In the first half of the seventeenth century, the little-studied printmaker Michael Snijders engraved an idiosyncratic series. All manner of heads, limbs, flora, fauna, bits of antique costume, and fantastical doodles fill these sheets, approximating the economical logic of an artist’s sketchbook; and carefully selected pictorial citations—often labeled as such with other artists’ names—assure the viewer of this function even as reproductive facture betrays this as a fiction.
Taken together, the sheets offer a master-class in artistic emulation, assembling a visual repository of citations from masters old and contemporary alike, a set of graphic styles, and even visual references to literary figures and artistic treatises. This paper positions Snijders’s works as delights of copying—of staged intertextuality and clever pictorial puns and plays—and the copiousness that resulted within emergent artistic and rhetorical traditions of his native Antwerp, but also as tools for reappraising art history’s relationship to the copy.