Maria met kind geflankeerd door aartsengel Rafaël met Tobias met vis en heilige Hieronymus 1517 - 1540

This engraving of the Virgin and Child, flanked by saints, was made in Italy, probably sometime in the 1510s, by Marco Dente. Like other prints from the period, this one shows the impact of the Roman Catholic Church as a major cultural institution, a role it has played for many centuries. Here, the artist is drawing on Biblical sources as well as long-standing iconographic traditions for his subject matter. He shows the Madonna and Christ Child together with Saint Jerome and the archangel Raphael, whose presence is alluded to through his association with Tobias and the fish. The print is not simply a devotional image, however. It also speaks to the development of printmaking as an industry in its own right. Dente and his contemporaries often made prints after famous paintings, and the present image may be based on a work by Raphael himself. To understand the print fully, scholars might ask what it tells us about the place of religion, the status of artists, and the technologies of image reproduction in early sixteenth-century Italy.