VERHEIDEN, Jacob.

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Praestantium aliquot theologorum qui Rom. antichristum praecipue oppugnarunt, effigies: First edition, a compendium of 50 attractively engraved portraits of famous Protestant theologians, each paired with a detailed biography and a list of their works. The illustrator was Henrick Hondius I (1573-1650), one of the most prominent engravers and cartographers in The Hague.This work is uncommon complete with all 50 portraits, copies in commerce often lacking gathering "(?)", comprising 2 leaves with the portrait of Berengarius.Hondius's portrait series, sometimes referred to in English as "Celebrated Reformers and Men of the Religion", was first published without text in 1599. The artist then collaborated with Verheiden and the printer Nieulandt to include the portraits in this book. The series features all the major Protestant reformers, such as Erasmus, Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, Theodore Beza, John Knox, Peter Martyr, and Geronimo Savonarola."The stylistic variation among the portraits may be due to the range of pictorial sources that Hondius seems to have relied upon for depicting each reformer. The portrait of Melanchton, for example, derives from the well-known portrait engraving by Durer of 1526... thus, the entire series seems to have been engraved by Hondius himself during a period in which his style was in the process of transformation" (Orenstein, p. 64). Other sources of inspiration were the painter Hans Hasper and the engraver Jacques the Gheyn II.Provenanc

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