Maarten de Vos was born in Antwerp in 1532 and died there in 1603. His father Pieter de Vos was also a painter and he studied first with him and then with Frans Floris, one of the first to bring Mannerism to Antwerp. In 1551 de Vos left Floris and went to Rome, where he studied the works of Michelangelo and then to Venice where he became first the pupil then the friend and collaborator of Tintoretto. He was highly successful in Italy, executing commissions for the Medici among others. In 1558 he returned to Antwerp where he worked as a painter executing portraits and large commissions for churches. He executed some engravings, but he was far more prolific as a source of drawings that were then engraved and published by others. In this set of twenty pieces depicting the Celebrated Women of the Old Testament, his drawings were engraved by Jan II Collaert (Antwerp, 1561/62-1620)

Stylistically these engravings are clearly Mannerist in inspiration. Thematically, they present an interesting set of celebrated women. Rahab is a prostitute who protects Joshua's spies in Jericho and thus aids in Joshua's conquest of her city, Tamar (or Thamar) is a widow who must play the part of a prostitute to force her father-in-law to obey the law of Israel and give her his third son as a husband following the deaths of his two eldest sons without begetting a child with her. Esther uses her beauty to become the wife of an Assyrian King and uses that place to put down an attempt to destroy the people of Israel and Judith lures an Assyrian General to his death, thus demoralizing his troops and saving Isreal from destruction by allowing Holofernes to think that she will sleep with him and then cutting off his head with his own sword when he falls asleep drunk. The acts of some of these women demonstrate a willingness to put service to God above all other concerns including conventional morality. Some of the presentations stress the beauty and sexual attractiveness of the women as if to invite us to reconsider whether the very things for which women had frequently been condemned might not be the very means by which God saves his people in these stories.

Select Bibliography: A. Doutrepont, Martin de Vos et l'Entrée triomphale de l'Archiduc Ernest d'Autriche à Anvers en 1594 (Brussels/Rome: 1937); M.M.L. Netto-Bol, So-called Maarten de Vos sketchbook of drawings after the antique (The Hague, Staatsuitgeverij, 1976: Vol. IV of the series "Kunsthistorische Studiën van het Nederlands Instituut te Rome); C. Schuckman, Maarten de Vos, 1532-1603 (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision, 1995/96. 3 vols. Together 850 pp., ca.1600 ills. Vols XLIV - XLVI in the Hollstein's Dutch and Flemish series); A. Zweite, Studien zu Marten Vos. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der antwerpener Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität, 1974); A. Zweite, Marten de Vos als Maler. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Antwerpener Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin 1980). For the definitive work on the Collaert family, see Marjolein Leesberg, and Arnout Balis, The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts 1450-1700. The Collaert Dynasty, Part I-Part IV (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Publishers, 2005).