RAIMONDI, MARCANTONIO

Marcantonio Raimondi, the most prolific engraver of sixteenth-century Italy, is remembered for his reproductions of the later works of Raphael.* In his native Bologna Raimondi learned niellowork from the painter and goldsmith Francesco Francia and then took up copper engraving, copying paintings of contemporar­ies. By 1504 his skill was acknowledged in Viridario by his fellow Bolognese, Giovanni Philoteo Achillini, who is assumed to be the subject of Raimondi's early print of his own design, The Guitar Player.

In Venice (c. 1505-09) Raimondi was employed in the De Jesu brothers' workshop, where he transposed Albrecht Dürer's* woodcuts of the Life of the Virgin into copper engravings, a practice about which Dürer complained in per­son to the Venetian Senate in 1506.Stylistically, Raimondi learned Dürer's system of crosshatching, which he adapted to his own technique. Giorgione's Tempesta may have influenced a curious engraving titled Raphael's Dream, whose nightmare imagery recalls that of Hieronymus Bosch.

In 1508 or 1509, in Florence and en route to Rome, Raimondi saw the cartoons for Michelangelo's* lost Battle of Cascina and The Bathers, which pro­vided models for future engravings. In Rome his technique matured. Baldassare Peruzzi's* paintings inspired engravings on the Third Punic War and Orpheus and Euridice. Most important was Raimondi's close affiliation with Raphael, whom he convinced of his abilities with an incised study, Lucrezia (1511-12). Raimondi's Lucrezia exemplifies his preference for the human figure set against classical architectonic elements rather than landscape settings, which here are simply borrowed from Lucas van Leyden.* Lucrezia herself imitates the twisted human torsos in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura and may be directly related to an antique statue excavated in Rome in 1500.

While the precise dynamics of Raimondi's collaboration with Raphael have proven difficult to reconstruct, it is clear that he worked from the painter's drawings to reproduce the effects of chiaroscuro and night light for the first time in prints. The most important engravings based on Raphael are Morbetto, The Massacre ofthe Innocents, The Judgment of Paris, and Apollo and the Muses. Raimondi incised a full-figure portrait of Raphael himself, who, in turn, included the engraver's likeness in the fresco The Expulsion of Heliodorus in the Vatican alongside his own as a bearer of Pope Julius II's* gestatorial chair. After Raph­ael's death in 1520, Raimondi associated with Baccio Bandinelli* and Giulio Romano.* Reproduction of the latter's sketches to illustrate Pietro Aretino's* pornographic sonnets, I modi, resulted in Raimondi's imprisonment by the pope. Thanks to Bandinelli, he was released to copy the mannerist Martyrdom of St. Lawrence. Marcantonio's good fortune ended with the sack of Rome in 1527, after which he returned to his native Bologna, where he died poor and in ob­scurity.

L. Lawner, ed. and trans., I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album ofthe Italian Renaissance: Giulio Romano, Marcantonio Raimondi, Pietro Aretino, and Count Jean-Frederic-Maximilian de Waldeck, 1988.

I. H. Shoemaker and E. Broun, The Engravings ofMarcantonio Raimondi, 1981.