Bathsheba c. 16th century

Jacob Binck made this engraving of Bathsheba, sometime in the 16th century. It depicts a scene from the Hebrew Bible where King David spies on Bathsheba bathing and subsequently seduces her. Binck was a court artist who worked for members of the northern European elite, and this informs the visual language of the print. The architecture is reminiscent of an Italian Renaissance palazzo with a formal garden. The figures, however, have a more Germanic quality, which would have appealed to a north European audience. Prints like this were collected and stored in albums or bound as books, often alongside classical and mythological subjects. The history of collecting, storing, and displaying prints is crucial to understanding the development of art institutions and the establishment of an artistic canon. To understand the place of this print in its own time, we can look at the artist’s biography, and study the inventories of the collections where prints like this would have been housed.