printing beyond boundaries: the use of northern prints in

1 Luke Syson, “Zanetto Bugatto, court portraitist in Sforza Milan,” Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1118 (May 1996): 300-308; Evelyn Welch, Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 248.

2 Mark Evans, “German prints and Milanese miniatures; influences on—and from—Giovan Pietro Birago,” Apollo 153 (March 2001): 5. Evans has identified several manuscript illuminations by Giovan Pietro da Birago in the Sforza Book of Hours (c. 1486-1494) that were derived from engravings by Martin Schongauer.

3 Within the last few years, several scholars have begun to reconsider Milan and Lombardy’s place within the discourse of exchange with the north. See Frédéric Elsig and Claudia Gaggetta, eds., Cultura oltremontana in Lombardia al tempo degli Sforza (1450-1535), Studi Lombardi 7 (Rome: Viella, 2014); Frédéric Elsig and Mauro Natale, eds., Le duché de Milan et les commanditaires français (1499-1521) (Rome: Viella, 2013).

4 Giovanni Maria Fara, Albrecht Dürer: originali, copie, derivazioni (Flor-ence: L.S. Olschki, 2007); Vorbild Dürer: Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte Albrecht Dürers im Spiegel der europäischen Druckgraphik des 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1978).

5 David Freedberg, “Prints and the Status of Image in Flanders,” in Le stampe e la diffusione delle immagini e degli stili, ed. Henri Zerner, International Congress of the History of Art, 24 (Bologna: Editrice CLUEB, 1983), 39. Also see Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, eds. Burke and R. Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9-10; John Shearman, “Imitation, and the Slow Fuse,” in Only Connect…: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 233.

6 Henri Zerner, “Introduction,” in Le stampe e la diffusione delle im-magini e degli stili (Bologna, 1983), 4.

Printing Beyond Boundaries: The Use of Northern Prints in Renaissance Milan

Devon Baker

By the late fifteenth century, at the height of Sforza power, Milan was a bustling urban center that had important geo-graphical, political and mercantile ties not only to other major cities on the peninsula, but also to France and the Holy Ro-man Empire. These instances of north-south diplomatic and economic exchange subsequently had a significant impact on artistic production. In 1460, Francesco Sforza sent their court artist, Zanetto Bugatto, to Brussels to study the art of portraiture with the Flemish master, Rogier van der Weyden.1 Skilled craftsmen north of the Alps traveled south to work in the city as masons and stained-glass designers for the Milan Cathedral, and as goldsmiths and book printers, resulting in the appropriation of northern motifs and subjects in the art and architecture of the duchy and greater Lombardy. Although the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci and Donato Bramante arguably shaped the landscape of the court city well into the sixteenth century, northern artists and crafts-men similarly affected the artistic environment throughout Lombardy. Prints by northern artists found their way into Milan, particularly those by Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden, facilitated by the portability of the medium.2 Several printmakers active in Milan—Zoan Andrea, Master of 1515, and Giovanni Battista Palumba —incorporated motifs, subjects and techniques into their work derived from these northern artists, complicating the dynamics of Lombardy’s artistic networks and expanding their boundaries beyond the narrative of Leonardo.3

Although scholars have been diligent in identifying in-stances of quotations or borrowings from artists like Dürer by other artists, their comparative examples often are an index

of surface observations without providing the overarching meaning behind these citations.4 David Freedberg noted that merely comparing surface transmissions of style is not useful, but that it “receives its justification from the consideration of its purpose.”5 This paper builds on these facile observa-tions to consider the motive behind such reiterations and reinterpretations as acts of insightful commentary on artistic imitation and translation. What might be learned from a close study of Milanese prints about the reception and transmis-sion of artistic knowledge? In what ways did the north-south exchange of ideas and styles stimulate or complicate the artistic environment of Milan? How did prints actively shape and respond to the expectations of the market and interests of a changing court culture?

This paper focuses on three different case studies in which the circulation of northern motifs and ideas were used systematically by Lombard printmakers as visual vocabular-ies from which to pull, either wholly or selectively, while in more complex instances, a different form of translation was required—translating the northern references into a local idiom, making it suitable for Lombard viewers. By examining these connections and expanding the boundaries, one can better understand the agency of printmaking as a source for theorizing about art and representation during the early mod-ern period in order to deepen the current trends in scholar-ship that are revisiting notions of north-south exchange as part of the larger Renaissance discourse.6

Zoan Andrea—sometimes identified by scholars as Giovanni Antonio da Brescia—arrived in Milan during the last decade of the fifteenth century and remained active in

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athanor xxxiv devon baker

7 The debate about the identities of Zoan Andrea and Giovanni Antonio da Brescia are too intricate and complex to be discussed in the scope of this paper. See Suzanne Boorsch and David Landau’s contributions in Andrea Mantegna, ed. Jane Martineau (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; London: Royal Academy of Arts: 1992); Patricia Emison, “The Raucousness of Mantegna’s Mythological Engravings,” Gazette des beaux-arts 6 (1994): 159-76; Verge Segre, “Introduzione,” in Andrea Mantegna: e l’incisione italiana del Rinascimento nelle col-lezioni dei Musei civici di Pavia, ed. Saverio Lomartire (Milan: Electa, 2003), 23-25.

8 Gisèle Lambert, Les Premières gravures italiennes, Quattrocento-début du Cinquecento, Inventaire da la collection du département des Es-tampes et de la Photographie (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1999), 242-59.

9 Giulia Bartrum, et al., Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (London: British Museum, 2002); Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

10 Hans Rupprich, “Willibald Pirckheimer: A Study of His Personality as a Scholar,” in Pre-Reformation Germany, ed. Gerald Strauss (London: Macmillan, 1972), 388-91.

11 Joseph Koerner, “Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-Century Influenza,” in Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, 18-38.

12 Lambert, Les Premières gravures italiennes, 242-59.

13 Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

14 Lambert, Les Premières gravures italiennes, 278-81.

15 Peter Burke, “Decentering the Italian Renaissance: the Challenge of Postmodernism,” in At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy, ed. Peter Burke and Stephen J. Milner (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 41.

16 Early twentieth-century scholars identified him as a German print-maker, even associating him with the Vischer family of sculptors in Nuremberg. See K. Simon, “Der Meister von 1515=Hermann Vischer?” in Italien Studien (Leipzig: K.W. Hiersemann, 1929), 123-37; Arthur M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving (1948; repr. Nendeln; Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1970), 5:279-82; Peter Dreyer and Matthias Winner, “Der Meister von 1515 und das Bambaja-Skizzenbuch in Berlin,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 6 (1964): 53-94.

the city for the remainder of his career through the 1520s.7 Though his chronology is difficult to pin down, it is believed that he worked as an engraver in Mantua around 1475, producing prints after designs by the court artist, Andrea Mantegna (Figure 1). When Zoan Andrea arrived in Milan, he made several engravings after drawings attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and his followers. Whereas the prints after Mantegna’s designs employed diagonal, parallel hatching lines and hard contours, the prints after Leonardo reflected an interest in light and shadow with soft contours of form. Thus, a technical shift in Zoan Andrea’s working method oc-curred upon his move to Milan, which reflected the demand for Leonardo’s aesthetic and designs.

It was also in Milan when he began to recognize the popularity of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings and woodcuts and reproduced five of his prints, including St. Jerome Penitent in the Wilderness (Figures 2 and 3).8 As a printmaker, Dürer was known as the “Apelles of the black line,” who pushed the boundaries of printmaking and achieved new levels of texture, form and movement through the intricate lines in his engravings and woodcuts.9 His prints were highly regarded on both sides of the Alps by collectors and artists alike. Northern merchants and artists likely brought Dürer’s prints into Milan and the surrounding towns, cultivating a new market base and demand for his work. Furthermore, the University of Pavia, located approximately twenty-two miles south of Milan, had a large number of students from German-speaking towns, including Dürer’s dear friend, Willibald Pirckheimer, who studied law at the University from 1491 to 1495.10 Zoan Andrea, wanting to capitalize on the so-called “Dürer influenza,”—borrowing a term from Joseph Koerner—responded by evolving his graphic style once again, building on his technical knowledge in order to reproduce the intricacies of Dürer’s models for the Milanese and Lombard collectors.11

The five reproductive engravings by Zoan Andrea were executed by Dürer between 1497 and 1503, providing schol-ars with the terminus post quem for Zoan Andrea’s prints, which corresponds to the early years when he was active in Milan.12 Zoan Andrea’s prints after Dürer were not exact reproductions, however. The orientations of Zoan Andrea’s engravings are reversed, due to copying Dürer’s print onto the matrix, which results in a mirror image when printed. Additionally, Zoan Andrea omitted Dürer’s AD monogram, replacing it with the initials ZA, indicating that his intention was not to pass off his work as being printed by Dürer, but rather to provide a composition of a Dürer; a distinction that was not necessarily a primary concern for contemporary collectors.13

Unlike Zoan Andrea’s reproductive engravings after Mantegna, Leonardo and Dürer, the prints by the anonymous Master of 1515 are unique in the way he assembled elements from various printmakers into new, veiled and subdued con-figurations, as seen in his Roman Soldier on Horseback with a Dog (Figure 4).14 The legacy of Italian and German masters affected the artistic landscape of Milan and Lombardy, result-ing in artistic eclecticism, or, as Peter Burke has described it, of “stylistic pluralism.”15 Master of 1515’s printed oeuvre reflects numerous borrowings from both sides of the Alps. He was previously thought to have been of German origin, yet a sketchbook housed in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin by the Milanese sculptor, Agostino Busti, known as “il Bambaia,” contains sketches that were later reproduced in print by the Master of 1515, thus situating the artist in Milan.16

It is easy to see how scholars were confounded by his identity, given his choice of subjects in addition to his ex-perimentation with technique, which was a combination of drypoint and engraving. Drypoint is a technique most often associated with northern printmakers, such as the Nether-landish artist, Master of the Housebook, whose prints Master

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printing beyond boundaries: the use of northern prints in renaissanCe milan

17 Lambert, Les Premières gravures italiennes, xxv.

18 Franz Winzinger, “Dürer und Leonardo,” Pantheon 29 (1971): 3-21; Evans, “German prints and Milanese miniatures,” 9.

19 Lambert, Les Premières gravures italiennes, 412-24. Lambert observes that nine out of the thirteen secular engravings by Palumba employ some sort of Dürer reference. Those prints by Dürer from which Pa-lumba borrowed motifs were done between 1494 and 1500, giving us a terminus post quem for Palumba’s engravings.

20 Jennifer Spinks, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 3. See also Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 173-214.

21 Spinks, Monstrous Births, 40.

of 1515 may have studied (Figure 5).17 Similar to the way an artist would use a pen or chalk to create sketches, drypoint involved the use of a metal stylus, scratching shallow lines onto the surface of the plate, like a drawing, that would create a burr, resulting in soft, hazy lines when printed. In his Roman Soldier on Horseback with a Dog, the Master of 1515 incorporates the carefully constructed parallel lines of Mantegna but also uses drypoint creating a seemingly hurried and incomplete effect. In areas of modeling, the artist barely scratches the surface of the plate, thus appearing as light, silvery lines. Though it allowed for relative ease, the shallow-ness of the grooves did not allow for numerous impressions to be pulled before the lines began to break down. The technique alone added to their rarity and, therefore, a high desirability among collectors who could have understood and appreciated their references to northern masters. In addition to Master of the Housebook, it also is possible that Master of 1515 was trying to emulate the effects of another northern artist, Lucas van Leyden, who was celebrated for his light and airy greyness.

The composition and subject of Master of 1515’s Ro-man Soldier often has been compared to Dürer’s famous Knight, Death, and the Devil (Figure 6) with an armored soldier mounted on a horse, its front and back legs raised as if in movement, with a small patch of grass growing in the corner of the frame, and a dog appearing below. Rather than faithfully striding alongside the valiant soldier, the dog in Master of 1515’s print stops to scratch his ear, reminiscent of the Master of the Housebook. Furthermore, connections have been made between Master of 1515’s Roman Soldier with Dürer’s 1505 engraving, Small Horse (Figure 7). In both prints, the horse stands majestically facing to the left, front leg raised, recalling ancient Roman equestrian statues. The mouths are slightly open, and a tuft of the horses’ hair falls between its perked ears. While the soft texture and muscula-ture of Dürer’s horse is rendered by his mastery of the burin, Master of 1515 relies on the light, silvery effect of the stylus.

Dürer’s Small Horse has, in many ways, been read as a response to Leonardo’s studies of proportions and the geo-metrical principles of horses.18 Engravings also were made —presumably—after Leonardo’s drawings for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, which both Dürer and Master of 1515 could have studied. Therefore, Roman Soldier becomes paradigmatic of the stylistic pluralities within Renaissance Milan, an amalgamation of singular points of reference ap-propriated from both Italian and German prints.

Among all of the active printmakers in Lombardy,

Giovanni Battista Palumba perhaps shows the most interest in Dürer’s technical prowess and innovative subjects and motifs. Palumba found new ways to reinterpret, respond to, and critique Dürer that spoke to the discerning print collectors within the city and beyond its borders.19 Of the fifteen extant engravings by Palumba, thirteen employ secular subjects, often from mythologies and Ovidian scenes from classical literature, suggesting a more learned circle of buy-ers and patrons.

In Palumba’s engraving referred to as the Three Mon-strosities (Figure 8), however, he depicted a contemporary event using text and images to describe reports of three different “wonders” born in Rome in April 1503: a three-headed cat, a misshaped egg, and twin boys joined at the navel. Yet with Palumba’s subject, any documented case of all three misbirths is unknown, leading to the possibility that these were not actual events, but rather concocted to appeal to popular print culture at the time. Playing on the theme of premonitions and foreboding signs of apocalyptic events, Palumba’s engraving enters into the lineage of the broadsheet tradition of illustrating monstrous births as omens. One of the most well-known and reproduced broadsheets told tales of the so-called “Papal Ass,” a monster pulled from the Tiber River in 1496 and seen as an omen against the sins of Pope Alexander VI. Though news spread of portents and omens on the Italian peninsula, there was a stronger tradition of distributing news of such occurrences in centers north of the Alps through illustrated broadsheets.20 One such broadsheet published by Sebastian Brant circulated through Germany and down through the Italian peninsula, with text provided in German and Latin, announcing that a sow was born in Landser on 1 March 1496, with one head and two bodies. Soon after, Dürer created his own interpretation of the broadsheet with his engraving, the Monstrous Sow of Landser (Figure 9). Historian Jennifer Spinks rightly observes that Dürer’s engraving is “in many ways the antithesis of the broadsheet images.”21 Popular broadsheets were often crudely executed in woodcut, giving a sense of urgency for its release, typically with supplemental text informing the viewer about the event. However, Dürer transformed his subject into something different: rather than a crude woodcut, it becomes an exercise in artistic rendering, and by omitting the text and inserting the animal into a landscape, it becomes a new subject that acts independently.

Sixteenth-century collectors likely would have been familiar with or owned broadsheets, or potentially owned Dürer’s Landser Sow. Palumba surely was looking to Dürer’s

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engraving for his own print with the same intentions in mind: to show off his graphic skill and the artistic merit of the scene, yet unlike Dürer, he wanted to retain the text-image association of the broadsheet tradition.22 Furthermore, Pa-lumba sets his figures into a northern landscape, not Rome as the text suggests. Instead, Palumba chose to incorporate another one of Dürer’s references for the background—the landscape does not come from the Sow of Landser, but rather the castle and drawbridge in St. John before God and the Elders (Figure 10) from Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcut series (1498; 1511), underscoring the theme of prophecy. It can be argued that the audience for Palumba’s Three Monstrosi-ties and Dürer’s Monstrous Sow of Landser would have seen their dual nature: the engravings could have been revered for the grave implications of their subject, while at the same time appreciated for their stylistic and skillful depictions.23 Whereas the single referential points in Master of 1515’s Roman Soldier and the reproductive prints of Zoan Andrea can be classified as instances of imitation, Palumba should be regarded on the level of emulation, who used Dürer’s prints as an exercise in reflexivity and transformation, adapt-ing the northern models and restructuring his compositions to fit within a local vernacular.

The case studies examined throughout the course of the paper reveal the complex dynamics of print production

in Milan and greater Lombardy during the Renaissance. In addition to the diplomatic relationships and the presence of northern craftsmen and artists in the duchy, the portability of prints helped to facilitate the process of artistic exchange, acting as mediators between various modes of visual transla-tions in creating a meta-local vocabulary. Though the impact of Leonardo reverberated throughout the city for some time, the ties with northern masters cannot be overlooked. Print scholar Rainer Schoch finds that, for Italian artists looking north, the “seduction and the attractiveness of what is alien was in itself a basic push to new knowledge.”24 The northern motifs, subjects and techniques were synthesized by the Italian artists and translated into a new manner of expres-sion. 25 The social and political environment of late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Milan and its territories was constantly redefining itself, which attests to the heterogeneity of the prints produced by artists active there. By understand-ing the agency of printmaking, we can begin to redefine the concept of local identity and style in Milan and Lombardy, challenging our understanding of constructed regionalisms by emphasizing the mutability of boundaries through various artistic networks and exchanges.

Temple University22 For more, see Almut Pollmer-Schmidt, “Conjoined Twins, a Monstrous

Pig, and a Rhinoceros. Dürer’s Broadsheets,” in Albrecht Dürer: His Art in Context, ed. Jochen Sander (Munich / New York: Prestel, 2013), 295-98.

23 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 173-214.

24 Rainer Schoch, “Specchio di due mondi: Dürer in Italia,” in Fara, Albrecht Dürer, xv.

25 For a similar insight on the reception of Italian prints in Germany, see Anne-Sophie Pellé, “Receiving Mantegna’s Engravings in the North: Artistic Translation as an Expression of Germany Identity, 1490-1530,” in Artistic Translations between Fourteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: International Seminar for Young Researchers; Proceedings; [University of Warsaw, April 2013], ed. Aleksandra Fedorowicz-Jackowska and Zuzanna Sarnecka (Warsaw: Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw, 2013), 147-60.

Figure 1. Andrea Mantegna, The Entombment, c. 1470s, engraving, 28.6 x 43.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Figure 3. [top right] Zoan Andrea, St. Penitent in the Wilderness, after 1496, engraving, 29.2 x 21.2 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Figure 4. [right] Master of 1515, Roman Soldier on Horseback with a Dog, c. 1515-20, engraving and drypoint, 19.5 x 14.8 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Figure 2. Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome Penitent in the Wilderness, c. 1496, engraving, 32 x 22.4 cm (trimmed to plate). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fletcher Fund, 1919).


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Figure 5. [above left] Master of the Housebook, Dog Scratching Him-self, c. 1475, drypoint, 12.3 x 12.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Figure 6. [above right] Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513, engraving, 25 x 19.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943).

Figure 7. Albrecht Dürer, Small Horse, 1505, engraving, 16.5 x 10.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fletcher Fund, 1919).

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Figure 8. [above left] Giovanni Battista Palumba, Three Mon-strosities, c. 1503, engraving, 19.8 x 12.3 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Figure 9. [above right] Albrecht Dürer, The Monstrous Sow of Landser, c. 1496, engraving 11.9 x 12.7 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fletcher Fund, 1919).

Figure 10. Albrecht Dürer, St. John before God and the Elders, from The Apocalypse, 1498; 1511, woodcut, 38.7 x 27.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Gift of Junius Spencer Morgan, 1919).

printing beyond boundaries: the use of northern prints in

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