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* is one of the most quietly unsettling works in the history of European printmaking — five skeletal figures rendered with a lightness of hand that makes their subject matter all the more striking. Stefano della Bella was a Florentine master who trained under the shadow of Jacques Callot, and it shows: his line work carries the same nervous energy and precision, coaxing extraordinary depth from a needle and an acid bath. Where many of his contemporaries treated death as spectacle, della Bella approached it with an almost elegiac restraint — each figure in this series possessing its own character, its own grim dignity. Working across Rome, Paris, and Florence, he became one of the most prolific and inventive printmakers of the seventeenth century. Della Bella produced the series during a period when plague and political violence were recurring realities across Europe, lending the work a weight that goes beyond mere allegory. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the etching's finely wrought lines and tonal contrasts into the richer, warmer register of paint — preserving the original's theatrical atmosphere while bringing a new material presence to della Bella's extraordinary draftsmanship.