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The article explores the work of the artist Andrea Mantegna. Particular focus is given to his works on paper, most particularly his engravings. Additional topics explored include his artwork "The Entombment," dating from 1465-1470, the history of engraving and graphic arts and how his work compares to that of other artists including Jacopo Bellini.

The paper aims to analyse the particular iconography of a large fifteenth century engraving, currently known in a single copy in Copenhagen (Statens Museum for Kunst, Konegelige Kobberstiksamling, inv. 8320). With more than 50 figures depicted, the engraving is an iconographic hapax in which the type of the "Fortress of the Faith" is used to celebrate the numerous congregations of Canons Regular and to reaffirm their privileged connection with St. Augustine, considered their founder. Dating around 1480, the work is fully part of the strong controversy which exploded in those years between the Canons and the Hermits on the relationship with the Bishop of Hippo, a controversy where even the images - starting from the engravings - played a key role and where this work truly constitutes an absolutely original outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Francesco Berlinghieri's Geographia (Florence, 1482) is now regarded as representative of a thriving humanist geographic enterprise, modern scholars universally agree that its author had no significant role in the production of its maps. Yet Berlinghieri's contemporaries regarded the poet as a cosmographer and 'world painter' and associated his work so closely with its principal source, Ptolemy, that it was referred to as el tolomeo. From an examination of the Geographia's text, maps and illuminations, I argue that Berlinghieri, and the artists who worked for him, portrayed the poet as author of both the textual and the cartographical components. This poetic and artistic project served to frame Berlinghieri's endeavour as one that emulated the achievements of classical geography and conformed to fifteenth-century expectations for the role of the geographer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) otto prints owned by Leipzig merchant Ernst Peter Otto in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Printed in black, the otto prints' classicizing scene depicts a centaur carrying a nearly nude woman burdened by a garland laden. It adds that the centaur imagery also enjoyed a certain vogue during the late 15th century Florence, as demonstrated by Antonio Pollaiuolo's painting entitled "Hercules and Deianira," and Sandro Botticelli's "Pallas and a Centaur." Moreover, the otto prints proper are a group of 24 fine-manner engravings having secular themes in oval form, thought to have been produced in a single late 15th century Florentine workshop.

Notes that in the 15th century, printed images offered an opportunity for the most in influential people in Germany to be the most visible as well, through the distribution of their likenesses. Use of engravings and woodcuts, as well as cast medals, to simulate the traditional effects of coins as bearers of protraits; Emerging status as media heroes of learned authors in the new age of type.