Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi - Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print

In early sixteenth-century Italy, works of art came to be understood as unique objects made by individuals of genius, giving rise to a new sense of the artist as the author - both originator and owner - of his images. At the same time, the practice of engraving, a medium that produced multiple printed images via collaborative processes, rapidly developed. In this book, Lisa Pon examines how images passed between artists - across media, geographic boundaries, and time - and considers how printing techniques affected the authorship of images.
Pon focuses on encounters between the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and three key artists, describing how Marcantonio copied Albrecht Dürer's woodcuts, collaborated with Raphael to create printed masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, and was featured in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. She demonstrates various ways the tensions between possessive authorship and practical collaboration in the visual arts arose and were played out; in the collision between legitimate copying and artistic originality; in the parallels between the hand-drawn trace and the printed line; and in the consideration of printmakers within a series of artists' biographies.
Provocative and lucidly written; this book reframes the analysis of both the production of prints and the relation between printmaker and artist during a crucial period in European art.