In 1604 he ran away to Italy in the company of a band of gypsies, hoping to reach the goal of hisambition, Rome. He stopped in Florence and studied engraving under the celebrated Remigio Gallina, and copied the work of the masters, thus tempering his love for the grotesque. The young runaway was soon sent home, to the joy of his parents, but his father finally consented to his accompanying the envoy of Duke Henry II to the Papal Court. In Rome he practised engraving and etching and invented a hard varnish for grounding copper-plates. When he left Italy (1621 or 1622) his fame was already great, and it soon became world-wide. He engraved for the Infanta Eugenia in Brussels and for Louis XIII in Paris. It is said that when the French monarch in 1633 commanded Callot to engrave a plate commemorative of the fall of Nancy the artist cried that he "would rather cut off his right hand than use it on such a work".

If little is known of his intimate life and traits, his 1600 plates afford full information concerning the artistic side of his career. Callot was often ugly in his realism, but he was a master of the art of design, clear in drawing, fertile in invention, precise in line, and varied in his style. The freedom andnaïveté in his small figures, the lifelike manner in which he treated them, and the certainty with which he arranged complicated groups made him the pioneer of methods followed by Rembrandt and his forerunners. The Macaberesque note in medieval art is dominant in his work, and there is a piquancy and newness given to the slightest details. A peculiarity in nearly all his figures is the smallness of the heads in proportion to the bodies. His landscapes are inferior to his figure-pieces and architecturalplates, though the latter are of great historical and topographical interest ("La Tourde Nesle" with "the Old Louvre"). No authentic finished painting by Callot exists among the great collections, and it is verydoubtful if he ever completed a work in oil. The master of the grotesque and humerous was the father of etching in France, and his fame comes from his etchings, which are better than his engravings. He frequently spoiled his splendid point-work with the burin, and his reputation as an aquafortist depends, therefore, more on what he did than on how he did it. Notable among his works are eighteen plates entitled "The Miseries of War"; twenty-five plates of beggars; "The Holy Family"; "Cosmo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany"; "Charles III of Lorraine". His last years were spent industriously in Nancy, where he died. He was buried in the church of the Franciscans (Cordeliers). He was noted for his loyalty andcourage as a subject of Lorraine, and for his generosity, probity, and kindness of heart as a citizen.