Chilon, Spartan Philosopher and Councilor

The philosopher Chilon seems ready to burst out of the frame in this in this startling portrait by Jan Muller. He holds a convex mirror in his massive hands, crowding the picture plane, and turns his head slightly away as he looks out at the viewer. Chilon was a philosopher and councilor in the city-state of Sparta and one of the Seven Sages of Greece – seven philosophers, statesmen and lawgivers who were known for their wisdom in the early sixth century BCE. Muller has made him into a grotesque figure, using a dramatically swelling and tapering line, to emphasize the warts on his face and his wildly curling hair. His mirror embodies his motto, "know thyself," a phrase repeated in Greek and Latin in the inscriptions on the oval frame.


Three years earlier, in 1593, Muller had engraved a portrait of the Harpocrates, the god of silence (accession no. 51.501.6334), also slightly larger than life and in an oval frame. He most probably intended the two engravings as a pair, or as the first two prints in a never completed series of portraits from antiquity. In style and subject matter, Harpocrates and Chilon derive from "fantasy portraits" by Hendrick Goltzius – the foremost Mannerist printmaker, to whom Muller may have been apprenticed -- and his school. They were pen drawings of historical or mythological figures, rendered in bold strokes mimicking the swelling and tapering lines of engravings. Here Muller has taken this mannerist predilection for blurring the lines between different media a step further, by creating engravings that emulate drawings that imitate engravings.