Prints Drawings 15C-19C

Chair: Cheryl Snay, csnay@nd.edu

European and American Prints and Drawings, 15th–19th Centuries

How We Talk About (Older) Drawings: Rediscovery in the Face of Destruction: Archaeology and the Graphic Arts in Renaissance Italy

Victoria Sancho-Lobis, Director

Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College

victoriasancho.lobis@pomona.edu

Departing from a consideration of the recently realized exhibition Rubens, Rembrandt, and Drawing in the Golden Age, presented at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019–2020, this paper considers recent strategies for interpreting early modern and nineteenth-century drawings. The following questions will be explored: What kinds of scientific analysis can be brought to bear on an interpretation of drawings? How can we make the practice of connoisseurship more accessible and transparent? How can we more thoroughly embrace a study of drawings as an independent form of artistic expression? What types of narrative history can be written through an examination of drawings on their own terms? These questions will be considered through a series of case studies. Without providing prescriptive solutions to these challenges, this paper hopes to inspire further consideration of the broad interpretative potential made possible through rigorous study of early modern and nineteenth-century drawings.

Recuperating the Past through Print: Sixteenth-Century Engravings of Imagined Antiquities

Kylie Fisher

Visiting Professor, Furman University

kylie.fisher@furman.edu

In recounting the 1527 Sack of Rome when many antiquities were looted, damaged, and destroyed, the poet Antonio Tebaldeo warned, “if you come back, you will find Rome un-made.” As a result of the physical and psychological devastation caused by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s army, anxiety grew about the city’s capability to preserve the artistic remains of its illustrious antique past and subsequently maintain its stature as caput mundi (“capital of the world”). Once fertile ground for the discovery and display of antiquities, Rome lay barren in this regard, leaving inhabitants who longed to connect with the historical past to do so through other visual means. Printmakers in early sixteenth- century Rome capitalized on the desire among local antiquarians to cultivate a kind of spiritual bond with the ancient city by inventing antiquities in print. This paper examines three engraving series by Agostino Veneziano, Leonardo da Udine, and Enea Vico of all’antica vases and ewers from the 1530s and 40s to demonstrate how prints of pseudo-antiquities provided viewers the opportunity to conceptually possess the past, and in turn, immortalize the ethos of antiquity in their memories. Through their classicizing ornamentation, placement within illusionistic spaces, and accompanying inscriptions, this paper suggests that the objects in the engravings were offered as examples of plausible fiction, that is antiquities believed to have once existed in pre-Sack Rome. I argue that such prints allowed local collectors to recuperate a lost—even if imagined—past, thereby contributing to Rome’s mythmaking as the “Eternal City.”

A Changing Artistic Vision: Édouard Manet's Experimentations with Aquatint

Elissa Watters

USC, PhD candidate

watters.elissa@gmail.com

During his initial work in printmaking in the early 1860s, Édouard Manet focused primarily on etching. By the mid-1860s, however, aquatint appeared in nearly all Manet’s intaglio prints. Employing a variety of aquatint techniques, Manet introduced a range of tones and diverse textures to his printed images. The resulting visual effects offer a sense of the painterly hand and foreshadow the intense tonal contrasts and highly textured surfaces of Manet’s later paintings, particularly of the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Manet’s experimentation in print indicates that he viewed printmaking as not just a means of reproduction but also a mode of original artistic production. This paper examines the types of aquatint used in three of Manet’s intaglio prints: Mlle. Victorine in the Costume of an “Espada,” The Absinthe Drinker, and At the Prado. Close study of various states and impressions of these prints shows Manet’s willingness to try new techniques and take risks, sometimes with success and sometimes not, as one rare extant proof of The Absinthe Drinker suggests.

Considering these prints alongside related drawn studies and finished paintings, this paper reveals how working across media fundamentally shaped Manet’s artistic practice. Variations in tone and texture not only demonstrate the appearance of the painterly in print but also forecast the emergence of the printerly in paint. The direct relation between Manet’s experimentation with aquatint and the development of his painting practice places printmaking at the center of the narrative of the rise of the artistic movement known today as Impressionism.