This paper explores Marcantonio Raimondi’s earliest engravings as repositories of experimentation reflective of the negotiations that necessarily occur during the emergence of a new medium. Made in Bologna between approximately 1501 and 1506, these works have predominantly been studied for their esoteric iconographies based in Bolognese humanistic thought. Meanwhile, the engraving techniques have largely been dismissed as simplistic. Raimondi’s limited graphic lexicon, reliant on deeply incised contours and finely hatched lines closely aligns to the handling of the burin as used in metalwork decoration. Although today Raimondi’s fame is as an engraver, like many printmakers of the first century of European printmaking, his formative training was as a goldsmith. While scholars have acknowledged that goldsmithing and niello-work informed the appearance of Raimondi’s early engravings, it is often done derisively and in passing. My paper offers a new reading of these prints by arguing that their appearance was indicative of the centrality of Raimondi’s formative training to his initial conception of engraving as a medium. I suggest that Raimondi treated the matrix as a piece of metalwork for which the substrate was the ground rather than something intended to be carved and manipulated for transfer to a paper support. In this way, the oft-remarked-upon metallic appearance can be understood as symptomatic of the sustained logic of the goldsmith and the application of the techniques of an older medium to a new one in which they were less effective.
By examining how the meeting of old and new media is reflected both intentionally and not in these works, I seek to revise our understanding of Raimondi’s Bolognese engravings not as idiosyncratic or marked by inexperience, but rather as material evidence of the requisite negotiations in the definition of a new medium.