Hercules Segers

IN HER BOOK The Wretched of the Screen, Hito Steyerl diagnoses the current artscape as a realm of unceasing fall: “a world of forces and matter” unmoored from history or expression, where “the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose.” This contemporary miasma might find a prehistory in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, a capitalist empire of images, one similarly awash in violence, inequity, and risk. It was there that the printmaker Hercules Segers (ca. 1589–1638) worked in near isolation to create startling, experimental landscape pictures on canvas and paper. Segers’s

print January 2003

Hendrick Goltzius

“TO BECOME AND BEHAVE LIKE SOMETHING ELSE,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “. . . is really a life-determining force.” Long before Andy Warhol or Cindy Sherman tinkered with mechanical reproduction and artistic identity, there was Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), a sulky, petulant artist of astonishing versatility. Dubbed “the Netherlandish Proteus” by famed contemporary Karel van Mander, Goltzius made a career of ventriloquizing the styles and techniques of older Italian and German artists. His “Dürers” and “Lucas van Leydens” duped connoisseurs, and as a reproductive printmaker he (legitimately) published