Entombment of Christ, two men lifting Christ into a tomb, with a shroud underneath the body, three crosses on Golgotha beyond, from a series of five engravings after the destroyed or detached frescoes of 1532/33 by Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone in the cloister of S.Stefano, Venice

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.