Art Institute of Chicago

Allegory with a Woman in Roman Dress on a Triumphal Chariot

Allaert Claesz

Date

after 1520

Medium

Engraving in black on ivory laid paper, laid down on ivory laid paper

Culture

Netherlands

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Religion, piracy, and print technology intersect in Allaert Claesz’s reinvention of a detail from Marcantonio Raimondi’s Quos Ego , itself after Raphael, from the poet Virgil’s Trojan War epic. Raimondi’s print showed the goddess Venus pleading with Jupiter for her son Aeneas’s life, so that he can fulfill his destiny of founding Rome. Rather than reusing this pagan content in an exact reverse copy, Claesz has instead turned it into a Christian Triumph. God the Father and the crucified Christ appear in a formerly blank bank of clouds, and the woman’s hand stretches out to them in praise, rather than to Jupiter in supplication.

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