"Judith" (from "Famous Women from the Old Testament", set of 6) 1550 - 1612

This engraving of "Judith" was made by Philips Galle around 1600, using the intaglio process. Lines were incised into a copper plate, and then ink was pressed into these, resulting in the image you see here. The image shows Judith about to sever the head of Holofernes. The level of detail is astonishing, from the rendering of fabrics to the foreshortened body of Holofernes. Note that the composition is circular. That would have required exceptional skill on the part of Galle, who had to rotate the plate constantly while cutting into it. Consider this print as an early form of mass media. It was relatively inexpensive and easily portable. Engravings like these were often collected into albums. The prints allowed the stories to be circulated widely, far beyond the elite circles who might have seen paintings of the same subject. So in a sense, Galle was not just a master craftsman, but an early agent of cultural distribution.