The Authority of Prints: an early modern perspective

Abstract

This article addresses some of the circumstances, and consequences, of the peculiar authority invested in copperplate prints in the early modern period. At issue are a whole range of kinds of agency and efficacy that were active in early modern thinking about printed images – ones which neither ‘aura’ (what mechanical reproduction, by Walter Benjamin’s lights, was supposed to rob) nor William M. Ivins Jr.’s account of prints as ‘exactly repeatable pictorial statements‘ adequately captures. Sustained attention is paid to the radical recombinability of prints and the competing oeuvres and authorships (constructions inseparable from discrete collections of a printmaker’s output) that arose from this fact. A second area of preoccupation is the interalization of printmaking technologies and the proliferation of a set of intaglio metaphors used to conceptualize how sensations were recorded in the mind and retrieved as units of knowledge. The experience of prints figured as both cause and effect of these early modern habits of thought. If the mind was thought to be like an engraved copper plate or a sheet of paper imprinted with figures, it is asked, what of the interface with its material referents? What might be thought to happen when people with print‐ or plate‐like minds looked at printed images? Prints by Abraham Bosse and Clause Mellan supply partial answers.