Building on recent scholarship that has revealed the degree to which the printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi was not a simple copyist but an independently minded artist, Lisa Pon’s book, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, argues that his works are products of collaboration: among the engraver, the inventor, and the publisher on the one hand, and between the viewer and the image on the other. Pon situates Marcantonio’s engravings against the rise during the sixteenth century of what she describes as the “artist-author”—celebrated most memorably in Giorgio Vasari’s description of Michelangelo’s heroic single-handed paintings of the Sistine Ceiling—and contends that Marcantonio’s engravings confront and challenge the idea of the inventor as the work of art’s sole creator of meaning. Relying on the language of semiotics and the poststructuralist literary criticism of Roland Barthes, the author views prints through the lens of signs and signifiers and compares the way Marcantonio’s prints functioned to “a permutation of texts, an intertextuality” (5). As she points out, issues of text and image seem particularly well suited to the medium of prints, not least because of their close ties to printed texts. An engraving like Giulio Bonasone’s Judith Leaving the Tent of Holofernes after Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, which not only announces the work’s painter, engraver, and publisher but also provides a poem to explain its subject, is explicitly concerned with both visual and textual quotation.

The first chapter, entitled “Framing Marcantonio Raimondi’s Prints,” serves to contextualize Marcantonio’s printmaking project. Pon revisits well-known territory in her discussion of the impact the multiplication of texts had on the exchange of information, but she offers new ideas for thinking about Marcantonio’s art by positioning it within a larger tradition of copying. The devices used for replication included the time-honored techniques of spolvero, pricking a design with a needle and dusting charcoal through the perforations, and calco, tracing a design with enough pressure to impress an image on a surface beneath. By these means artists transferred drawings from one medium to another. As Pon also shows with two interesting examples from the J. Paul Getty Museum, these techniques could also be applied to printed designs. Comparing the replication of printed images to the pecia system, a method of book production designed in the High Middle Ages to increase the manufacture of textually accurate manuscripts, she concludes not only that the Renaissance was able to produce greater quantities of copies, but also that it was a culture “obsessed with copying.” The chapter concludes with an instructive and well-documented discussion of the history of the idea of the reproductive print, which the author traces to nineteenth-century prejudices about photography. Following Evelina Borea and Michael Bury, Pon also proposes the term “translation” as a more appropriate term for prints that are generally termed “reproductive,” reflecting her inclination to see prints as kind of text.

The title of the second chapter, “Aldus Manutius’s Venice,” suggests somewhat misleadingly that the Venetian book publisher will be its focus. The chapter’s main contribution, however, is not a study of Manutius, who, as Pon herself points out, had virtually ceased book production when Marcantonio arrived in Venice, but rather an examination of the series of collaborations in which Marcantonio was involved, which took place between Marcantonio and the publishing house of Niccolò and Domenico dal Jesus. Pon offers a fascinating new account of one of the better-known stories of Marcantonio’s career, that of his infamous copies of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut series of the Life of the Virgin. Generally treated as the first counterfeit lawsuit in the history of art, most scholars have focused their attention on the consequences of Marcantonio’s application of Dürer’s monogram to his prints and have failed to examine the images themselves. Studying the inscriptions on Marcantonio’s print of the Glorification of the Virgin, Pon discovers that Niccolò and Domenico dal Jesus published the series in association with the Gesuati, a lay order that was deeply invested in the didactic power of books. What emerges from Pon’s study of Marcantonio’s copies after Dürer is not an instance of Marcantonio’s lack of judgment in presuming to replicate the work of another artist, but rather an interesting example of the way in which local Venetian conventions of book publishing, which considered the adoption of another artist’s images unproblematic, clashed with Dürer’s own well-developed sense of authorship.

The third chapter considers how the act of signing reflects the emerging sense of authorship in early-sixteenth-century prints. Prints differ from paintings and sculpture in that they regularly announce the range of artists or artisans who were involved in their execution. At the time Marcantonio was making his prints, however, many of the conventions for acknowledging this responsibility were still being worked out, and Pon attends to the range of possibilities for registering not only who did what and how this was represented, but also, paradoxically, how signatures could express authorial absence. Marcantonio employed a number of different signatures, including variations on MAR-ANT, MA, and MAF, as well as the ever-intriguing puzzle of the blank tablet with which he “signed” a number of his works. Scholars have proffered an array of interpretations: that the tablet reflects the engraver’s sense of his mission as a reproductive artist (namely the complete erasure of his artistic identity) or that it represents Marcantonio’s school more broadly. Pon offers a new theory, speculating that the tablet may be the device of il Baviera, the person who oversaw the publishing of the prints, and she compares the rectangular shape of the tablet to the wax tablets on which workshop assistants practiced drawing.

What Pon does not point out, however, is that tablets, even empty tablets, are not unique to Marcantonio and his followers. A range of Italian artists, including Antonio Pollaiuolo, Nicoletto da Modena, Cristofano Robetta, and Jacopo de Barberi, placed their signatures or monograms on such supports. Given the presence of similar devices elsewhere and the fact that Marcantonio’s copies of Dürer’s Small Woodcut Passion predate his involvement with il Baviera, the association of the tablet with the publisher seems inconclusive, suggesting the need for further research into the function of related tablets in the works of other late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century printmakers.

Chapter 4 offers a stimulating account of another of Marcantonio’s collaborations, this time with Raphael; Pon examines Raphael’s habits as a graphic artist as a means of explaining his interest in having Marcantonio make prints after his designs. Though Pon agrees with the common view that prints were a useful way of broadcasting the artist’s inventions, she suggests that Raphael’s own use of cut-and-paste techniques, of counterproofs, and of drawing with a blind stylus—which she likens to the burin cutting into the plate—offers further evidence for why the artist might have decided to work with Marcantonio. It is an intriguing and original idea that the compatibility between the artists’ graphic means explains why Raphael was interested in collaborating with Marcantonio. Yet, given the ubiquity of these methods—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Fra Bartolomeo, among others, used them too—one wonders whether a more simple rationalization for the painter’s use of these techniques might not be found in the challenges of running a large and active workshop with a significant number of papal commissions. As Pon herself says, Raphael was arguably the busiest artist of his time. A more obvious explanation of these practices, therefore, was that Raphael was concerned with economizing his labor, and with eliminating the need for redrawing. The chapter concludes with an innovative study, using digital photography, of the drawings related to Marcantonio’s Massacre of the Innocents, but Pon brings us no closer to disentangling the problem of deciding which drawings proceed which, or of the collaborative arrangements between painter and printmaker.

The last chapter deals with Vasari’s account of Marcantonio and with the attitudes toward prints that his account engenders. Incorporated into a work entitled the Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vasari’s Life of Marcantonio is singular in addressing the topic of prints. An anomaly within the Lives, comparable, as Walter Melion has pointed out, only to that of the gem engraver Valerio Vicentino, the Life of Marcantonio was not included in the first 1550 edition of the Lives but was added to that of 1568. Though Pon does not elaborate on the connections between the two lives, the parallels between them are suggestive. Both deal with intagliatori (engravers), pointing toward Vasari’s sense of the relationship between the two lives as one between artists who incised their works. Yet, whereas gem engraving had its roots in antiquity, printmaking was a new art, the invention of which, as Pon points out, Vasari falsely attributed to Maso Finiguerra. The Life of Marcantonio, as the author notes, is riddled with tensions and inaccuracies, symptoms of the challenges its author faced in accommodating prints to the larger project of the Lives. Studying not only the differences between the 1550 and 1568 editions of the Lives but also those that existed between the lives of Raphael and Marcantonio, Pon convincingly shows how Vasari pursued a different agenda in each, celebrating Raphael as the great artist-author and Marcantonio as part of a larger tradition of printmakers, both North and South.

The five chapters that constitute this book are further subdivided into minichapters, resulting in a rather fractured account of both Marcantonio and the Renaissance culture of copying. As the title of the book suggests, this is not a traditional monograph. Indeed, while Marcantonio is the protagonist of the book, Pon’s underlying argument is that reproductive prints, because they are products of collaboration, challenge the dominance of the single authorial voice. Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi is a welcome addition to the literature on prints that is being published by Yale University Press. This study of Marcantonio’s partnerships and reception offers much food for thought and promises to enliven future discussions of print culture in sixteenth-century Italy.