Mercury and Psyche - Muller after De Vries
Mungo Campbell traces the various incarnations of a classical legend form the court of Habsburg Prague to a Dutch engraver's workshop.
Prague, wrote the painter and writer Karel van Mander in 1604, was the one city which the art lover must visit if he was to see all that was newest and best in contemporary Europe. At the end of the sixteenth century, the cross-currents in European art ran swiftly and powerfully, as almost never before, across the Continent, from Naples in the south to Amsterdam in the north, from Fontainebleau in the west to Prague in the east. It was in that last city that the astonishing wealth and last vestiges of the once astonishing power of the Holy Roman Emperor were held.
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