The Five Deaths

Stefano della Bella · c. 1645-62

Medium

Etching and engraving in black ink on cream laid paper

Original size

18.9 × 15.1 cm (7 1/2 × 6 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

"The Five Deaths" announces itself with a hushed drama — five skeletal figures presiding over scenes of mortality that feel both inevitable and intimate, rendered with a delicate precision that only etching can achieve. Stefano della Bella was a Florentine printmaker who trained under Jacques Callot and absorbed the restless energy of seventeenth-century Rome and Paris before settling back in his native city. His work sits at an unusual crossroads: technically virtuosic in the Callot tradition, yet emotionally cooler, more contemplative. In "The Five Deaths," that restraint is the point — death is not sensationalised but observed, each figure a quiet philosopher of endings rather than a theatrical spectre. Della Bella produced the series during the years he spent under the patronage of the Medici, a period when mortality was not an abstract concern but a recurring presence in Florentine civic life following plague and political upheaval. A hand-painted oil reproduction of this work translates the engraving's intricate linework into a medium that carries its own kind of weight. Where the original commands through precision on paper, the oil painting renders those same contours with depth and warmth, giving the composition a presence that fills a wall rather than a portfolio.