Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael Exhibition Guide

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Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 1 27/09/2016 13:59 Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 2 27/09/2016 13:59 Introduction Between about 1510 and 1520, Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480-c.1534) and Raphael (1483-1520) entered into a creative collaboration that gave rise to some of the most famous printed images in western art. For the frst time, an artist of Raphael’s stature turned to a printmaker to spread his innovative designs and style to new audiences. Raphael recognized Marcantonio Raimondi as a master of the new multiple medium of engraving, and Marcantonio brought an unprecedented graphic intelligence to the task of working from Raphael’s designs. Their partnership in the early 16th century changed the way we see art today.

Yet Marcantonio’s close working relationship with Raphael is only one facet of his career and its impact. Throughout his life as an engraver Marcantonio made prints from his own designs as well as those of other artists, consistently fashioning innovative images for the new medium of print. Before the invention of printmaking in the mid-1440s, nearly all visual images were singular. Marcantonio was a skilled and radical innovator in the new technology of copperplate engraving – a modern invention only about ffty years old at the time – and he was instrumental in driving a proliferation of images that still reverberates in our own information age. It is worth remembering that all historic art was contemporary art when it was created. Marcantonio’s artform, the print, was arguably more accessible and democratic than any which came before, placing images into the hands of new audiences and challenging conceptions of what constitutes ‘art’.

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 3 27/09/2016 13:59 Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480-c.1534)

Marcantonio Raimondi was probably born around 1480 in Argini, near the university city of Bologna. After establishing himself as an accomplished engraver, he travelled from Bologna to Venice around 1506, moving from a world of humanist scholarship to the heart of Italian publishing. In Venice, he may have been involved in one of the earliest intellectual property disputes in history when he produced unauthorized copies of prints by his famous German contemporary, Albrecht Dürer, although the evidence surrounding this case is ambiguous. Around 1510, after passing through Florence, he moved to Rome, a city long regarded as the centre of western culture and religion. His ambition was to work in close proximity to the most accomplished and successful living artists of his day. He collaborated with Raphael on many engraving and publishing projects until Raphael’s death in 1520. Marcantonio then sometimes worked with Giulio Romano, Raphael’s chief assistant. In 1524 he was sent to prison for several months for making prints after a series of drawings by Giulio of erotic subjects known as I Modi (The Positions). Marcantonio’s misfortunes continued. He is reported to have lost all his possessions in the calamitous Sack of Rome in 1527 and was forced to ransom himself to the mutinous troops of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Reduced almost to the state of a beggar, he is said to have returned to Bologna, where he died around 1534.

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 4 27/09/2016 13:59 1 Bologna and humanism

Marcantonio Raimondi’s frst works date from his youth in the university city of Bologna. Little is known about his early life and training with the Bolognese painter, medallist and goldsmith Francesco Raibolini, known as Francia. However, by 1504 Marcantonio was being praised for his accomplishments in engraving by a poet associated with the humanist circles of the city, Giovanni Achillini, whom Marcantonio would later portray as a modern-day Orpheus playing his guitar. Marcantonio’s early drawings and engravings refect his close association with a Bolognese circle of writers and artists who actively collected antiquities and modern works of art and encouraged the careers of local printmakers, often by guiding them with verses and occasionally composing verses on their work. The rapid development of Marcantonio’s technique in these years shows the application and care that he brought to analyzing and absorbing the best in existing prints, especially the recent prints of Albrecht Dürer. Marcantonio’s Apollo, Hyacinth and Amor from 1506, is particularly remarkable for its forthright depiction of homoerotic intimacy.

2 Encounters with Dürer, Giorgione and Michelangelo: Venice, Florence and Rome

In 1506, having made his mark as an accomplished engraver in Bologna, Marcantonio Raimondi travelled to Venice, one of the major publishing centres in Europe. The move almost certainly encouraged his commercial ambitions. In Venice he saw Dürer’s Life of the Virgin series of woodcuts for sale and subsequently made engraved copies after the German artist’s designs in partnership with the publishing frm of Niccolò and Domenico dal Jesus. Giorgio Vasari in the second edition of his Lives of the Artists, published more than sixty years later, told contradictory stories about whether Dürer had agreed to Marcantonio producing engraved copies after his work or not. While Marcantonio was based in Venice, the city came under threat from a huge fre in the Arsenale and invasion by forces of the Holy Roman Empire, giving rise to a collective sense of impending disaster. These factors may have inspired one of Marcantonio’s most remarkable engravings, Il Sogno (The Dream of Raphael). After leaving Venice around 1509, Marcantonio appears to have travelled to another important cultural centre, Florence, where he encountered Michelangelo’s

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 5 27/09/2016 13:59 monumental design for The Battle of Cascina. He produced at least two prints demonstrating his interest in Michelangelo’s heroic depiction of the male nude in that work, a theme he revisited in two of the earliest prints after fgures from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

3 Working with Raphael in Rome

Marcantonio Raimondi’s move to Rome demonstrates his ambition to work in close proximity to the greatest living artists of his day and to study celebrated ancient sculptures, many of which had only recently been unearthed. When Marcantonio frst arrived in Rome around 1510, he worked with a slightly older generation of artists including Jacopo Ripanda and Baldassare Peruzzi. Their antiquarian interests matched his own experiences, and they introduced him to important scholars and collectors. Yet, soon Marcantonio entered into a professional relationship with Raphael that would come to defne his career and alter the course of European art. For the frst time, a painter working for a patron as illustrious as the Pope produced designs expressly for the multiple, portable medium of print. Together, Raphael and Marcantonio produced some of the most famous printed images in western art, including The Massacre of the Innocents, Quos Ego, The Plague in Crete (The Morbetto) and The Judgment of Paris. Some of Raphael’s drawings related to these prints are exhibited here alongside Marcantonio’s engravings, allowing unparalleled insight into how Raphael communicated his ideas to the engraver and how the engraver, in turn, translated the artist’s thoughts into print.

4 Antiquity and mythology

Prints played a vital role in broadcasting the rediscovery of antiquities. Some of Marcantonio Raimondi’s best-known prints represent celebrated ancient statues, many of which had recently been unearthed or recovered after centuries of neglect. These sculptures were eagerly collected and displayed by important Roman families and by the Pope, fostering a new appreciation for the physical remains of antiquity. Marcantonio’s ‘followers’ – printmakers who put his methods to practice in their own work – also played an important role in disseminating knowledge of antiquities through print. Many of their prints advertise the locations of the antiquities they represent, whether they were on public view or had

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 6 27/09/2016 13:59 recently been moved into private collections. In some cases, these prints give a sense of setting – a niche, a plinth, a sculpture court or a gallery. In other instances, printmakers appear to enliven their subjects, playing on the life-like properties of ancient sculpture and creating compelling narrative images around them, often based on ancient myths or on important episodes in Roman history.

5 Virtue: antique and Christian

Many of Marcantonio Raimondi’s prints played a role in shaping social values, often fusing humanist learning with Christian piety. In addition to the small, coin-like portraits of the Renaissance popes on view, the prints in this section all present us with moral exemplars in the form of beautiful fgures embodying virtue and devotion. While the Seven Virtues transform a cycle of paintings on the façade of a Roman home into a hand-held guide to human conduct, the Reconciliation of Minerva and Cupid visualizes the unifcation of the opposing forces of chastity and love. One of the examples of that print on display is a proof, an unfnished work, which Marcantonio corrected with the pen before completing his engraving. Poetry, based on a fresco Raphael painted for the same room as his famous School of Athens in the Vatican, shows the literary goddess as both recipient and transmitter of divine enlightenment, foating on clouds and bathed in supernatural light.

6 Faith and devotion

Marcantonio Raimondi’s prints depicting Christian imagery gathered in this section were made in Rome between c.1512-25, and most of them relate in some way to Raphael or other artists linked to him. However, none of Marcantonio’s engravings here can be considered a straightforward ‘reproduction’ of a design by Raphael or another artist in his circle. These prints were made for a variety of purposes, but in every case Marcantonio asserts his own creative aspiration to refashion the sacred image for the multiple medium of engraving. For example, Marcantonio’s take on the Adam and Eve narrative unconventionally casts Adam, rather than Eve, in the role of the tempter; he inserts a prominent palm tree into The Virgin of the Palm Tree to make a clear allusion to the Flight into Egypt narrative; his Virgin and the Cradle mingles gendered domestic moralizing with

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 7 27/09/2016 13:59 sacred imagery; and his changes of technique and supporting details in the second version of the Pietà shift the mood of the image to a darker, more tragic place.

7 I Modi (The Positions)

Erotic scenes were common in the art of ancient Greece and Rome and also existed in the marginalia of medieval illuminated manuscripts, but it was not until the invention of printmaking in the 15th century that sexually explicit images entered into any type of mass circulation in the western world. Because of their compact scale, prints were very suited for erotic depictions that were not thought to be appropriate for public display. With the revival of classical subjects in the Renaissance most erotic imagery was presented in the form of tales from mythology or re-workings of antique sculpture. I Modi (The Positions) was diferent. Giulio Romano, Raphael’s chief assistant from 1515 until the latter’s death in 1520, made a series of drawings depicting couples in diferent sexual positions that were then engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi in c.1524. After seeing the prints, the poet Pietro Aretino wrote sonnets to accompany each position. While Giulio Romano escaped punishment, as his drawn imagery was singular and thus private, the outraged Pope Clement VII sent Marcantonio to jail and ordered that all the prints should be destroyed to prevent them from circulating in the public realm. The destruction was efective, and no complete set of Marcantonio’s engravings is known to survive.

8 After the death of Raphael: Marcantonio and his circle

In the Sack of Rome in 1527, military forces loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V pillaged the city, bringing an end to the frst generation of engravers working from Raphael’s designs. According to Vasari, Marcantonio was rendered penniless following the Sack, and few works can be dated securely to the years after 1527. The publisher Baviera survived unscathed, however, and continued his operation even as many artists went into exile. This period of political and religious uncertainty was characterized by a somewhat diminished status for the Papacy and the spread of Protestantism in northern Europe. These troubled circumstances gave rise to a profusion of new subjects as well as an interest in repeating

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 8 27/09/2016 13:59 earlier compositions, possibly because the original plates had been destroyed. On display here are a selection of prints by Marcantonio and printmakers termed his ‘followers’, who adapted his manner of printmaking while driving a demand for new images, many of them secular in nature.

Playlist of sacred music at the Papal Court of Leo X, 1513-21: 1. Antoine Bruhier, Vivite felices, 2:45 2. Jean Mouton, Nesciens mater Virgo virum, 3:21 3. Adrian Willaert, Virgo gloriosa Christi, 3:12 4. Jean Mouton, In omni tribulatione, 1:31 5. Jean de La Fage, Videns dominum civitatem desolatum, 4:20 6. Jean Mouton, Exalta regina Galliae, 3:01 7. Andreas de Silva, Omnis pulchritudo domini, 4:35 8. Jean Mouton, Per lignum salvi facti sumus, 4:20 9. Heinrich Isaac, Quid retribuam tibi, Leo, 1:54

Playlist of secular music at the Papal Court of Leo X, 1513-21: 1. Francesco da Milano, Ricerar No. 4, 0.53 2. Jean Richafort, De mon triste desplaisir, 1.52 3. Francesco da Milano, Fantasia De mon triste, 2.23 4. Anon, Se mai, per maraveglia, 5.17 5. Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, Recercada, 2.44 6. Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, Lautre yor per un matin, 4.15 7. Pope Leo X, Cela sans plus, 2.42 8. Francesco da Milano, Ricerar No. 10, 1.38 9. Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, O stella maris, 4.34 10. Pope Leo X, Canon di papa Lione X a 3 voci, 1.30 11. Josquin des Prez, Nymphes de bois, 4.32

Sources: 1. The Lion’s Ear: A Tribute to Leo X, La Morra (Ramée, RAM1043, 2016) 2. Vivat Leo! Music for a Medici Pope, Cappella Pratensis, Joshua Rifin (Challenge Classics, CC72366, 2010)

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 9 27/09/2016 13:59 Map of Renaissance Italy

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 10 27/09/2016 13:59 Glossary of terms used in the exhibition texts and labels Attribute An attribute (noun) in art is an object or animal associated with a particular personage. The most common attributes (objects/animals associated with personages) are those of the ancient Greek gods. For example the ancient musical instrument known as a lyre is an attribute of Apollo, god of music and the arts. A bow and arrows and/or a spear, together with hounds, are attributes of the goddess Diana, who was famous as a huntress. She was also goddess of the moon, so often has a crescent in her hair.

Burin A burin is a steel cutting tool which is the essential tool used in engraving. The burin consists of a rounded handle shaped like a mushroom, and a tempered steel shaft, coming from the handle at an angle, and ending in a very sharp cutting face. In use, it is typically held at approximately a 30-degree angle to the sur- face. The index and middle fnger typically guide the shaft, while the han- dle is cradled in the palm.

Cartoon The term cartoon is derived from the Italian word cartone, which means a large sheet of paper. A cartoon is a full size and usually detailed prepara- tion on paper for a painting (in fresco, on canvas or on panel) or a tapestry.

Contrapposto Contrapposto is the Italian word used to describe the way in which the dif- ferent parts of the human body are counterpoised - balanced against each other. An ability to represent this natural tendency was seen as part of the artist’s skill in recording human anatomy in action, a skill much prized dur- ing the Renaissance when interest in anatomy and in the nude increased, especially in Italy.

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 11 27/09/2016 13:59 Engraving A form of intaglio printing in which lines are incised into a metal plate with a carving tool called a burin. The characteristics of burin engraving difer from that of etching in that engraving, requiring considerable force, is done from the strength of the arm and eliminates the quavering autographic qualities of etching, which is done more from the fngertips like fne drawing. The hallmarks of engraving are often elegantly swelling and tapering lines.

Modello A modello (from the Italian; plural, modelli) is a sketch for a painting (or other work of art, especially sculpture) made in the same, or similar, medium. Modelli were usually made to show patrons what the end result would roughly look like, as well as to help artists work out their ideas.

Niello Niello is a black mixture of copper, silver, and lead sulphides, used as an inlay on engraved or etched metal.

Pendentives In architecture, a triangular segment of a spherical surface, flling in the upper corners of a room, in order to form, at the top, a circular support for a dome.

Silverpoint Silverpoint is one of several types of metalpoint used by scribes, craftsmen and artists since ancient times. Metalpoint styli were used for writing on soft surfaces (wax or bark), ruling and underdrawing on parchment, and drawing on prepared paper and panel supports.

State Any stage in the development of a printed image from which impressions are pulled.

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 12 27/09/2016 13:59 Tondo Circular panel paintings (‘tondi’), became popular in Italy about the middle of the 15th century. They had earlier been favoured in French art. The word derives from ‘rotondo’, the Italian for circular.

Woodcut A relief print is usually carved in the plank grain of a piece of wood. After the relief image has been carved in the plank with knives or gouges it is inked with a dauber or roller. It can then be printed by hand (in which case a sheet of paper is laid down on the inked plank and rubbed from the back with a smooth surface such as the palm of the hand or a wooden spoon) or with the help of a mechanical press.

Sources http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/collection/print/glossary.shtml http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/printmaking-glossary.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/glossary/ http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/ https://www.britannica.com/technology/

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 13 27/09/2016 13:59 Acknowledgements

This is the frst exhibition to focus on Marcantonio Raimondi’s whole career in thirty-fve years and the frst ever in the UK. Dr. Edward H. Wouk, Lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies at The University of Manchester and David Morris, Head of Collections at the Whitworth, The University of Manchester curated the exhibition.

The generosity of the following lenders has made this exhibition possible and the Whitworth, The University of Manchester would like to ofer grateful thanks to them all:

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford British Museum, London Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester Leeds Museums and Art Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) Liverpool Libraries and Information Services Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University The Royal Collection / Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Victoria and Albert Museum, London Professor Henri Zerner

This exhibition has been made possible by the provision of insurance through the Government Indemnity Scheme. The Hayward Gallery would like to thank HM Government for providing Government Indemnity and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England for arranging the indemnity.

Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 14 27/09/2016 13:59 Marcantonio LARGE PRINT guide A4.indd 15 27/09/2016 13:59 manchester.ac.uk/whitworth

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