Alexander the Great - Baudet

A print of Étienne Baudet's Alexander the Great — a 17th century French line engraving after an antique bust of the Macedonian conqueror, of the kind Baudet and his contemporaries produced in volume to transmit knowledge of Rome's ancient marbles across the rest of Europe.

Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BC) is, by any reasonable measure, the most consequential military figure in Western history. In the dozen years between taking his father's throne and dying in Babylon at thirty-two, he broke the Persian Empire, took Egypt, drove his army as far east as the Punjab, and left behind a band of Hellenistic successor kingdoms whose fusion of Greek and Near Eastern culture shaped everything that came after, from Rome's art to the Gospels' Greek.

Étienne Baudet (c. 1636–1711) was a French engraver working in Paris in the second half of the 17th century, best known for his reproductive engravings after Poussin and after the antique marbles of Rome. His work belongs to the great 17th century project of making the antique portable — disseminating the sculpture and architecture of the ancient world through print to artists, collectors and amateurs who would never travel to Italy.