HAU44027/28 Multiple Histories: The Print in Early Modern Europe

The principal research question pursued in this course is ‘how did the existence of prints shape the writing of Art History?’ For example, the northern European reader of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, the humanist scholar Domenicus Lampsonius, felt the need to see reproductions of the works of art described in the biographies of Italian artists. He subsequently arranged for the engraver Cornelis Cort to travel to Italy to produce better quality prints than those available for purchase from Italian printmakers. Vasari then responded to the growing interest in prints by including a short history of engraving in the second edition of the Lives in the form of a biography of Raphael’s engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi. In this way, the history of prints became a necessary supplement to the history of painting, sculpture and architecture. Marcantonio’s prints had spread the fame of Raphael’s designs and inventive genius across Europe, just as Dürer’s engravings had made the German artist known at a distance to Raphael. Prints promoted cultural exchange together with stylistic influence across borders, and collecting them produced encyclopaedic repertoires of images, where the work of different artists could be directly compared. Prints promoted aesthetic judgements, the formation of canons, and disseminated the names of famous artists across Europe (and even the world). Yet they also could perpetuate mistakes, cause omissions, and prove unreliable as historical documents or statements of theory. In attempting to analyse these issues, this course will also provide a survey of major developments in printmaking over the period c.1450-1800, examine technical developments like etching and mezzotint, and examine the status of the multiple and relatively inexpensive print as an art work.