Callot, Jacques

(born 1592/93, Nancy, Fr.—died March 24, 1635, Nancy) French etcher, engraver, and draftsman. He learned the technique of engraving in Rome. In 1612, at the court of the Medici family in Florence, he was employed to make pictorial records of pageants and feasts. He had a genius for caricature and the grotesque; his series of etchings The Miseries of War (1633), documenting the atrocities of the Thirty Years' War, was used as a source by Francisco de Goya. His output was prodigious; more than 1,400 etchings and 2,000 drawings survive. One of the greatest of all etchers, he was also one of the first major artists to practice the graphic arts exclusively.

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