Two Warriors, One with a Winged Genie on His Helmet (1475/1500): Artwork and History

Two Warriors, One with a Winged Genie on His Helmet (1475/1500) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as School of Maso Finiguerra Italian, 1426-1464.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This tiny print of fantastically helmeted warriors may have been pulled as a test proof from a plate engraved as a niello, a small precious-metal plate with lines meant to be filled in and heightened with a black enamel-like substance to increase the contrast with the surrounding metal. Prints like this one were sometimes made to record completed designs, and the process is similar to the decorative blackening of parade armor (as in the greave displayed nearby). Very few niello prints survive, as they were part of the process of making metalwork and were never produced in larger numbers.

Object facts

• Title: Two Warriors, One with a Winged Genie on His Helmet
• Date: 1475/1500
• Artist attribution: School of Maso Finiguerra Italian, 1426-1464
• Place of origin: Italy
• Medium: Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
• Dimensions: 3.7 × 5.1 cm (1 1/2 × 2 1/16 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1956.989

Collection credit

Bequest of Mrs. Potter Palmer, Jr.

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.