Spring 

Virgil Solis made this engraving titled “Spring” sometime in the mid-16th century. It's part of a series representing the four seasons, all allegorical scenes with classical deities. Here, Venus and Mars, Urania and Euterpe, and other such figures stand alongside symbols of seasonal change. Flora sits on a chariot in the middle of the scene, while Mercury leads the image on the right-hand side. Solis was working in Nuremberg, which was then an important center for the printing and book-making trades. His images were made to be reproduced, shared, and collected. As such, it is interesting to consider how and why the artist chose this particular arrangement of figures. What was the value, for a 16th-century audience, of seeing classical imagery reproduced in these new, widely available formats? Does this speak to a growing interest in the knowledge of the classics? Or is the artist self-consciously invoking these figures to give his work a sense of inherited cultural prestige? These are the questions that art historians seek to answer by understanding the cultural institutions in which these images were made and circulated.