(Shepherd) from Les Bucoliques de Virgile, Folio of etchings

 

Hans Erni

  1909 - 2015 (biography)

1960  

Etching, printed in red ink 

16 3/8 x 11 1/4" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

15 of 20  

pencil editioned in lower left 

for portfolio: Giroud 27. - Monod 11332. - Tiessen II, 48. 

ivory BFK Rives watermarked wove 

published 

Andre and Pierre Gonin (Lausanne) 

20609 

$400.00 

Roman poet Virgil's Bucolics - or Eclogues - from 37 BC are a collection of ten pastoral poems meditating on various subjects ranging from love to politics to death to spirituality, presented as ten dialogues between two shepherds. Alongside the Aeneid, they are among Virgil's most oft-translated works, and are noted as having been so popular that for the following four hundred years Christian priests in Rome would sometimes recite them in the streets in place of their required psalms. For the folio, Hans Erni let the images remain simple so as not to overpower the accompanying text. Here, he maintains a continuity of thinness in the line, rendered in deep sanguine, to portray the elder shepherd Tityre leaning down to embrace a goat and a sheep. He uses only the upper half of the matrix on which to engrave and allows the rest of the sheet to remain blank, creating a bouyancy in the composition.