How does renaissance art reflect the values of people?

Giancarlo Beltrame (1925-2011), an avid collector of scientific books and of prints, was obsessed by the eternal themes of Love and Death. The walls in his house in Vicenza were teeming with depictions of nudes and skeletons, skulls and bones, dragons and witches, monsters and martyrs.

The Beltrame Collection offers a fascinating survey of memento mori, Vanitas images, Dances of Death and related imagery and includes prints of the 15th to the 20th century. With estimates starting at just US$600, this sale offers the opportunity to acquire very rare and unusual prints, including arguably the most bizarre print of the Renaissance, Agostino Veneziano’s The Carcasse, an exquisite and rather macabre little engraving of Adam and Eve by Hans Sebald Beham, and one of the most famous images in the history of printmaking, Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.