Endorsements

Best known for his partnership with Raphael, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480-c. 1534) enabled Renaissance artists to disseminate their designs in print, advancing a revolution in visual communication that still reverberates in our own information age. Yet Marcantonio did more than render compositions by famous artists in the novel medium of engraving. This catalogue, written by a group of international scholars, reveals the unprecedented diversity of his work and the range of his skill. It expands our knowledge of his collaboration with Raphael, while also probing Marcantonio's creative response to the dynamic humanist culture in his native Bologna and later in Venice and Rome. Contributions also examine the importance of his engravings to the history of collecting and provide new insight into the work of his 'followers', including Agostino Veneziano, Marco Dente and the so-called Master of the Die. Marcantonio's talents won him praise in his own day. According to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, they also landed him in trouble, first for copying Dürer's Life of the Virgin woodcut series, and later for engraving Giulio Romano's drawings of sexual positions, I Modi. These cases of piracy and pornography secured Marcantonio enduring fame in the history of art, but his engravings have long been classed as 'reproductions'. The present catalogue, which accompanies the first exhibition of Marcantonio's work in over three decades, aims to restore the printmaker's status as an independent artist. His engravings created new spaces for creative expression and set the Renaissance in motion through the proliferation of print.