Quote:And in her day, the artist who huddled over this sheet, meticulously clipping out the negative space, was every bit as famous as those icons. Her name was Joanna Koerten, but her skill with the scissors earned her the epithet “Scissors-Minerva,” after the Roman goddess of art.
“The Blok,” the museum she ran out of her house, was described by the art historian Martha Moffitt Peacock, writing in the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, as an “eighth wonder of the world.” Tsar Peter the Great, Cosimi de Medici, and innumerable poets and fellow artists visited there to watch her make her careful incisions. At one point, one of her diminutive paper-cuttings sold for more than Rembrandt’s monumental Night Watch. After her death, her husband published a book of poems in praise of her work; in time, the collection swelled to fill six volumes.