A member of the extremely talented Sadeler family, Aegidius II Sadeler, along with his uncles Jan (1550-1600) and Raphael (1560-1632), is an artist whose role in the Dutch Mannerist School of the late 16th and early 17th centuries is coming to be seen as central to the efflorescence of Netherlandish printmaking of the period. Aegidius was appointed Imperial Printmaker to three successive Hapsburg emperors in Prague and Vienna and helped to spread the art of the Hapsburg Courts, and especially the artists of Rudolf II, particularly Hans van Aachen and Batholomeus Spranger, throughout Europe. Joachim von Sandrart, writing in the 1670s, 40 years of Aegidius' death, pronounced him "a phoenix among engravers" and recent critical studies of the period tend to concur. Aegidius was apprenticed to his uncle Jan, an important part of the Antwerp School (which also included Cornelis Cort, Philips and Theodore Galle, Jan and Adrien Collaert, and Jerome, Jan, and Anthonie Wierix), who produced many engravings after drawings by Marten de Vos and others for the publisher Christopher Plantin before becoming a publisher (along with his brother Raphael) himself. In the late 1580s, the family left Antwerp and went to Germany where Jan became printmaker to Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria, working at his court in Munich. After visits from Hendrik Goltzius both on his way to Italy and on his return, Aegidius seems to have made the journey himself between 1591 and 1593 where, according to Limouze, he stayed inVenice, Verona, Rome, and perhaps Florence. In Rome he worked with Joseph Heintz, also one of Rudolf II's imperial painters, which may have led to Aegidius' own appointment at the court of Rudolf II in 1597.

Select Bibliography: K. G. Boon, ed. Hollstein's Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts ca. 1450-1700: Volumes 21-22 Aegidius Sadeler to Raphael Sadeler II (Amsterdam: Van Gendt & Co., 1980); Dorothy Anne Limouze, Aegidius Sadeler (C. 1570-1629): Drawings, Prints, and Art Theory (Princeton, 1990); Dorothy Anne Limouze, Aegidius Sadeler, Imperial Printmaker (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989); Isabelle de Ramaix, The illustrated Bartsch 72: Aegidius Sadeler II (NY: Abaris, 1998); Isabelle de Raimaix, Les Sadeler: Graveurs et éditeurs (Bruxelles: Bibliothèque royale Albert I, 1992).