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

Few printmakers in the seventeenth century rendered mortality with both such delicacy and such unease as Stefano della Bella achieved in *The Five Deaths*. A Florentine by birth, della Bella spent formative years in Paris under the patronage of Cardinal de Medici before returning to Florence, absorbing the influence of Jacques Callot along the way. His engraving technique was unusually refined for the period — fine, layered lines that give his skeletal and spectral figures a strange softness, almost tenderness, at odds with their subject matter. *The Five Deaths* exemplifies this: five personifications of death, each distinct in posture and context, arranged with a compositional elegance that makes the morbid feel almost meditative. Della Bella produced over a thousand prints across his career, and his death-themed works proved widely influential on later Baroque printmaking throughout Europe. Because the original is a work on paper — ink and pressure rather than pigment — translating it into oil requires an interpreter as much as a copyist. Our artists render della Bella's characteristic linework in tone and texture, giving the piece the physical presence and warmth of a painting while honouring the precise, spare drama that has kept this image compelling for nearly four centuries.