January 3, 2012 — Highlighting works on paper from the University of Virginia Art Museum's collection, a new exhibition, "Master Printmakers: The Italian Renaissance and Its Modern Legacy" features works in various media – engraving, woodcut and etching – from a golden age in the history of Italian art.
 
The exhibition, which opens Jan. 20 and runs through May 20, is curated by Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor of Italian Renaissance Art and Literature in U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences.

The exhibition includes works by Marcantonio Raimondi, Jacopo de'Barbari, Domenico Beccafumi and other 16th-century artists whose mythological, religious and allegorical images express the cultural and aesthetic ideals of the High Renaissance. Printmakers, as this show reveals, are both artists in their own right and graphic historians, who keep alive the inventions of major artists of earlier periods, Barolsky said. Featured here are original prints after pictorial inventions by Raphael, Francesco Primaticcio, Federico Barocci, Tintoretto and Titian.

"Prints not only disseminated widely the ideas of the great masters, they also captured in diverse media the pictorial qualities of such masterworks," Barolsky said.

The exhibition is supported by Albemarle Magazine, The Hook and Ivy Publications LLC's Charlottesville Welcome Book.