Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-06(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Suzanne Boorsch.

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This dissertation positively re-evaluates printmaking in late-sixteenth-century Rome through an analysis of the closely related phenomena and copying and collaboration. Traditionally, individual "genius", uniqueness, and originality have been the parameters by which art historians have assessed the importance and worth of artists' work. Such an approach looms large particularly in studies of the Renaissance, a period in which scholars posit the emergence of the very ideas of individuality and original authorship. Because of its essential characteristics, the art of printmaking, especially at the height of its commercial success in Rome in the late Cinquecento, fads foul of these limited interpretative categories and has consequently been relatively neglected by art-historical literature. Only very recently have late-sixteenth-century prints received the attention that their sheer quantity, quality, iconographic complexity and variety command.

At the heart of this project is the exploration of the overlapping activity of three printmakers working in Rome around i600: the Sienese painter-etcher Ventura Salimbeni, the French engraver Philippe Thomassin, and the Florentine engraver Raffaello Guidi. Lesser-known figures even in printmaking scholarship, these three artists all knew one other, worked together on a variety of printmaking projects, and exploited their personal and professional networks to create, market, and publicize their works. A sign of the cosmopolitan nature of the Roman printmaking world, all three artists also forged and maintained strong connections with Flanders: the other major contemporary centre of European print production. Further, all three artists were born outside of Rome and moved to the papal city, attracted by the international reach of the opportunities it afforded.

This project was undertaken with a number of aims in mind. At the most basic level, this dissertation is an attempt to break down traditional scholarly boundaries between studies of engraving, etching, painting, and book history. Throughout, emphasis has been placed on the spaces and connections shared by artists, publishers, collectors and patrons, and on the proximity in which works in these different media were created. Of crucial importance for the methodology of print studies was the firm intention of moving away from the limiting modem construct of "reproductive print" towards a richer conception of the Renaissance print as a palimpsest of authorial inputs, or -- to modify a well-known definition -- a deposit of collaborative relationships. A wide-ranging and detailed analysis of copies and collaborations, therefore, was crucial to this interpretative "rebalancing act". Related to this was the aim of eroding the separation between the study of northern and southern European prints. Indeed, close scrutiny reveals that Renaissance printmaking was a truly international artistic enterprise, sustained by far-reaching networks of knowledge and personal connections. In other words, at this time prints were produced in, and for, a "republic of images" that spanned the whole European continent. Finally, by focusing on the manifold manifestations of collaboration in art-making, the dissertation should contribute to refraining the discourse of artistic authorship more broadly in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

After examining a variety of examples of sixteenth-century copies, collaborations, and contemporary responses to them in the first chapter, the dissertation is divided into three parts, each dedicated to one of the printmakers under consideration. The chapter dealing with Salimbeni is the first comprehensive study of his printed works: both of the etchings he made and contemporary prints after his designs. The third chapter is a broad reconstruction of Thomassin's collaborative networks through the analysis of documents and of his significant -- and here substantially expanded -- oeuvre. Raffaello Guidi and the importance of his mastery of the Flemish manner of engraving for his career as a collaborative copyist are the subject of the fourth and final chapter. These subdivisions are necessarily artificial, and a certain degree of overlap between the three chapters contributes to making the imbricated nature of Rome's artistic milieu all the more vivid. The act of separating the strands of each individual artist's activity -- a requirement of narrative clarity -- can only provide a partial and fragmentary glimpse into a complex creative world. Rather than three distinct case studies, these three chapters aim to tell the same story from three different points of view.