Detail View: The AMICA Library: The Judgment of Paris

The work of Raphael represents a culminating point of Renaissance art, and thus the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, replicating Raphael's compositions for his contemporaries and for posterity, can be seen as the quintessential Renaissance prints. A native of Bologna, Marcantonio arrived in Rome about 1509 and began reproducing Raphael's designs. Many of these works had been made in preparation for frescoes, but some of the best known, including 'The Judgment of Paris,' seem to have been created expressly to be engraved. Vasari wrote of this print that Raphael drew 'to please himself . . . the Chariot of the Sun, the nymphs of the wood, . . . the fountains, and . . . the rivers, with vases, rudders, and other beautiful fanciful things all around.' In Rome at this time excavation and collecting of antique statuary were carried on with fervor, and Raphael, besides working on the major pictorial decoration in the Vatican Palace, was also the superintendent of antiquities from 1515 on. 'The Judgment of Paris' is a free adaptation from sculpted reliefs on two antique sarcophagi, one being the very one that, a generation earlier, had inspired Mantegna's 'Bacchanal with a Wine Vat' (1986.1159). Marcantonio's engraving in turn inspired many other works, most famously Manet's 'Luncheon on the Grass.'