Artwork story
About The Fifth Day (Dies V): The Creation of the Kingdom of Animals, from "The Creation of the World"
The artist and artwork
Jan Muller engraved The Fifth Day in 1589 after a design by Hendrick Goltzius, who also published the series. Muller, the son of an Amsterdam printer, engraver, and publisher, was then working in Goltzius’s Haarlem workshop. The round copper engraving is the second of two states. Its swelling and tapering lines turn clouds, waves, feathers, fur, scales, shells, and a reclining sea goddess into one continuous display of printmaking skill.
The world around it
Goltzius’s Haarlem print business aimed at an international audience of collectors and challenged Antwerp’s dominance of northern European print publishing. By the late 1580s, his workshop stood at the height of Mannerist invention: learned subjects, deliberately artificial bodies, and virtuosic engraved lines circulated widely on paper. This Creation series also crosses traditions. Instead of illustrating Genesis in the customary Christian manner, Goltzius drew on classical mythology, probably Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to imagine the origins of the world.
A detail to notice
The fifth day becomes a census in motion. Birds stream across the upper air, land animals gather on a distant ledge, and fish, turtles, crabs, shells, and a sea monster churn through the foreground water. At their center, an idealized goddess reclines across several sea creatures with her back to us, pointing toward the living kingdom around her. The finished Goltzius designs are now lost, although preliminary sketches survive. Muller’s engraving is therefore not merely a reproduction; it is the detailed surviving form through which this crowded invention remains visible.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print made in Engraving; New Holl.'s second state of two and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include Sheet (diameter): 10 3/8 in. (26.4 cm).
Subject terms include Human Figures, Birds, Fish, and Insects. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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