Vulcanus en Venus 1693

Samuel Bottschild created this print, Vulcanus en Venus, using etching, sometime in the late 17th century. The etcher’s art is on full display here. Notice how the image is built up from a dense vocabulary of hatched lines. These range from the most delicate, suggesting the clouds beneath Venus, to the densest, giving shadow and volume to Vulcan's muscular torso. This print is, in a way, about labor. It represents the workshop of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking, where objects are brought into being through strenuous and skilled work. The artist has chosen to depict the scene within an oval format, as if seen through a peephole. This compositional choice puts us in the position of voyeurs looking in on this scene of divine industry, or overhearing a bit of gossip from Mount Olympus. Bottschild asks us to consider the making of an image in concert with the making of other things. It invites us to overcome traditional distinctions between design, craft, and art.