1554 Giorgio Ghisi "Adoration of the Shepherds" Engraving
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GUEST:
Well, I found it in an online auction. I paid $600 for the print. I have about another $500 in between the conservation work and the framing. I know it's an engraving by Giorgio Ghisi.
APPRAISER:
You're absolutely right, it's an engraving by the Italian Renaissance master Giorgio Ghisi. He was a patriarch of a family of engravers out of Mantua in central Italy. And this is one of his most famous prints.
GUEST:
Ooh.
APPRAISER:
And you can see he identifies himself in this tablet in Latin, "Giorgio Ghisi from Mantua." He made this engraving after a painting that had been made by the Italian Mannerist Renaissance artist Agnolo Bronzino.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
He was known as Bronzino for his very tanned look. Ooh, nice. And he was a well-known Mannerist painter, and Mannerism was this high Renaissance style that exaggerated, especially body forms. So you see the long necks of the angels and the very long fingers on the Virgin and the muscular back on that shepherd. Very well-known painting by Bronzino, which is now in the National Museum in Budapest.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Bronzino made this on a commission for a Florentine aristocrat in the 1530s. Right. And the engraving was then made by Ghisi in the early 1550s. And what you have here subject-wise is the Nativity or the Adoration of the Shepherds. This is a great story in the Renaissance art trade, as well. Ghisi, the patriarch of this family of engravers, was actually invited to the Netherlands by a publisher up there in 1550 whose name was Hieronymus Cock. And Cock invited this Italian printmaker to come to the Netherlands to make an engraving of this then-famous painting about 20 years after it had been made. So it was well-known enough and revered enough...
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
...that you have this.
GUEST:
I didn't realize any of that.
APPRAISER:
Which is very cool, happening in the mid-1500s.
GUEST:
Yeah.
APPRAISER:
It is in a great state of preservation.
GUEST:
That's good to know.
APPRAISER:
It's obviously in reverse of the painting that Bronzino made, but that is about the full sheet. Wonderful to see it like that. Given its importance, its size, its state of preservation, I would put an estimate on it at auction for between $15,000 and $20,000.
GUEST:
Oh, my God!
APPRAISER:
And I wouldn't be surprised if it sold for more. I think that's conservative.
GUEST:
Are you serious? I... I find it hard to believe. I would have never guessed that. Never guessed it. That's awesome. I love looking at it every day. (chuckling) Amazing.
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