Students help to organise major historical art exhibition in Manchester

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Undergraduate and postgraduate students from The University of Manchester have helped to organise the UK’s first exhibition of the work of Marcantonio Raimondi, the foremost printmaker of the Italian Renaissance.

The exhibition, which takes place at the Whitworth Art Gallery from 30 September, is the creation of Edward Wouk, a lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies at the University, and David Morris, Head of Collections at the Whitworth. Edward worked with a dozen of his students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, who contributed to planning the display and writing entries for the catalogue, and will now graduate with experience of organising a major exhibition, and as published authors with a major academic press.

Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480-c.1532) was a leading printmaker of the Italian Renaissance, and is best known for his ground-breaking collaboration with the artist Raphael. This resulted in famous images such as The Massacre of the Innocents, which translates an episode from Christ’s birth to contemporary Rome.

Another famous work by Raimondi is Apollo and Hyacinth - a rare print of two young mythic lovers - which will be on display on loan from the British Museum.

Before the invention of printmaking in the mid-1400s, nearly all visual images were singular. Marcantonio Raimondi was one of printmaking’s leading exponents, which resulted in a multiplying of images that radically transformed art and all other fields of knowledge. Making prints also freed artists from the restrictions of working for the Church or rich secular elites of the period. It was arguably an intrinsically more urban and democratic form of visual art than anything before it - printmaking was as revolutionary then as the Internet is now.

The idea of organising an exhibition of Marcantonio’s work based on the collections in the Whitworth was given fresh impetus by Edward’s chance discovery of an album of his prints in the John Rylands Library, which was long considered lost.