Jean Duvet
He produced about seventy-three known plates, that convey a highly personal style, often compared to that of William Blake,[1] with very crowded compositions, a certain naive quality, and intense religious feeling.
[2] A degree of mystery surrounds his biography, as there is disagreement as to whether or not he was the Jean Duvet from Dijon who spent sixteen years in the militantly Calvinist city-state of Geneva.
He became a master of the Dijon Goldsmiths' guild in 1509, and may have travelled to Italy in about 1519; this is purely an inference from his prints, which show considerable Italian influence.
[2] He died, probably in Langres, after 1562, when he is recorded as attending a town meeting there,[6] though Zerner gives his death date as 1561 and Marqusee says that there is no specific documentation of Duvet after the last Geneva mention in 1556.
A Jean Duvet from Dijon is also recorded working as a goldsmith in Calvinist Geneva from 1540–56, but most scholarly opinion now believes that this was someone else, probably his nephew.
They borrow heavily from the famous series in woodcut of Albrecht Dürer (1498) but are very different in style - crowded, even confused, but urgent and intense.
[20] Duvet's engraving known as Moses Surrounded by the Patriarchs (1540–50), for example, draws on a common medieval theme, the ancestors and antetypes of Christ.
[20] The driving force of Duvet's composition is the visionary nature of his material, which inspires him to place symbolic expression ahead of considerations of proportion, scale, or space.
[21] As well as recalling the medieval past, Duvet's work also looks forward to the more agitated style of the art produced during the French Wars of Religion later in the sixteenth century.
[22] Duvet's work was produced, like that of Rosso and Pontormo in the Florence of the 1520s, in an urban atmosphere of religious excitement, since the town of Langres was in the grip of an enthusiastic and emotional Catholic revival at the time.
[23] Duvet shares with those Florentine artists the style of distorted and crowded figures and borrowings from Dürer, though his use of Gothic elements is more pronounced.
