Walking and mounted figures surrounding a river traversed by a bridge, with a hilly outcrop and windmill, from the series 'Italian landscapes' (Diverse vedute designate in Fiorenza / Paysages italiens)

Jacques Callot was born in Nancy, Lorraine, now France. He came from an aristocratic family and he writes about his noble status in his print inscriptions. He learned engraving in Rome from an expatriate Frenchman, Philippe Thomassin, and probably, from Antonio Tempesta in Florence where he started to work for the Medici. In 1621, he returned to Nancy where he lived for the rest of his life. Although he remained in Nancy, his prints were distributed through Europe. He developed several technical innovations that enabled etching lines to be etched more smoothly and deeply. Now etchers could do the very detailed work that was previously the monopoly of engravers, and Callot made good use of the new techniques. His multiple innovations also achieved unprecedented subtlety in the effects of distance and light even his prints were relatively small – as much as about six inches or 15 cm on their longest dimension. His most famous prints are his two series of prints each on "the Miseries and Misfortunes of War". These images show soldiers pillaging and burning their way through towns before being arrested and executed by their superiors, lynched by peasants, or surviving to live as crippled beggars.

This collection as well as all massive collections on Picryl.com required two steps: First, we picked a manually curated set to train AI vision to recognize windmills, and after that, we run image recognition through all 25M+ images in our database. All media in the collection is in the public domain. There is no limitation on the dataset usage - educational, scientific, or commercial.