GOLTZIUS

Peter Greenaway’s Goltzius is the second installment in his Dutch Masters series. Its story runs thus: sometime during the winter of 1590, the Dutch printmaker Hendrik Goltzius holds an interview with Margrave of Alsace, in the grand library at his castle on the Rhine.
Goltzius needs money in order to build a printing press to print erotic illustrated books, and he entices Margrave of Alsace into paying for an extraordinary book of pictures of Old Testament Biblical stories, by dramatizing the erotic stories of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah and John the Baptist and Salome–stories in which themes of incest, adultery, female entrapment and necrophilia abound. Margrave’s court is completely seduced by Goltzius’ titillating storytelling, and swiftly sinks into a pit of lechery and religious politics, until the court is forced to buy its way out, and Goltzius can begin his ambitious endeavor.