Men Hunting Ibexes with Hounds

These two drawings, Men Hunting Ibexes with Hounds (Mountain Goat Hunt) (2001.502) and The Capture of a Swarm of Bees in a Farmyard (2013.1031) relate to a series of prints of hunting scenes that Johannes Stradanus, an artist based in Florence, designed in collaboration with the publisher Philips Galle, who was based in Antwerp. The drawings communicated Stradanus’s ideas directly with the members of Galle’s workshop who prepared the printing plates. It is curious that Stradanus chose to create such elaborate and colorful designs even though they were to be made into monochromatic prints. In Men Hunting Ibexes with Hounds (Mountain Goat Hunt), Stradanus was clearly dissatisfied with an earlier attempt to represent the subject. The center-most foreground figure has been redrawn on a separate piece of paper that replaced another passage.