Subcategories

  • German prints
  • Flemish and Dutch prints
  • Italian prints
  • French prints
  • Spanish prints
  • Ornament

    Ornament

    Considered as a minor art, ornament was the artistic genre in which printmakers enjoyed greater creative freedom to develop their fantasy. Its triviality allowed experimentation with form and its unimportance freed artists from the formal impositions of canonical art and from the severity imposed by other genres considered higher, such as portrait or biblical and mythological stories.

  • Weibermacht

    Weibermacht: Power of Women

    Women have a special role in our collection. We have assembled in this selection some works that refer to the Weibermacht or Power of Women, a medieval and Renaissance artistic and literary topos that shows heroic or wise men dominated by women, presenting an admonitory inversion of the male-dominated sexual hierarchy and warning of the danger that this transposition of roles could suppose for men. Women perfidious and castrators who use their charms to overthrow the virility of their victim, such as Delilah or Salome. Others as Susanna, Dido or Lucretia, who become an example for preserving even with their death, chastity, their most precious virtue. Strong women as Judith or Tomyris, who uses their sex appeal to defeat the enemy. These series had a special fascination and were highly demanded. As models to follow or to avoid, these women interpreted by men reflect ambivalent feelings of fear and attraction.

  • Emblemata / Alba Amicorum
  • Vanitas / Memento Mori
  • The 70 faces of Bruegel

    The 70 faces of Bruegel

    The Mariano Moret Collection holds an almost complete series (35 of 36 plates) of the third state of the Toonneel des Wereldts Ontdeckende De Ongestuymigheden in Ydelheden, published in Amsterdam by Claes Jansz Visscher in 1658. This volume is a compilation of the Tronies or caricatured portraits of human characters engraved by Doetechum after lost drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This rare series, unmatched in any other Spanish collection, is an extraordinary testimony to the genius of Bruegel, a pioneer artist in genre painting who, instead of portraying the rich and powerful, turned peasants, drunkards, beggars and other marginalized people into protagonists of their paintings. This series of paired portraits has as an antecedent on Leonardo da Vinci's numerous Teste grottesche, deformed faces that denote Leonardo's interest in physiognomy and in the representation of the passions that disturb the physical aspect as well as of the old age and its physical degenerations.

  • Buffoons & Jesters