The Beginning of Reproductive Prints
Printmaking was a way of producing multiple images. During the Renaissance, the technique of copperplate engraving became increasingly popular for its capability to render fine, subtle details.When it was first introduced to the Italian city-states, only a few artists ventured to experiment with this new medium because it required a very specialized set of tools and skills. The printmaker, taking a copperplate, would first carve his design with a metal burin, apply ink into the carvings, and then run it through a large and heavy press. This machine would then press the ink onto a sheet of paper and yield a reversed image.
Yet, despite the training and economic costs, some artists did recognize printmaking’s revolutionary potential for art-making and tried to incorporate it into their studio practice. One of them was Bartolomeo Montagna (circa 1450–1523), the leading painter in the Venetian city of Vicenza.
Montagna encouraged his son Benedetto to learn the technique of engraving and set up a printing press in the family workshop. The reproduction of the “Madonna and Child” is probably the first print made by the young Benedetto because it was a copy of his father’s devotional panel painting. The first state of the print was in fact a faithful reproduction of the painting, but the plate was recarved a few years later by another printmaker in the Montagna workshop and signed here as an independent work. Compared to the sizable and impressively colored panel painting, the printed image on paper appears insignificant. Yet, it crucially brought Bartolomeo’s design to a much greater number of people beyond his native city.
Michelangelo and the Creation of Art History
When Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” was unveiled in 1541, it soon came to be memorialized as a major artistic achievement. Within decades, it was copied by a number of printmakers. In a partial copy by Domenico del Barbiere, the printmaker paid close attention to a small section of figures on the right side of Christ, thus showing Michelangelo’s forceful figurative style in better detail.
Meanwhile, in those same decades, the art of Michelangelo became a major point of discussion among men and women of letters. Some praised his sculptural figures for their deep engagement with the Neoplatonic philosophy of the time, while others denounced the scandalous nudity in his depiction of holy people.
Art After Vasari
In the following centuries, new generations of artists and writers continued to carry forth the Italian Renaissance tradition, and printing retained its role in propagating compositional designs and theoretical views. Around the year 1600, a painter from Bologna, Annibale Carracci, successfully identified himself as the star of his age, winning the accolade of critics and historians.Carracci made a name for himself in Rome with the spectacular fresco cycle painted on a ceiling of the Farnese Palace. Filling every inch of space, the artist turned the vaulted ceiling into an illusionistic canvas, painted with pseudo marble sculpture, bronze relief, and framed canvases. They decorate 13 narrative scenes depicting the “Loves of the Gods,” with stories drawn from a variety of classical sources.
The Clark exhibition features an installation of a suite of engravings, published in Rome in 1674, which reproduced sections of the Farnese Gallery’s walls and vaulted ceiling. By this time, Carracci’s frescoes had already become a renowned monument in the history of Italian art—celebrated and memorialized in contemporary treatises.
The suite of 25 prints visualized Carracci’s entire decorative program in the architectural space, bringing the splendor of the Baroque palace to the hands of art enthusiasts.
While the art of Florence and Rome continued to dominate our view of Renaissance art, there still existed robust artistic traditions outside Central Italy that kept inspiring new generations of artists. Especially admired was the judicial use of color in the tradition of Venetian painting.
Since the mid-1500s, Venetian artists and theorists have contested Vasari’s view of art history, and toward the 1700s they even began writing their own historical narratives that championed artists such as Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese. In 1731, the English printmaker John Baptist Jackson arrived in Venice, where he undertook a grand project reproducing 17 large paintings by those Venetian Renaissance masters, including the “Marriage at Cana” after Veronese’s monumental canvas. To convey the rich colors of Venetian painting, Jackson revived an old woodcut technique called “chiaroscuro” which prints from several carved woodblocks to create a wide range of color tones.
After the Renaissance, reproductive prints grew to be a crucial means to copy, multiply, and remember the art of the past. Together with texts on art theory, they documented the historical development of artistic styles and constitute a rich and important archive of images that enlivened the art history discussions in early modern Europe. These, among a total of over 30 works, are currently on view at the Clark Art Institute.
