Special Exhibitions
Battle of the Nudes
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Special Exhibitions |
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Battle of the Nudes |
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Brief History of Print Collecting In order to understand how an important and valuable work of art such as Pollaiuolo's Battle of the Nudes could have incurred damage, it is important to consider briefly the history of print collecting.In recent decades this subject has received increased scholarly attention: it is a rich and complex subject that encompasses the history of print connoiseurship and print restoration. Roughly summarized there is evidence that some form of print collecting began as early as the fifteenth century. The earliest print collections assembled according to an articulated system of instructions, appear in the sixteenth century. These were encyclopedic in scope and organized by subject. The image was of primary concern and was valued chiefly for visual information and didactic potential. In the later part of the sixteenth century, collections were amassed with a particular focus on individual artists. Artists were being recognized for their inventive genius and artistic sense as well as their technical skill. Concern for condition and emphasis on impression quality and rarity emerge in the late sixteenth century but these features become more evident in seventeenth-century collections. In the early centuries of print collecting it was commonplace for works of art on paper to sustain damage through rough handling and storage conditions ill-suited for preservation purposes. Prints - even large-scale and exceptionally impressive ones that were sure to have been widely renowned in their own time - simply did not have the stature as works of art that they have today. Prints were collected and - often after first being cut down - placed in albums or books. This typically involved folding and/or mounting. This aspect of print collecting actually provided prints some protection, especially from light exposure. However, in their protective cases prints did not escape wear and tear. Storage in albums often subjected prints to prolonged contact with unstable materials such as unrefined starch or glue-based mounting adhesives and even other media, such as acidic iron gall ink, a ubiquitous drawing and writing ink. Loose sheets were even more vulnerable to damage especially when they began to be used as cheap substitutes for paintings and other decorative purposes that entailed unfavorable mounting conditions and continuous display. Ironically, these practices became more prevalent with the increasing attitude in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that prints could be regarded as works of art in their own right. In the earliest centuries of print collecting, prints were valued primarily for their didactic potential, and an important function was to instruct artists. In this capacity prints were repeatedly handled and tacked to walls or even essentially used up as the "raw material" for making other works of art, most notably, in making transfers in which case the prints could be squared, pricked or scored in tracing. Print scholars believe that Pollaiuolo's Battle would have had great demand for such didactic purposes as it presented an explicit depiction of the male nude seen from many vantage points and displayed an advanced understanding of human anatomy for its time. In this sense the print's popularity would have hastened its demise. (Bibliography: Stevenson, Kosek, Bury, Griffiths, Parshall, Cohn, Hajos, Robinson) Page 1 of 5 | On the next page: Early Italian versus Early Northern European Engraving |
