Portrait of Justus Lipsius, Flemish humanist

Crispijn van de Passe the Elder was a Dutch draughtsman and printmaker active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Working primarily in pen and ink, he produced detailed studies of ornament, natural forms, and allegorical subjects that circulated widely across Northern Europe as models for artisans and designers. His drawings were foundational to the dissemination of Renaissance and early Baroque decorative vocabularies in the Dutch Republic and beyond.