Apollo

From the museum

In the Netherlands, Hendrick Goltzius radically altered the engraver’s formulas for producing shape, volume, and tone. Building on Cornelis Cort’s and Agostino Carracci’s formulas, he used swelled, crossed lines that end at the figure’s outline. He interspersed the diamond shapes on Apollo’s body with dots to convey the transition from dark to light—effective for portraying the Sun God’s exaggerated musculature, a hallmark of Goltzius’s work. The S curve, a mark used by Albrecht Dürer, is now swelled to follow the complicated, swirling volume of clouds.

The museum’s own description, in English. Licence: CC0