Michael Snijders's Copious Copies and the Mechanisms of Print

Abstract

Between around 1630 and 1640, the little-studied printmaker Michael Snijders engraved an idiosyncratic series likely consisting of at least twenty-two prints. Approximating the logics of both drawing manual and sketchbook, the series brings together head studies, limbs, flora, fauna, antique costume, and fantastical creatures. Almost every one of these myriad motifs is copied from another source and staged – over the course of multiple, radically altered states – to produce a delightful play on the entwined concepts of copy and copiousness for artists and increasingly attentive connoisseurs. As this essay argues, Snijders’s series thus amounts to an intensive commentary on the mechanisms of print as a medium and, through this, on the history of early modern art and the status of the “copy” within it.