Currus Triumphales title page, Italy

Here we have strange, weird and wonderful prints and paintings by Medieval and Renaissance artists. Sometimes it is difficult to explain the scene, the whole thing just seems so ridiculous, and we get a good laugh out of it.

Printmaking in woodcut and engraving came to Northern Italy within a few decades of their invention north of the Alps. Engraving probably came first to Florence in the 1440s, the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra (1426–64) used the technique. Italian engraving caught the very early Renaissance, 1460–1490. Print copying was a widely accepted practice, as well as copying of paintings viewed as images in their own right.