Death on horseback with trumpet

Death on horseback, with a trumpet; in an oval composition, the skeletal figure of Death riding on a horse towards left, holding a trumpet with a banner aloft in his left hand; in background a battlefield and to right further Deaths.

Etching with engraving, 1648 circa. Example in the second state of three, before the Vincent’s address.

Magnificent proof, printed on contemporary laid paper, cut inside the copper imprint and complete with the engraved part, in excellent condition.

From the series The Five Deaths- Les Cinq Morts, which Della Bella completed in France.

It was probably during his last years in France that Della Bella began an updated version of the Dance of Death. This typically Northern and medieval subject usually showed Death in a variety of situations, carrying away victims of every age and walk of life. While in France Della Bella etched four oval scenes of Death's conquest, including this print (Death Carrying a Child), three of which take place in cemeteries and the fourth on the battlefield. A horizontal version of Death triumphing in war probably also dates to these years. At the end of his life, Della Bella took up the theme again, creating three more episodes in the oval format—two of these were left incomplete at his death. In the early prints particularly, Death is as energetic as he is ruthless—here Death carrying off a female on his shoulders, with her head downwards, followed at a distance by another Death holding a corpse in his arms. The setting is the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, a site with which della Bella was undoubtedly familiar, since many publishers and print dealers had their shops on the ground floor of the charnel houses.

Stefano della Bella was one of the most interesting and original engravers in 17th-century Florence and can be considered the only brilliant continuator of Jacques Callot's work. His artistic education began in Florence in the workshop of the goldsmiths Gasparo Mola and Orazio Vanni, and the precision of sign, typical of the goldsmith's art, will remain characteristic of his style. He then studied under Giovanni Battista Vanni and perhaps also under Cantagallina and Cesare Dandini, but soon turned to engraving. His real master can be considered Jacques Callot, the French engraver who stayed in Florence for a long time and left a strong imprint on the city's artistic scene.

The most important years of his career were the ones he spent in Paris, from 1639 to 1650, salaried by Lorenzo de' Medici: he worked together with Israel Silvestre, with the publishers Langlois, Ciartres and Pierre Mariette, for French printers and for commissions of great prestige, such as those of 1641 for Cardinal Richelieu, who entrusted him with illustrations of his warlike exploits.

Around 1647, during a trip to Holland, where he executed etchings with views of the port of Amsterdam, he met Rembrandt, and from that date we note a profound echo of the Dutchman's art in Della Bella's graphic work.

Bibliografia

De Vesme - Massar Stefano della Bella (1971) n. 89, II/III; F.Carey (ed.), "The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come", exh. cat., BM, London, 1999, nos 112-115.