God Creating Heaven and Earth, title page from "The Creation of the World"

In 1589 Jan Muller, son of the Amsterdam book printer, engraver, and publisher, was a member of or working in Hendrick Goltzius’s workshop in Haarlem. During that time, he engraved a series of prints depicting the creation of the world after designs by Goltzius, the premier draftsman and printmaker in the northern Netherlands. Although some preliminary sketches for the series still exist, the finished designs are now lost.


The series itself is extraordinary. Rather than following the centuries old traditional representations of the seven days of creation, based on the Book of Genesis, Goltzius looked instead to classical mythology for his imagery. It is often suggested that he was inspired by Ovid, the first century Latin poet, who describes the creation at the beginning of The Metamorphoses, his long poem about the gods and humankind.


The titlepage is one of the only two prints in the series to include a representation of God the Father. He is a robed and bearded figure, floating on a wraithlike cloud and gesturing toward a newly created Earth. Earth is a shiny sphere, as yet undifferentiated into land and sea, suspended on a rope held by two well-muscled nude male figures, presumably some godlike or angelic figures, standing on a base of clouds in an otherwise undefined cosmos. The text on the tablet below the figures is a poem by F. Estius, roughly following the Biblical description of the creation.