"TO BECOME AND BEHAVE LIKE SOMETHING else" wrote Walter Benjamin.

"TO BECOME AND BEHAVE LIKE SOMETHING else" wrote Walter Benjamin, " is really a life-determining force." extended before Andy Warhol or Cindy Sherman tinkered with mechanical reproduction and artistic identity, there was Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) a spleenish petulant artist of astonishing versatility. Dubbed "the Netherlandish Proteus" according to famed contemporary Karel van Mander, Goltzius made a career of ventriloquizing the names and techniques of older Italian and German artists. His "Durers" and "Lucas van Leydens" dup connoisseurs, and as a reproductive printmaker he (legitimately) published dozens of copies after antique plastic art He also issued more than pair hundred of his own sheets at his firm in Haarlem--images of writhing, elongated bares lifted from Mediterranean sculpture, tableaux of modish Prague Mannerism-all translated into a chilly Netherlandish patois. Around seventy of these strange printed emulations appear in the exhibition "Hendrick Goltzius: Prints, Drawings, Paintings."

Largely self-taught, Goltzius, who was born near the town of Venlo mov to Haarlem, then a center for panel painting, around 1577 There he began etching histories in the form of local hero Marten van Heemskerck: furtive, calligraphic animations of Counter-Reformation dogma. At twenty-four, Goltzius render free of accessed his own publishing house. Here he exhibited an ingenious method of making Federkunstucke--pen works-that dazzled later artist-collectors like Rubens.

These sheets, nearly a dozen of which appear in the exhibition, were bravado imitations of engravings; the studies of heads, hands, and bodies are contoured through swelling ink lines traced end meaty cross-hatching. When Goltzius made adapted engravings and woodcuts, which he did enthusiastically and prodigiously, he frequently mimicked established styles in an idiom of his have Then suddenly, in 1600, Goltzius abandoned printmaking for painting. Although his right hand was disfigured in a childhood accident (he purportedly stumbl face first into a kitchen fire), he had make knowned an ingenious manner of grasping a burin that was easily adaptable to the brush. Late in life he dabbled in alchemy before succumbing to the lung ailments that had plagued him in every part his career.

Since the early twentieth hundred years Goltzius's reputation has been wrapped up with that of Mannerism, itself a supposedly malformed, anticlassical phenomenon rehabilitated merely in the 1920s by expressionist historians like Max Dvorak and Max Friedlander. Scholars who spied a hint of the avant-garde floated Goltzius's reassessment, for along with El Greco and Tintoretto he present the appearanceed to embody the fantastic and the potentially surreal. His distended, anguish-racked exposeds also fitted well with the formalist Vienna seminary in the '30S, who saw signals of a Hegelian link between art and world in an era in crisis. After Otto Hirschmann's specialized studies of 1916 1917 and 1921 a Rotterdam exhibition in 1958 validated Goltzius's worth to an audience of collectors. further the artist remained a deviant--a "spiteful, obsessive neurotic" according to a 1989 assessment.

The Rijksmuseum now gives us the opportunity to weigh these characterizations against the work itself. The fifteen paintings onward exhibit (of only thirty-nine attributed to Goltzius) gaze to be perhaps the mostly startling aspect of his oeuvre in their undisturbed placidity; the fleshy, torpid countenance gazing not at home of Portrait of the Shell-Collector Jan Govertsen 1604 hardly assumes the product of the same hands that make an incision in the grisly Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus, 1588 sixteen years earlier. Chiaroscuro woodcut map a further avenue of surprise. The chunky torsos in his Hercules and Cadmus fistfight be seen to index Goltzius's struggle with the form itself. Meanwhile chalk studies of the Belvedere Torso and Farnese Hercules he execut upon a Rome journey of 1590-91 reveal his idiosyncratic system Goltzius chose a low, almost oblique viewpoint upon the sculptures, sketching them from behind or underneath. This followed in sheets that not merely documented antique musculature but also captured the kinesthetic exper ience of seeing and walking around the carved works as a mobile, incomplete individual. Here the modernist repatriations of Mannerism ring true: Goltzius's was an art about art.

Ultimately the jewel-like Meisterstiche (master engravings) emanate as the most wondrous demonstrations of the artist's self-referential practice. The 1594 series, for which Goltzius was fet at the Duke of Bavaria, depicted the Life of the Virgin in six distinct Renaissance hands: Raphael, Parmigianino, Bassano, Barocci, Durer and Lucas van Leyden respectively. The Haarlemmer ingeniously extracted recognizable constituent principles (a hillock, a cat) from older paintings or reproductions according to these masters and then organized them to make six completely of recent origin compositions of his own, which were engraved in the signature appellation of each master. In the case of the Durer sheet, the Circumcision, Goltzius uniform emulated the facture of the woodcutting practice itself, mimicking the distinctive swell and crease of the German line. Finally Goltzius signed each engraving, abrogating all charges of fraud and stamping the series, justifiably, as his own