The prints prepared by Jacques Callot for the book industry should be examined separately from the rest of the artist's oeuvre. The printmaker who produced illustrations for books had to follow rules and publication deadlines, and had to yield to the author's intents.
Callot provided illustrations for about forty books in his career and an evolution from his Italian to his French period can be detected. His Italian production is comparatively homogeneous since he worked nearly exclusively for the Medici family and with its official publishers. Still, his Italian work can divided into two broad categories. The first one includes the pieces produced to commemorate an event, such as a wedding or a death, like The Funeral Book of the Queen of Spain, commissioned by Cosimo II, written by Giovanni Altoviti and published in Florence by Bartolomeo Sermatelli in 1616.
The second category comprises literary books or plays. A good example of this is the tragedy, Il Solimano, a very popular play in the seventeenth century, which was written by Prospero Bonarelli and published by Pietro Cecconcelli in 1620.
Caption: Il Solimano, Act I Caption: Il Solimano, Act III
Callot produced a frontispiece and five illustrations for Il Solimano, whose plot centers around the intrigues at the court of Suleiman I the Magnificent (?1494-1566). This play is good example of the Medici Court's fascination with the Ottoman Empire.
In these three prints, Callot used the conventional perspective of the Italian Renaissance theater, which was based upon a single vanishing point demanding an optimum point of view. This point of view was the prerogative of the ruling aristocracy since it was only from their royal box that the spatial illusion could be experienced without distortion. These prints also reflect the fact that Callot had to work quickly to meet deadlines and often reused his copper plates. For instance, he reused the plate he had engraved for the fronstispiece of the Two Naval Battles for the frontispiece of Il Solimano.
Book illustration was not usually a financially rewarding trade for an artist since it was the author and the print publisher who benefited from the production. In Nancy, Callot, whose career was flourishing, had the luxury of accepting or refusing commissions. As a result, he worked for and with authors he liked and who were his friends and he determined the type of book he illustrated. It is notable, therefore, that nearly all the frontispieces he engraved after 1621 were religious in nature.
Callot collaborated, for instance, with his friend, Alphonse de Rambervillers, a well-known Catholic humanist, poet and writer, on the image entitled Gloriosissimae, which was created as an homage to Henri of Bourbon, the Bishop of Metz. This religious image is not a frontispiece but was probably conceived and used as a bookmark for a devotional book.
Callot also gave Rambervillers a copy of The Miracles of the Annunziata, one of the books he had illustrated some years earlier in Florence. First published in 1619 by Pietro Cecconcelli, The Miracles of the Annunziata was written by Giovanni Angelo Lottini who was not only a friar but also a sculptor and poet. His book is a history of all the miracles attributed to a thirteenth-century fresco representing the Annunciation. It was believed that the head of the Virgin was painted by an angel. This fresco, still located in the Church of the Annunziata in Florence, is the subject of Callot's print below.
The technique Callot used for these illustrations was more personal than that of other book illustrators and changed the way books were illustrated in Lorraine. He simplified the decoration of the frontispieces and related the design of the frontispiece to the meaning of the literary work. Unfortunately, very few prints engraved by Callot survive in the form of books. In most cases, the illustrations have been removed to be sold separately.
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