EXHIBITION EXPLORES THE DEBATE OVER REPRODUCTION RIGHTS IN VIEW OF NEW TECHNOLOGY ... IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Released: August 25, 1998
Contact: Kate McShea Ewen
E-mail mcshea@fas.harvard.edu
(617) 495-2397
Cambridge, Massachusetts - 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. 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.
The practice of copying classical and more immediate prototypes was at the heart of Renaissance culture. On a more mundane level, copying books and pictures unprotected by privileges was a standard and legitimate business practice for many sixteenth-century publishers. This traditional conception of copying as legitimate collided with the more modern sensibility of the artist's originality as sacrosanct when Nicolo and Domenico dal Jesus published prints engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, which were copies of woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer. A sixteenth-century source states that Dürer traveled to Venice specifically to contest Marcantonio's right to reproduce these prints. Prints by these two artists and books by the dal Jesus brothers are a focus of the exhibition.
The visual centerpiece of Prints and Privileges is the pairing of Jacopo de Barbari's Bird's-Eye View of Venice and Titian's The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea. Jacopo's magnificent woodcut, printed from six large woodblocks, rewards both close viewing and looking from a distance. The outline of the city and the slow reverse S-curve of the Grand Canal are tilted towards the viewer, presenting Venice with the sensuousness of a reclining Venus. At the same time, an astonishing richness of detail draws the viewer in. Many sites, including the Rialto Bridge and the Piazza di San Marco, are fully recognizable, as are the more than seventy churches identified by name. On the water, there are depicted a variety of activities, from clamming to regatta racing, and a variety of boats and ships, from gondolas to the war galleons that were the pride of Venice.
Titian's The Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea depicts the Biblical scene in which the Pharaoh's soldiers pursuing Moses and the Israelites are destroyed by the waters of the Red Sea. The mural-like scale of the work is such that the vigorously swirling waves threaten almost to engulf the viewer. The woodcut survives only in the state of the print in the exhibition, with an inscription indicating that it was published by Domenico delle Greche in 1549, and designed "by the hand of the great and immortal Titian." The style of the composition suggests that Titian worked out the design decades earlier, and this stylistic dating is confirmed by a privilege dated 9 February 1514 from the Venetian Senate to book and print publisher Bernardino Benalio. The privilege allowed only Benalio to produce the submersione di pharaone for ten years. Long after the expiration of this privilege, Domenico delle Greche must have acquired the twelve wood blocks for this print, inserted the current inscription, and published the impression on view.
Prints and Privileges is representative of the kind of teaching exhibition that can only be presented at Harvard University. It is one in which a doctoral candidate is invited to use the collections and facilities to present a curatorial thesis that contributes a new and original perspective on a subject. Recognizing the value of Lisa Pon's proposed exhibition as a teaching tool, Harvard's Department of History of Art and Architecture encouraged her to develop a Junior Tutorial offered last spring in conjunction with Prints and Privileges. Undergraduates from this tutorial will bring their acquired knowledge to the public when they present gallery talks during the course of the exhibition. In addition, new scholarship sparked by the exhibition will be brought to the public with a free two-day symposium, Printing Matters: The Materiality of Print in Early Modern Europe. The symposium is co-organized by Pon and Graham Larkin, also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and the curator of Lines of Inquiry: Ancien Régime Book Illustration from the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard's Houghton Library from September 2 through December 11, 1998.
Prints and Privileges is supported by funds from the Gürel Student Exhibition Fund.
Gallery talks
Gallery talks are free to the public with the price of Art Museums'
admission. Admission is free on Wednesdays and Saturday mornings. Hearing
assists are available for gallery talks; arrangements should be made beforehand
by phoning (617) 495-8286. To request a sign language interpreter, the
public should call (617) 495-2397 using Massachusetts Telephone Relay
Service 1-800-439-2370, preferably three weeks in advance of the gallery
talk.
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.
Fogg Art Museum
Free and open to the public, complimentary parking available at the Broadway
garage on the corner of Felton street and Broadway.
This two-day symposium, organized by Graham Larkin and Lisa Pon, doctoral candidates in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, will bring together leading scholars to reflect upon the materiality of printed objects, both books and prints, in early modern Europe. Topics to be addressed will include such issues as the transitions between hand production and mechanical production, the ways in which typographic and layout conventions are invested with meaning, and the synthesis of visual and textual content. This material emphasis brings together text-based and image-based studies, challenging current disciplinary boundaries. Cosponsored by Harvard's Department of History of Art and Architecture, this symposium is being presented in conjunction with the exhibitions Prints and Privileges: Regulating the Image in Sixteenth-Century Italy in the Fogg (October 1 through December 27) and Lines of Inquiry: Ancien Régime Book Illustration from the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard's Houghton Library (September 2 through December 11).
Speakers include Lilian Armstrong, Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Art, Wellesley College; Tom Conley, professor of romance languages and literatures, Harvard University; Brendan Dooley, associate professor of history and of social studies, Harvard University; Evelyn Lincoln, associate professor of history of art and architecture, Brown University; Walter Melion, professor of history of art, The Johns Hopkins University; Paul Saenger, George A. Poole III Curator of Rare Books, The Newberry Library; Ramie Targoff, assistant professor of English, Yale University; Christopher Wood, associate professor of history of art, Yale University; and Abby Zanger, associate professor of romance languages and literatures, Harvard University.
For more information, see the Printing Matters Symposium web site at: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/Events/printmatters.html
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The Harvard University Art Museums' facilities are wheelchair accessible. For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. For press information or photographs, please contact Kate McShea Ewen at (617) 495-2397. For more information on events, please call (617) 495-4544. World Wide Web: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. **
The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and to all on Saturday mornings and all day on Wednesdays. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June; Wednesdays only in July and August. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
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