Virgil Solis

Born 1514; diedd Nuremberg, 1562.

The text of a portrait engraving of him done in 1562 by Balthasar Jenichen provides Solis’s birth year. Little is known about his origins or training. From 1540 he and his workshop created over 2000 prints and drawings. Most are signed with his monogram and many are dated. O’Dell-Franke noted that during his later career the monogram simply certified that the work was made in his shop though not necessarily by the master himself. This helps to explain the sharp fluctuations in quality from print to print. Although Solis often signed himself as a painter, nothing certain is known about this aspect of his career.

Various prints and drawings from the late 1530s have been ascribed to Solis, but his earliest secure works date to 1540: some relatively crude engravings (b. 446–7) and a drawing, Nude Woman with a Parrot (Hamburg, Ksthalle). Its drawing style, with strong outlines and simply defined hatchings, recalls the sketches of Erhard Schön; while the figure may derive generally from Georg Pencz’s Five Senses (b. 105–9). This reliance upon Nuremberg’s leading graphic artists is hardly surprising. Throughout his career Solis borrowed liberally from Schön, Pencz, Peter Flötner, Albrecht Dürer, Sebald Beham and other German and Italian masters. He specialized in popular, commercially successful prints. Few, if any, are memorable or personally distinctive: this was a matter of intent rather than technical competency, since occasionally Solis would labour on a particular engraving. For instance, his Heart Decoration (1550–55; b. 464) offers a highly attractive and detailed emblem of love, centred on two harts preparing to battle over a hind. The engraving is one of at least six that Solis made as designs for the interior of a cup or a dish.

Solis’s prints illustrate a remarkably diverse range of popular subjects, including series—the nine worthies, the first twelve Roman emperors, the seven planets, etc—hunting scenes, representations of soldiers and a deck of 52 playing cards. He switched effortlessly from depicting contemporary fashion to fanciful Roman attire. His equestrian portraits of illustrious rulers, for instance King Henry I of France (Geisberg, no. 13281) and King Christian of Sweden and Norway (Strauss, vol. i, p. 404, no. 16), offer almost interchangeable likenesses. These woodcuts were mass produced, often with attractive stencil colouring, by Solis’s printer, Stefan Hamer, in the 1550s and reissued long after the artist’s death. Solis also worked with Hans Guldenmundt (d 1560), another local Formschneider (woodblock cutter) and publisher. Some compositions were his own, but others derived from various contemporary artists. For instance his Buchlin von den alten Gebeuten (c. 1550) is an outright copy of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (i)’s booklet of prints (Orléans, 1550). Solis credited ‘Jacques’, announcing that he merely wished to make the series better known.

Solis’s finest and most influential work is the Biblische Figuren des Alten und Neuwen Testaments (pubd Sigmund Feyerabend, Frankfurt am Main, 1562). He supplied 218 woodcuts illustrating biblical stories, 31 different borders and two title-pages. The book’s popularity led to ten new editions between 1565 and 1606. Solis also designed 178 woodcuts for the Metamorphoses Ovidii (pubd Feyerabend, Frankfurt, 1563) and another 194 for Aesopiphrygis fabulae (pubd Hartman Schopper, Frankfurt, 1566), the latter described on the title-page as ‘his very last designs’. Such woodcuts were frequently reused in later texts published in Frankfurt and Nuremberg.

Many prints by Solis were intended as models for artists working in other media. Furniture such as the sumptuous reading chest (1540s), perhaps by a Nuremberg master, in the Museum für Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am Main, is based on Solis’s graphic works. His designs reappear on plaquettes, handarms and architectural friezes, taken from series such as the plates on foliage decorations entitled Etlicher gutter conterfectischer Laubwerck Art (1553; b. 473–93). Solis, like Flötner or Sebald Beham before him, engraved and etched designs for goblets, pitchers, bowls, sword scabbards and jewellery (O’Dell-Franke, i 1–124, k 1–47). Solis’s prints (odf l 1–53, m 1–114) were an important means of disseminating contemporary ornamental forms such as the manneristic rollwork creations of Antwerp masters Cornelis Floris and Cornelis Bos. Hayward (1976) noted that Solis’s mixing together of animal and vegetable forms on drinking vessel designs helped to break many goldsmiths’ strict adherence to Classical motifs. Solis worked closely with Wenzel Jamnitzer, Nuremberg’s most famous goldsmith, often probably engraving directly after Jamnitzer’s drawings. His Goblet with Satyr (odf i 58) recalls Jamnitzer’s Merkel table decoration (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). Solis achieved considerable fame within his lifetime for the quantity and diversity of his prints. His woodblocks and plates continued to be printed by his publishers, his sons and by Jenichen, making his designs readily available to other European artists well into the mid-17th century.

Jeffrey Chipps Smith. "Solis." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T079645pg1 (accessed April 27, 2012).