Women of old Florence

An uncommon subject within Saito's body of work, turning from his customary Heian-era women toward Renaissance Italy. The plate likely depicts a group of female figures rendered in a quattrocento idiom — profile heads, dressed hair, the sober drapery of fifteenth-century Florence — translated into the bitten line of etching. The medium itself is European in origin, and the choice of subject foregrounds that lineage. Intaglio entered Japan only in the late nineteenth century, and printmakers of Saito's generation often acknowledged the technique's western provenance through occasional excursions into European motifs. The composition is built largely from contour and crosshatching rather than the tonal modeling of mezzotint, allowing Saito to approach something closer to an Italian disegno. The print illustrates the breadth of the postwar sōsaku-hanga sensibility, where European subject and Japanese authorship sit easily together within the same plate.