Niklaus Manuel: Catalogue raisonné. Michael Egli and Hans Christoph von Tavel. With Petra Barton Sigrist. 2 vols. Œuvrekataloge Schweizer Künstler und Künstlerinnen 29. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2017. 934 pp. €640.
published by Theodoor Galle’s son, Johannes, probably in the early 1640s. Like his father and grandfather, he identified Cornelis Cort as the inventor. Into a number of these images that had been bereft of narrative, Johannes Galle inserted active figures that he lifted from Jacques Callot’s magisterial 1620 etching of the Fair at Impruneta. Tellingly, he also appropriated figures in violent conflict from Callot’s large Miseries of War series of 1633, which provide a forceful contrast to the sheets depicting bucolic images of the ideal countryside of yesteryear. The reader learns a lot from Onuf’s text. But one has to wonder if Barthes’s “Death of the Author” is an appropriate model for the early modern period. As the publishers keep signaling, the inventor plays a significant role in this era. Agency matters, in ways it didn’t seem to for artists a century earlier. The choices the draftsman made, coupled with the decisions the publisher effected, give us some vision of a (multiple) personality tethered to the countryside during the Eighty Years War. These are individuals we would like to get to know better, with or without a name.