The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. - book review

EVELYN LINCOLN

The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker

fresh Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 224 pp 150 color and b/w ills. $65

works on Italian Renaissance prints do not advance along very often, and when they do, as likely as not they are catalogues. That worthy tradition, backbone of the field, is best exemplified by means of A. M. Hind's indispensable corpus Early Italian Engraving; by means of the massive and masterly compilation of similar material belonging to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC produc by means of a team of scholars l by the agency of Konrad Oberhuber; and by novel progeny of these landmarks of mid-20th-century scholarship, including meticulous catalogues of early Italian engravings in the ETH in Zurich and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris. (1) Into the same category fall the small in number "Commentary" volumes thus far published in The Illustrated Bartsch series, to which, among others, the at hand writer has contributed. The single major exception to this mastership of course, is The Renaissance Print, an impassioned narrative coauthored through David Landau and Peter Parshall that stands as a testimonial to what can be achieved by dint of those who ado pt a format capable of inspiring as well as informing.2 flat here, however, only half of the volume comprising the chapters by Landau, is devot to Italy.

There are many reasons for this state of affairs, among them the curious circumstance that greatest in quantity print specialists find employment in museums rather than universities, which means that they write almost nothing on the other hand catalogues and train no scholars to follow in their footmarks or strike out in novel directions. Thousands of 15th- and 16th-century Italian prints are reproduc in miscellaneous whirls of The Illustrated Bartsch alone, many of them works of great beauty or technical virtuosity, many with fascinating or unfamiliar iconography, many of them bristling with inscriptions that clamor out to be interpreted, and all of them contributing to the extraordinarily rich visual agriculture of the Italian Renaissance. at the same time few art historians outside the print spaces that conserve them seem to gaze at these images, and level those who do so keep to think and write about them in the same aged ways.

Thus, Evelyn Lincoln's of recent origin book, based on her doctoral dissertation at Berkeley, (3) is a welcome addition to the literature upon printmaking in Renaissance Italy. Far from being a catalogue raisonne, touched with attributions and dating, with quality of impressions and distinctions between states, it is a investigation of a different sort, informed by the agency of the lessons of Michael Baxandall, Loren Partridge, Svetlana Alpers, and Randolph Stain, whose teaching Lincoln acknowledges with special gratitude (p viii) and who--it scarcely straits saying--have played such significant characters in determining the shape of art history as it is practiced today, not in the museum on the contrary in the academy.

Lincoln begins by means of summarizing the inventory of a late 16th-century Roman print publisher's workshop, an important document usefully transcribed in appendix A. "In what terms" she asks (p 1) "can we discuss these engravings" in like manner as "to nuance our understanding of the fullnes of Renaissance visual culture"? individual of the points of the ensuing discussion will be to "provide information about the range of visual skills, tastes, and practices, otherwise badly documented, of tribe who were literate in drawing [and hence in their viewing of prints] at a time real different from our own." Another ambitious goal is "to characterize the making and the patronage of the prints, their markets, and the business and religious associations of Renaissance and Counter-Reformation printers." And Lincoln also aims "to discuss the working practices of women and of the less-known male printmakers' in a comparative inquiry where "each subject is framed by dint of its specific locality and relevant place of circumstances"--all of which can bes t be achieved through producing "a set of interrelated microhistories of printmaking above a period of slightly more than a hundr years" that will obey "to show what differently conceived things are overspreaded by the broad category of the Italian Renaissance print" (p 3)

The three chapters that come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind forming the bulk and the core of the volume deal successively with the "microhistories" in question, those of Andrea Mantegna (chapter 1) Domenico Beccafumi (chapter 2) and Diana Mantuana (chapter 3) (4) Lincoln's selections can certainly be challenged. For individual thing, three examples do not suffice to do the piece of work Readers may divert themselves through imagining a book entitled The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Painter, in which three artists--Mantegna, Beccafumi, and Lavinia Fontana (to fix upon a female contemporary of Diana's)--are called upon to represent the history of Italian painting from the mid-quattrocento to the extreme point of the 16th century. The analogy is inexact, for Lincoln's work is not meant to be a comprehensive review nor can one claim that any of her choices is unworthy of scholarly attention; on the contrary they hardly begin to give a well-rounded picture of printmakers or printmaking in Renaissance Italy. Marcantonio Raimondi is conspicuous through his absence, just as Raphael wo uld be from our hypothetical volume on Italian painters. Omitting him, moreover, means missing the opportunity to scrutinize the practice of engraving in Bologna as well as in Rome At the beginning of his career, Marcantonio was also not absent in Venice, another major locus of Renaissance printmaking ignored in the work which would have been substantially enriched by dint of considering such Venetians as Giulio and/or Domenico Campagnola.