Circe Drinking (Circella)

Italian woodcutter and printer Andrea Andreani revitalized the chiaroscuro woodcut in Italy in the early seventeenth century by creating new prints and reprinting earlier works from woodblocks he acquired. To produce this print, Andreani used blocks from two different versions of “Circe Drinking” created by other artists in the 1540s: one attributed to Antonio da Trento or Nicolló Vicentino, and another by Nicolló Vicentino. Both of these prints closely reproduced a drawing by Parmigianino that is now in the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. The subject of the scene has traditionally been interpreted as episode in Homer’s “Odyssey,” however the image is not an accurate illustration of any narrative that appears in the text. Art historian Claudia Hattendorf has proposed Parmigianino may have instead taken inspiration from Matteo Boiardo’s epic poem “Orlando innamorato,” issued in 1483. In Boiardo’s story, the character Circella (named as an allusion to Circe in Homer’s “Odyssey”) falls in love with Orlando and turns his men into animals before being tricked into drinking her own magic potion.