PRESCRIBED WORKS OF ART 2023/24
“Being small, transportable, and relatively inexpensive to produce, the print by its very nature had a kind of autonomy that needed to forge a context for itself. In order to do this, prints had either to depend upon existing interests or to generate an interest of their own, a simple condition of any market that does not depend upon a bespoke relationship between maker and patron.”
David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Print in Italy: 1470 – 1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 64
On Mantegna’s prints, Evelyn Lincoln writes: “An engraved image realised in masses of parallel lines would be closest, in appearance, to a pen and ink drawings than to any other kind of image, and a drawing in pen and ink lines, without wash or other coloring of any sort, would be most like a sketch for a finished work in another medium.”
© POLITICS, ART AND CULTURE IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE: VENICE AND FLORENCE – CATALOGUE OF WORKS OF ART | 2023/24