Aegidius Sadeler
1568–1629 · Habsburg Netherlands · Mannerism, Northern Renaissance, Printmaking
The story
When Aegidius Sadeler reached Prague in 1597, he entered one of the strangest courts in Europe. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had gathered painters, astronomers, and alchemists around him, and Sadeler became his court engraver, the man who turned that court's pictures into printed sheets that travelled the continent.
He came from Antwerp and a whole dynasty of engravers, trained by his uncle Jan, and had worked in Munich, Rome, and Naples before Prague. There he engraved the Mannerist painters Rudolf favoured, Bartholomeus Spranger and Hans von Aachen among them, along with the strange composite heads of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and detailed views of Prague itself. Contemporaries called him the phoenix of engravers.
He served three successive Habsburg emperors in the same role and died in Prague in 1629. For much of Europe, his prints were how the art of Rudolf's court was seen at all.
