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| Album of etchings by Pietro Testa ca. 1650-1700 National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Allegory of the Seasons - Spring ca. 1637-38 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Allegory of the Seasons - Summer ca. 1644 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Allegory of the Seasons - Autumn ca. 1642 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Allegory of the Seasons - Winter 1644 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
"Pietro Testa's career as a printmaker began in Rome, where Joachim von Sandrart not only gave him financial support but also introduced him to some of the greatest engravers of the day, especially the northern artists Cornelis Bloemaert and Theodor Matham, both of whom were employed by Sandrart in engraving the statues in the Galleria Giustiniani. They taught Testa to engrave, but he found the suggestive and flexible medium of etching more suited to his rapid pen style and to his preoccupation with the practical and theoretical problems of chiaroscuro. By the second half of the 1630s, with his career as a painter already foundering, Testa's skill as an etcher became the chief source of his income and reputation. But Testa none the less continued to think of himself primarily as a painter throughout his life, and this attitude led to an entirely new conception of his own printmaking. Whereas his earliest prints are in the main small and unambitious compositions, by the latter 1630s the conception of his etchings becomes almost that of substitute paintings. Their large size and complex composition demanded the same detailed preparation; and at the same time Testa's considered mastery of the technical skill required to work on such a scale enabled him to compensate for the loss of palette through a theoretically founded application of colouristic values of light and shade. An important group of etchings in this category is the four large prints of the Seasons, the light and shadows of which change according to the changing light of the four seasons themselves. They were especially admired by Sandrart, Testa's early protector, as the finest of all his inventions, wherein he had set forth with many fine and strange thoughts Time's changes upon the earth and the movements of the starry heavens."
– Elizabeth Cropper, from Virtue's Wintry Reward: Pietro Testa's Etchings of the Seasons (London: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1974)
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| Pietro Testa Story of the Prodigal Son I - Departure before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Story of the Prodigal Son II - Dissipation before 1650 etching- National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Story of the Prodigal Son III - Among the Pigs before 1650 etching- National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Story of the Prodigal Son IV - Return before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Thetis immerses Achilles in the waters of the Styx before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Symposium (Seven Sages of Greece) before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Death of Cato before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Garden of Charity (horizontal) before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Garden of Charity (vertical) before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Garden of Venus before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Pietro Testa Venus and Adonis before 1650 etching National Galleries of Scotland |
"The invention of the subject matters of these etchings [of the Seasons] in fact shows Testa's preoccupation with the same system of mythological exegesis which informs a great many of his friend Poussin's paintings of the decade 1628-38 . . . Testa's series probably began, as we shall see, around 1638 with the etching of the Spring, but the closeness of his mythological imagery to Poussin's, derived from the antiquarian circle of Cassiano dal Pozzo (for whom Testa worked) is explicit at an earlier date, notably in [Testa's] painting of Venus and Adonis now in the Kunstakadamie in Vienna. This painting, which is unusual in its representation of a dead boar and a living Adonis who succumbs to and does not resist the appeals of Venus, reverses the conventional mythological relationships of the fable, and in so doing closely follows another painting by Poussin, the Venus and Adonis in the Rhode Island School of Design. The style of Testa's painting derives from Poussin's style of the latter 1620s and early 1630s (the Rhode Island picture is from this period), a fact which suggests that Testa's version is to be dated around 1635-36, that is, to a moment just before Poussin's style began to move decisively towards the monumentality of the 1640s. It follows from this that the beautiful and accomplished print [directly above] executed by Testa after his painting dates from the same period. The print was given by Testa to Niccolò Menghini, the sculptor who after restoring Roman sculpture in the Palazzo Barberini became supervisor of the Barberini collection of antiquities until his death in 1655. Its subject, described as 'singularissima inventione' by Menghini, is, like Poussin's before it, determined by a Macrobian analysis of the meaning of the myth. Accordingly the death of Adonis represents the loss of the sun's power at the onset of winter, symbolized by the boar, when the sun enters into the lower hemisphere of the Zodiac, over which Proserpine presides. The death of Adonis is, however, only temporary, and with the springtime ascent of the sun into the upper hemisphere, whose tutelary spirit is Venus, the boar of winter dies and the god returns to life. Testa's Venus and Adonis follows Poussin's painting in being concerned, through its reversal of the sequence of the myth, not with simple narrative exposition but with a presentation of the philosophic principles underlying the poetic fable, making of the painting and the print an allegory of spring."
– Elizabeth Cropper, from Virtue's Wintry Reward: Pietro Testa's Etchings of the Seasons (London: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1974)