MARCO DENTE
Ravenna about 1493 - 1527 Rome
Venus Seeks Advice from Juno and Ceres, circa 1518-1519
Engraving after Raphael Sanzio (Urbino 1483 - 1520 Rome)
260 x 201 mm.; 10 1/4 x 7 15/16 inches
Watermark: Anchor in Circle
Provenance: With the duplicate mark of the Kunsthalle Bremen.
Reference: Bartsch XIV, 247, 327.
Notes:
1. A very fine, sharp and, in its quality, extrremely rare impression of one of the graphic masterpieces of Marco Dente. This work was based on a drawing by Raphael now in the Albertina in Vienna.
2. In 1510, Marco Dente went fom his native Ravenna to Rome where he became a student of Marcantonio Raimondi whose engraving technique he followed quite closely. Dente’s productive life was rather limited since he died at the age of thirty-four in the Sack of Rome in 1527.
3. Marco Dente is one of a trio of artists, the others being Marcantonio Raimondi (1480 - 1527/34) and Agostino Veneziano (b. 1490), who executed some of the most beautiful engravings after Raphael. Most of these works were sold by the dealer Il Baviera. After the death of Raphael in 1520, Il Baviera apparently held onto the plates and, from that point on, took all the profit for himself -to the detriment of the interests of the printmakers themselves. Landau and Parshall (The Renaissance Print, 1994: p. 146) have suggested that, with few exceptions, both personal forgeries [copies of their own previously executed plates by Dente, Marcantonio and Veneziano] and any of the prints signed with the monogram or with a tablet -empty or not-, produced after 1520, were meant to damage Il Baviera and "to redress the financial balance of the whole operation in favor of the engravers".