Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder (review)

In recent years the study of print publishing in Italy during the sixteenth century has taken a dramatic turn. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Michael Bury (The Print in Italy, 1550–1620, London, 2001) and Christopher Witcombe, the mechanisms and complexities of print publishing are better understood and reveal a highly competitive and organized commercial enterprise that capitalized on the development of printing techniques and an expanding international clientele. That prints were made in multiple impressions allowed for the same image to be seen by different people across Europe at the same time. The advantages of this are obvious and encouraged the rise of the ‘professional viewer’, many of whom became eager collectors. Rather than being marginal, prints are now con sidered key to understanding Renaissance and early modern art history. Witcombe’s timely and welcome study provides a rigorous and fascinating account of print publishing in sixteenth-century Rome that is attentive both to detail and to the broader commercial structures driving its existence. It will provide the basis for further studies of the subject. The outcome of years of fruitful research, the author’s findings are served well by the publisher through an elegant layout and copious and legible illustrations.

Divided into five chapters, the book charts the emergence and development of print publishing in Rome during the sixteenth century. It is an ambitious task mainly because what started as a trickle with a handful of participants grew into a raging torrent and the complexities associated with that growth are not straightforward. The first chapter, ‘Artists and Entrepreneurs’, sets the scene for the emergence of professional print publishing. The relatively well-known account of the collaboration between Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi was forged at a time when the painter was at the height of his powers and eager to promote his accomplishments through acting, as it were, as a print publisher himself. A group of printmakers grew up around Marcantonio, including Agostino Musi Veneziano and Marco da Ravenna, whose work responded to the markets that emerged in Rome around the 1530s.

In Rome the area for printmaking and publishing developed between the Piazza Navona and the Campo dei Fiori where the Spanish-born publisher Antonio Salamanca worked from around 1505. Another important resident was the French-born Antonio Lafreri, who set up on the south end of the Piazza in the early 1540s in direct competition to Salamanca and commissioned prints from some of the emerging talents like Nicolas Beatrizet. The two formed a partnership in 1553 and Lafreri became the dominant partner. By the early 1570s his stock had become the envy of publishers in Rome. Witcombe carefully explores the rising numbers of print makers and publishers including those who worked as freelance and the professional rivalries that inevitably developed.

From around 1540 competition became increasingly fierce and the subjects represented in prints also expanded greatly. Salamanca was the first to buy previously published plates and reprint them. He capitalized on the new interest in Roman monuments especially for the educated tourists who came to admire the ancient remains. By the 1570s the range of prints being made was staggering and covered antiquity, mythology, images of well-known works of art and recent architecture, as well as maps and prints made specifically for pilgrims.

A document central to this study is the record of the hearing into the murder of the young printmaker Gerolamo da Modena that has until now not been fully exposed. Lafreri had died intestate on 20 July 1577. Modena was a promising young engraver in his workshop. After having vanished on 11 October, his body was found on 22 October drowned in the Tiber. Modena’s associates were convinced that the murder was part of a conspiracy to undermine the newly-formed Duchetti-Lafreri print publishing business. Those implicated in the turmoil read like a...