The Courtauld Institute of Art
Graduate Student, Art History
The British Museum, Prints and Drawings
Thesis Title: Engraving Devotion: Origins, Forms and Functions of Early Florentine Religious Engravings
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Professor Patricia Rubin
Dr Mark McDonald |
About
Nearly two hundred engravings have been associated with Florentine artisans working in the 1460s, 1470s, and 1480s, yet over the past one hundred years little attention has been focussed on them. The few scholarly works that have been produced are mainly comprehensive catalogues that consider the important and difficult issues of attribution and technique. The older connoisseurial approach, however, allows only a partial, obscured perspective of the prints, since a large proportion of Florentine engravings were created in response to social, religious and commercial factors as well as artistic developments. For although prints could be manipulated by their consumers in many different ways, the way that they were 'packaged' by their creators - with text, in books, or in a specific visual template - indicates that many of them were intended to be 'read' or used in specific ways. My study explores the significant number of devotional prints produced in this period to show how they were made in order to cultivate distinct modes of prayer and meditation popular at the time. Considering the engravings in broad iconographical categories that relate to different types of spiritual behaviour, I examine the probable intended functions of images that figure Christ, the Virgin, the saints, or an allegorical narrative.
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