The special exhibition Prints and Privileges: Regulating the Image in Sixteenth-Century Italy will be on display at the Fogg Art Museum from October 17 through December 27, 1998. The exhibition draws on the rich resources of Boston-area collections to explore an important tie between printed books and printed images in Italy during the sixteenth century. Forty woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and books by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Marcantonio Raimondi, Ugo da Carpi, Agostino Carracci, and Aldus Manutius will be on display. Visitors will be afforded a rare opportunity to view two spectacular mural-sized prints - Jacopo de Barbari's Bird's-Eye View of Venice (on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Titian's The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea - displayed side by side and taking up an entire wall of the Fogg's Lehman Gallery.

Federico Barocci, St Francis in the Chapel, 1581. Etching, 55 x 32.4 cm. Arnold Knapp Fund by exchange. M131655

Prints and Privileges is organized by Lisa Pon, Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's Department of History of Art and Architecture, in conjunction with a Harvard College seminar. An essay and checklist of the exhibition will be published in the Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin, volume VI, number II, this fall.

Prints and Privileges examines both the practice of copying in printed media in sixteenth-century Italy, and the development of the privilege, a legal mechanism to regulate the copying of printed images. Privileges were favors granted by a government, bestowing full or partial monopolies on those receiving them. Early privileges were developed for entrepreneurs opening mines, improving windmills, or experimenting with poison gas. By the late-fifteenth century, they began to be given to producers of printed books to prohibit others from reprinting the protected text; by the sixteenth century, they were used to protect printed images as well.

RELATED EVENTS - All in 1998

Gallery talks
Saturday, November 7, 11:30 a.m., Fogg Art Museum, free with Ada Polla, concentrator in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard class of '99 and participant in the curator Lisa Pon's Junior Tutorial linked with the exhibition.

Saturday, December 5, 11:30 a.m., Fogg Art Museum, free with Irene Cervantes, concentrator in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard class of '99 and participant in the curator Lisa Pon's Junior Tutorial linked with the exhibition.

Saturday, December 12, 11:30 a.m., Fogg Art Museum, free with Alexis Goodman, concentrator in History of Art and Architecture, Harvard class of '99 and participant in the curator Lisa Pon's Junior Tutorial linked with the exhibition.

Symposium
Printing Matters: The Materiality of Print in Early Modern Europe
Saturday, November 14; 9:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. and Sunday, November 15; 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Printing Matters Symposium
Fogg Art Museum
Free and open to the public, complimentary parking available at the Broadway garage on the corner of Felton street and Broadway.

The exhibition is organized by Lisa Pon, Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's Department of the History of Art and Architecture, in conjunction with her Junior Tutorial for third-year undergraduates in history of art.

Prints and Privileges is supported by funds from the Gürel Student Exhibition Fund. Press Release.