The Transmission of Fame: Italian Renaissance Prints

The Transmission of Fame celebrates designs after sixteenth-century artists including Michelangelo, Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Rosso Fiorentino. Italian Renaissance printmakers spread the works of these masters throughout Europe. In fact, prints became closely associated with the idea of fame, announcing to the world that an artist was truly a master if a print had been made after his work. For the first time, there was a movement to “translate” the designs of famous artists using the relief method of woodblock printing and intaglio methods of engraving or etching on copper plates. This exhibition presents most of the sixteenth-century Italian prints in the collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.