject in the same years, all published by the Antwerp engraver and publisher Philips Galle. The subject matter of Goltzius's early prints, which up to 1580 were mainly published by Galle, seems to be governed specifically by the religious situation in the Netherlands at that time. In the face of the increasingly violent quarrels between Catholics and Calvinists, a group of Humanists such as Ortelius, Plantin, and Coornhert exerted their best efforts on behalf of a generally acceptable Christian doctrine in which responsible ethical conduct played an important part. The prints published by Galle are conspicuous for their dominant overtones of moral and ethical instruction, which is closely comparable to the ideas of these humanists. The specific iconography of the various Last Judgments by Galle and Goltzius seems to have been strongly influenced by the thought of the moralist and engraver Dirck Volckertsz and Coornhert, who had been the teacher of both artists. Coornhert put up a stubborn resistance to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, placing the emphasis on man's moral responsibility for his own actions instead. It is precisely the latter concept that is clearly to be found in the engravings under discussion and this makes it likely that Galle deliberately put such prints on the market in the context of the controversy over predestination. The collaboration between Goltzius and Galle ended for good after 1582, when Goltzius began publishing his own prints. His fine portrait of Philips Galle of 1582, with a Latin verse composed by Janus Dousa, thus constitutes a worthy finale to this period.