The Lament of the Art of Painting

This wild and dynamic print is one of the very last and most important works by the Dutch engraver Cornelis Cort, who was trained in the Netherlands and made a career in Italy. Cort worked closely with many Italian artists, especially the Venetian Federico Zuccaro, and was deeply enmeshed in sixteenth-century debates about the nobility of the visual arts and about the primacy of different branches of theose arts—was painting really better and more noble than sculpture, and if so, why?

This complicated and somewhat mysterious scene includes what is probably a self-portrait of Zuccaro at lower left, working away at his easel. The young woman at center is an allegorical figure of painting, and seems to be complaining to him—or lamenting, in a more classical vein—about how she just gets no respect. She has vanquished jealousy (trapped in a cave beneath her feet), and the rest of the composition is filled with examples of how painting can be a useful moral and educational force.