Facade with caryatids

Marcantonio Raimondi, often called simply Marcantonio (c. 1470-1482 – c. 1534),was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker, whose body of work consists largely of prints copying paintings. He is therefore a key figure in the rise of the reproductive print. He also systematised a technique of engraving that became dominant in Italy and elsewhere. His collaboration with Raphael greatly helped his career, and he continued to exploit Raphael's works after the painter's death in 1520, playing a large part in spreading High Renaissance styles across Europe. Much of the biographical information we have comes from his life, the only one of a printmaker, in Giorgio Vasari's <em>Lives of the Artists. </em>Around 300 engravings are attributed to him. After years of great success, his career ran in to trouble in the mid-1520s; he was imprisoned for a time in Rome over his role in the series of erotic prints I Modi and then, according to Vasari, lost all his money in the Sack of Rome in 1527, after which none of his work can be securely dated.

Marcantonio Raimondi was exposed early on to antique art, mythology and history in the rich intellectual life of Bologna, and this underpins our rather remarkable and certainly very strange print. An architectural ensemble such as this was almost certainly intended to be serious, scholarly and didactic, yet clearly attention-grabbing too. It was probably a source for Giulio Romano's famous Mannerist architectural and decorative tomfooleries. It reveals Marcantonio’s awareness of Vitruvius’s <em>De Architectura</em> (1511), as translated by Fra Giovanni Giocondo, and its description and relatively crude woodcut illustrations of pre-Greek, Persian porticoes, which featured caryatids though less extreme than these. 

Marcantonio uses artistic licence to create a lower storey of male satraps or telamons using the Doric order, surmounted by an upper storey of caryatids topped with the Ionic order. Alongside the latter is a huge female head. Here the literary source is the Greek writer, traveller and antiquarian Pausinias, who describes a Persian portico with this feature, a portrait of Artemesia, Queen of Helicarnassus, a ferocious ally of Xerxes in the wars against Greece. Although this print was less familiar than Marcantonio’s engravings of Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and particularly Raphael (who collaborated closely with him and probably produced drawings specially for him), it is mentioned by Vasari. Several scholars have, moreover, linked it to the ‘High’ courtly Mannerism of Jean Goujon’s famous Musicians’ Gallery, 1550 (Paris: Louvre), which features four caryatids. Caryatids are also prominent in Raphael’s art contemporaneous with or just preceding this print, including <em>The School of Athens</em> and still more prominent, mostly male counterparts, in the <em>Stanze del Eliodoro</em> but these are essentially supportive features rather than the dominant ones here. Although the later admiration of Goujon and Piranesi would be pretty obvious here, Marcantonio’s appeal has a proto-surrealistic quality, seen more famously in the work of a younger generation Mannerist, Giuseppi Arcimboldo.

See:

George L. Hersey, <em>The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: </em><em>Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi </em>(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 178-9.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcantonio_Raimondi

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art             February 2017