Art and Absolutism: Jacques Callot and the Seductions of the Printed Image

The French printmaker Jacques Callot (1590–1635), both a genius and a cipher, evolved a pictorial language that articulated the ambitions of those most powerful nation-states shaping the politics of the modern world. In this lecture, Peter Parshall, a print scholar and a retired curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., explores Callot’s output as exemplary of what an art of the early modern state would have looked like—a vision, not coincidentally, propagated in the replicable medium of print. Callot envisions a society parsed and catalogued with its implicit ideals and inevitable demons, an unconscious depiction of an imagined reality that became the future. This lecture is part of the Getty Workshop “New Approaches to the Field of Early Modern Works on Paper,” which confronts and reassesses how scholars, curators, and educators make collections of early modern drawings and prints accessible, provocative, and relevant to larger multidisciplinary conversations in the 21st century. This program is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through the Paper Project initiative.