Artist unknown

Vatican Picture Gallery, Rome: Madonna de Foligno by Raphael, n.d.

Albumen print

10 3/8" x 7 7/16"

Photographs of art and architecture served as travel keepsakes as well as tools for study. Prior to the proliferation of photography, art objects were documented through graphic processes: artists copied an image onto a printing plate and used it as the basis for a print edition. Executed by hand, the prints were expensive and sometimes inaccurate. Photographs of paintings, sculpture, and buildings were vastly more affordable. To meet the public demand for images, photographers scoured cities taking pictures of edifices, architectural details, and works of art in public and private collections. If access to the original was impossible, photographers could take pictures of the graphic reproductions. Indeed, Vatican Picture Gallery, Rome: Madonna de Foligno by Raphael shows the fine lines of the graphic print. It is a photograph of a print of a painting. Museums even employed photographers to document their holdings and to issue photo editions of their well known sculptures or paintings. Visual artists used photographs to study style and technique. They copied images for practice or sampled elements for inclusion in their own work. Art History, a newly formed discipline, relied on photographic reproductions, most often in the form of glass slides which could be projected. In such a manner, professors could point out differences in periods and style using side-by-side comparisons of works art from across Europe.

n.d.

Gift of Dr. Corlette Rossiter Walker

1985.189a