The Creation of Adam
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione
c. 1642
Considered one of the most original and innovative Italian artists of the Baroque period, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione literally separated light from darkness, creating form out of chaos in this work, his earliest known monotype. In a perfect match of medium and message, Castiglione, the Genoese artist credited with inventing the technique, used this new method to portray the central act of Genesis: the creation of man. He produced this electrifying image by subtracting the design from the inked surface of a copperplate with a blunt instrument, such as a stick or paintbrush handle, and then printing directly on a sheet of paper. Broad, angular strokes of white depict God emerging from a cloud, while thin, fluid lines extract the languid body of Adam from velvety blackness. Castiglione’s monotypes employ both this dark-ground technique, which naturally lends itself to dramatic and mysterious imagery, and the light-ground manner, in which the design is drawn in ink directly on a clean plate. Both processes yield only one fine impression. It was not until the nineteenth century that such versatile artists as Edgar Degas explored the monotype’s full potential.
| Title | The Creation of Adam |
|---|---|
| Artist | Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione |
| Date | c. 1642 |
| Medium | Monotype in black ink on ivory laid paper |
| Dimensions | 30.3 × 20.3 cm (11 15/16 × 8 in.) |
About Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione
A prolific and multifaceted artist, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione was both a talented painter and a remarkably innovative draftsman. After training in his native Genoa, Castiglione traveled widely throughout the Italian peninsula, working in Genoa, Rome, Naples, Mantua, and Venice. This restlessly itinerant career chimes with accounts of his volatile and sometimes violent temperament, which occasionally caused him trouble with the law.
While Castiglione was renowned for his many paintings depicting subjects from the Old Testament and ancient history, it was in his works on paper that he made some of his most arrestingly original contributions, often blurring the boundaries between painting, drawing, and printmaking. Throughout his life Castiglione produced numerous drawings, both in the customary medium of pen and ink, as well as in a highly original technique that involved drawing on paper with a dry brush and oil paint. Probably inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’s oil sketches on panel, these drawings, such as the Art Institute’s magnificent Pagan Sacrifice, were created as independent works rather than as studies for paintings. The intentional unevenness of their finish, with some areas highly detailed and others barely sketched in, was part and parcel of their aesthetic appeal.
Castiglione also brought unprecedented painterliness to printmaking with his invention of the monotype, a haunting example of which is the Art Institute’s Creation of Adam. By applying and manipulating thick printers’ ink directly onto an unworked copper plate and then passing it through the press, Castiglione could create a printed image that was virtually unique, since only a single strong impression could be produced in this way. In the case of the Creation of Adam, Castiglione first uniformly inked the plate, then scraped the white lines with a blunt tool such as a reed pen, extracting his luminous design out of the dense black of the ink.
Even when he worked in the more traditional medium of etching, Castiglione created tonal compositions characterized by strong contrasts between light and dark. Atmospheric works such as The Raising of Lazarus reveal Castiglione’s admiration for Rembrandt van Rijn, who depicted the same subject a decade earlier. Rembrandt’s influence is also evident in Castiglione’s series of male heads in costume, reminiscent of the Dutch artist’s etched head studies. Catering to a cultured clientele that delighted in complex subjects, Castiglione devised seductively cryptic allegorical images as well as picturesque depictions of mythological tales. Later Italian artists, notably Giambattista Tiepolo, were clearly inspired by the style, technique, and subjects of Castiglione’s prints.