Prints in Translation, 1450–1750
Image, Materiality, Space
Visual Culture in Early Modernity Series

Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.

Contents

List of Figures
Preface
Notes on Contributors
Abbreviations

1 Toward an Anthropology of Print
Edward Wouk

2 From Print to Paint and Back Again: Painting Practices and Print Culture in Early Modern Antwerp
Alexandra Onuf

3 Prints as Paintings: Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611–1693) and Dutch Pen Painting circa 1650–65
Lelia Packer

4 Between Paper and Sword: Daniel Hopfer and the Translation of Etching in Reformation Augsburg
Freyda Spira

5 Hunting Erotica: Print Culture and a Seventeenth-Century Rifle in the Collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
Jonathan Tavares

6 Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods: the Material and Thematic Interaction of Print and Sculpture
Patricia Simons

7 Making Time and Space: Collecting Early Modern Printed Instruments
Suzanne Karr Schmidt

8 The State of the Fashion Plate, circa 1727: Historicizing Fashion Between ‘Dressed Prints’ and Dezallier’s Recueils
David Pullins

9 The Concettismo of Triumph: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V and Remembering Spanish Omnipotence in a late Sixteenth-Century Writing Cabinet
Arthur J. DiFuria

10 St. Michael the Archangel: Spiritual, Visual and Material Translations from Antwerp to Lima
Stephanie Porras

11 Lines of Perception: European Prints and the Mughal Kitābkhāna
Yael Rice

Bibliography

Index

Suzanne Karr Schmidt is George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.

Edward H. Wouk is Lecturer in European Art, 1400–1800, at The University of Manchester, UK.