![]() ![]() On his return, again with his patron’s support, he set up a publishing house (the first private press in the Netherlands), the Officina Goltziana, and his works began to flow C. In 1558 he moved to Bruges, where his new patron Marc Lauweryn (Marcus Laurinus) funded a two year trip through Europe to visit all the major numismatic collections. Goltzius’ first publication was the Imagines, images of the emperors from Caesar to Charles the Fifth, with accompanying notes in 1557 in several different languages, and this work, with its beautiful engravings influenced by but surpassing those of Enea Vico, made his name. How close Goltzius was to this world is unclear he is not named in Frans Swert’s contemporary list of Ortelius’ friends, but letters survive between Ortelius and Goltzius which show a familiarity Napolitano argues that the ties were close. Ortelius’ circle included Fulvio Ursino, Gerard Mercator, Iustus Lipsius, and Benedictus Arias Montanus, who supervised a great polyglot version of the Bible. Through this, he gained access to a wider world of humanist learning and tolerant Catholicism. Goltzius moved to the great trading city of Antwerp in 1546, and it may have been there that his relationship with Ortelius deepened. Lombard gave a boost to the collecting and studying of coins in Belgium, and was an important influence on Goltzius’ early life and friendships. Cornelis and Frans Floris were fellow academicians with Goltzius, and Ortelius, the great cartographer, moved in the same circles. Lombard was in Rome in the aftermath of the sack of 1527, but was forced to return to Liège, where his little academy taught the classics. At the age of 18, he moved to work with Lambert Lombard in Liège. The first two chapters focus largely on Goltzius’ biography. ![]() The book is divided into two parts, the first on Goltzius’ work generally, and the second specifically on the Magna Graecia. Napolitano’s volume, a detailed study of Goltzius’ life and output, with a particular emphasis on his account of Sicily and Magna Graecia (the first work in fact to use the term in its title 2), is a welcome addition, and will be a standard work for Goltzius as well as a useful contribution to understanding sixteenth-century scholarship on Roman history and numismatics. Thereafter, Goltzius languished and received less attention, until in recent times, Christian Dekesel produced a series of important (but not uncritical) works. The reliability of Goltzius’ identifications and indeed the authenticity of the coins he claimed to see were questioned. In the 18th century, Joseph Hilarius Eckhel made a vigorous critique of his reliability, and although it was not the first, it was the definitive dismissal. ![]() He founded a printing house, was friends with a core group of Dutch humanists, notably Ortelius, and left an important list of the coin collections which he had visited in Europe, which is of great significance for those wishing to understand early modern collecting and the origins of numismatic study. Hubertus Goltzius (1526 -1583) was renowned in his day for his versatility and for his monumental and handsome volumes on numismatics in particular. ![]()
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