Marcantonio Raimondi

Here is Marcantonio’s approach to engraving at its most regular and systematic, and therefore most easily repeatable by other practitioners. He placed bowed parallel lines perpendicular to the contour, crossed them with hatching, and then embellished with stippling or flicks (look closely at the female face in profile, lower right). He constructed each tonal section with short lines of one length and width, laying them parallel to one another, and avoiding the interpretive s-curves across forms found in Dürer’s work. Such regularity created grids that could be applied to the edge of any form (look closely at the edge of St. Paul’s drapery).

The print reproduces one episode from Raphael’s designs for tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel on the life of St. Paul. Here, the apostle Paul preaches to a crowd amid a grand architectural setting. Raphael included a portrait of Pope Leo X on the original cartoon to the left of the standing saint, but Marcantonio altered the figure to that of a generic audience member.