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Gluttony (Land of Cockaigne)
Peeter Baltens (Flemish, 1526/28–before 1584)
1560s (later restrike)
- Medium
- engraving
- Classification
- Culture
- Flanders
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Prints
- Credit line
- Gift of FitzRoy Carrington
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The copperplate for this print was engraved with a lozenge-section burin in Antwerp (in present-day Belgium)—an important center for print publishing—in the 1560s. The subject is an imaginary land of ease and luxury, where food falls from trees (the Land of Cockaigne, or Luilekkerland in Dutch). To engrave, a copperplate is balanced on a sandbag. The sandbag allows the engraver to adjust the plate’s position while slowly guiding the burin to remove the copper. Rather than moving the hand in a pushing motion, the engraver forces the copperplate into the tool, rotating or tilting on the sandbag as necessary, while keeping the hand relatively still. This impression taken from the plate was printed in the early 1900s. Note that the image prints in reverse compared to how it appears on the copperplate.
