In the second edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects Giorgio Vasari recounts meeting the engraver Diana Mantuana (c. 1547–1612) during his visit to the Gonzaga court in 1566. Vasari describes her as kind, gracious and talented, and portrays both the artist and her works as ‘marvellous things’, whose strangeness both attracts and repels. Medusa-like, Diana and her prints stupefy Vasari, while her grace and beauty charm him. He also portrays Mantua as fertile ground, where ‘the artisans have multiplied, and continue to multiply’. He goes on to establish an artistic lineage in which Diana, the daughter of Giovanni Battista Scultori, descends from Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi. Vasari's Diana is a natural wonder produced by generations of Mantuan procreativity, yet her attraction lies not in the virtuosity of her art, but in the exoticism of her existence. Diana is the last of her dynasty, for Vasari gives her no artistic progeny. His account is a double-edged sword, at once praising a woman who engraves, while also rendering her an oddity. He highlights Diana's artistic lineage, while suggesting that she lacks the ability to produce her own creative legacy.

In her prints Diana shrewdly appropriates and upends Vasari's criticism, making use of the fame his mention of her afforded, while also demonstrating her ability to participate in sixteenth-century discourses surrounding artistic creativity. In inscriptions on Christ and the Adulteress (fig. 5.1) and the Feast of the Gods (fig. 5.2), both dated 1575, she describes herself as ‘giving birth’ to her works.