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| Pietro Testa Figures of two Virtues for the etching, Earth in the circle of heaven ca. 1642-44 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Pietro Testa Self-portrait ca. 1645 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Pietro Testa "I find delight only in learning" ca. 1644 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
"Only recently has the importance of prints by the Carracci, with whose work Testa has most in common, been reassessed. But those of Testa remain difficult of access. Once categorized as the oneiric work of a romantic genius, they now appear paradoxically classical in technique and subject. To the admirer of Poussin, the later works seem too full of fantasy and intricate allegory and are separable only with difficulty from the artist's few known paintings, which are often found wanting in color, although not in invention. The etchings are rarely found in good condition, and even in the most distinguished collections are unmounted, tattered, and creased.
Rembrandt's etchings, widely published, appealed through their subjects to an idea of intimacy that coincides with one aesthetic of etching. Testa did not market his prints to a wide audience but sought instead to express himself directly to a small group of knowledgeable connoisseurs, such as Cassiano dal Pozzo and Girolamo Buonvisi. The truth of his expression, both in subject and in the manner in which it was conveyed, was as personal as that of his Northern contemporaries, but it took the forms of the culture in which he lived – not couched in the rhetoric of Protestant spirituality but aspiring to universality in the language of lyric poetry, allegory, and ancient history in the artistic conventions of Italy. His art was no less intimate or sincere for that.
Testa lived in a classical culture at the very moment when it was coming to an end, and his art is revelatory of the growing tensions between established convention and the emerging values of imagination and sensation. In the drawings, paintings, and etchings from throughout his short career he communicated explicitly his own interpretation of the inseparability of the natural, the human, and the divine, whether on the basis of familiar religious images or texts of his own choosing, whether through the process of thinking on paper or through the figures of thought and expression that he represented. The very exploitation of these highly personal images after Testa's death for an international art market stimulated by the desire for novelties led to a loss of understanding of the work of an artist who had etched not for that market but for himself."
– from Elizabeth Cropper's essay in the exhibition catalog Pietro Testa from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1988)
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| Pietro Testa Venus giving arms to Aeneas ca. 1638-40 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Pietro Testa Achilles dragging the body of Hector around the walls of Troy 1648-50 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Pietro Testa Sinorix carried from the temple ca. 1640 etching Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Pietro Testa Death of Sinorix ca. 1640 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Pietro Testa Death of Sinorix ca. 1640 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Pietro Testa Death of Sinorix ca. 1640 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Pietro Testa Landscape with nymphs and satyrs before 1650 drawing British Museum |
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| Pietro Testa Landscape with classical figures before 1650 drawing British Museum |
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| Pietro Testa Presentation of the Virgin ca. 1642 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Pietro Testa Alexander the Great saved from the River Cydnus ca. 1648-50 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Pietro Testa Aeneas on the bank of the River Styx ca. 1648-50 oil on canvas private collection |