Hesperia en Aesacus c. 1636 - 1670

Crispijn van de Passe the Younger created this engraving of Hesperia en Aesacus in the Netherlands, sometime in the early to mid-17th century. It depicts a tragic scene drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Aesacus discovers the lifeless body of Hesperia. The print circulated within a robust market for such images, connecting the social elite to classical literature. What’s interesting is the way the image presents the natural landscape as a site of both beauty and tragedy, reflecting the cultural values of the Dutch Golden Age, where landscape painting flourished and moralistic lessons were often embedded within depictions of nature. Van de Passe’s choice of subject matter and the print's distribution through commercial channels speak to the complex interplay between artistic creation, social values, and economic structures of the time. To understand this print fully, we delve into the prints' reception and circulation, the artistic conventions of the period, and the social networks that sustained artistic production. It's this contextual investigation that ultimately enriches our understanding.