In Dialogue: Medial Thinking in Bolognese Printmaking, 1500-1530

Ariella Minden

My project presents a history of printmaking in Bologna between 1500 and 1530 by tracking the expansive network of intermedial relationships integral to defining new print media. As a nexus of trade, university center, and the second city of the Papal States, Bologna offered an environment conducive to ambitious programs of print production characterized by a heightened medial consciousness on the part of printmakers and their patrons. The city gave rise and played host to some of the most important printmakers of the first three decades of the sixteenth century including Marcantonio Raimondi (1480-1534), Ugo da Carpi (ca.1450-ca.1532), and Francesco Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503-40), as well as the now unknown woodcutters who produced groundbreaking woodcut anatomical illustrations for the medical texts of Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (1460-1530). Each chapter examines how those involved in making prints established engraving, woodcut illustration, etching, and chiaroscuro woodcut next to metalwork, sculpture, manuscript illumination, painting, and drawing to define these emerging media. The medial entanglements interrogated in this project are evident in the highly self-reflexive prints under discussion and are analyzed alongside a range of contemporary written sources including poetry, patents, dissection manuals, and art theoretical treatises. In focusing on Bologna, this project shows how these four print media were being developed and defined not in isolation but next to one another in order to offer a reassessment of some of the most significant technological and artistic innovations of the early modern period.