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Spaightwood Galleries
Marcantonio Raimondi (Italian, c. 1480-c. 1527): Engravings after Durer's Small Woodcut Passion
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Marcantonio was the object of one of the earliest suits by an artist against those appropriating his work as their own. As Vasari tells it in his Lives of the Artists, Marcantonio discovered a set of Albrecht Dürer's Small Woodcut Passion in Venice, spent all of his money to purchase it, and proceeded, much to Vasari's disgust, to make engraved copies of each the pieces including Dürer's monogram. (Vasari makes it clear that he thinks everyone ought to be imitating Italians, not vice versa.) Dürer made a trip to Venice and complained to the Senate that Marcantonio was stealing his work and misrepresenting it (since Dürer had made woodcuts, not engravings). The Senate decided that since the images belonged to all of Christianity, Dürer could not claim ownership, but that his name belonged to him, and so it ordered Marcantonio not to use Dürer's monogram in his own works. Vasari seems to have gotten some of the detail s wrong—it was Dürer's Life of the Virgin that Marcantonio was publishing with Dürer's monogram, not his Small Woodcut Passion, which is never found in Marcantonio's engravings with the monogram—but the mistake is understandable, since Marcantonio did subsequently make engraved copies of the Small Woodcut Passion as well.
After leaving Venice, Marcantonio went first to Florence, then on to Rome, which became his home and where he found success working with Raphael as the head of a workshop of engravers (including Marco Dente da Ravenna and Agostino dei Musi (called Agostine Veneziano) whose copies made Raphael's work known through Europe. After Raphael's death from the plague in 1520, Marcantonio continued to work with the surviving members of Raphael's studio until the Sack of Rome in 1527, during which, according to Vasari, Marcantonio was taken prisoner and forced to sell everything he owned to ransom himself. Although his actual date of death, like his birthdate, is unknown, none of his works can be dated after 1527, and it is presumed that his death probably occurred soon after he was released from captivity.
Bibliography: There are volumes in The Illustrated Bartsch devoted to the work of Marcantonio and his followers. See also Innis H. Shoemaker and Elizabeth Broun, The Engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi (Lawrence KS: Spencer Museum of Art, 1981), the catalogue of a show that travelled from the Spencer Museum of Art to The Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina.
In the pages that follow, we are happy to present Marcantonio's engravings after Dürer's Small Woodcut Passion. All are in generally good condition, all generally have either thread margins or are cut on or just within the platemark. The reproductive process has made them look both less sharp and more uniform in tone than they are: the plates represent typical early sixteenth-century aesthetics: clear but light (with a very few specified exceptions which are more richly printed]. All are available for purchase on a satisfaction-guaranteed basis. As one of the most important of the early 16th-century Italian engravers and a pioneer in running a large workshop that put itself at the service of one of the great painting master's of all time, Marcantonio anticipates the great master printers of our own times like Stanley William Hayter and Kenneth Tyler. He is also a great engraver in his own right. At the moment, his prints are drastically undervalued, but we feel that his work needs to be known to understand the traffic in images in the Renaissance. We reserve the right to raise prices with no advance notice.
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The Fall of Man (Bartsch 586 iii/iii). Engraving after Dürer's Small Woodcut Passion, c. 1512. Good impression on laid paper with thread margins. "1" in cartouche. Image size: 127x99mm. Price: $1500.
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The Expulsion from Paradise (Bartsch 587 i/iii). Engraving after Dürer's Small Woodcut Passion, c. 1512. Good impression on laid paper with thread margins. Cartouche empty, no number at bottom of print. Image size: 126x99mm. Price: $1500.
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The Annunciation (Bartsch 588 ii/iii). Engraving after Dürer's Small Woodcut Passion, c. 1512. Good impression on laid paper with thread margins. Cartouche empty, numbered "3" and "4" at bottom of print. Repaired paper loss at lower left margin. Image size: 123x99mm. Price: $1075.
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The Nativity (Bartsch 589 iii/iii). Engraving after Dürer's Small Woodcut Passion, c. 1512. Good impression on laid paper with thread margins. "5" in Cartouche, "4" lower right at bottom of print. Image size: 125x97mm. Price: $1500.
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Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.
To purchase, call us at 1-800-809-3343 (508-529-2511 in Upton MA & vicinity) or send an email to sptwd@verizon.net. We accept AmericanExpress, DiscoverCard, MasterCard, and Visa.
Spaightwood Galleries is located at 120 Main St (aka Highway 140) in Upton MA at the corner of Main St and Maple Ave in a rehabilitated Unitarian Church. For directions and visiting information, please call. We are, of course, always available over the web and by telephone (see above for contact information). Click the following for links to past shows and artists. For a visual tour of the gallery, please click here. For information about Andy Weiner and Sonja Hansard-Weiner, please click here. For a list of special offers currently available, see Specials.
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Visiting hours: flexible. Call for availability. Browsers and guests are welcome.
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