A printing establishment was set up under the charge of Raphael's colour-grinder, Il Baviera, and the profits, in the early stage of the business, were shared between the engraver and the printer. The sale soon became very great; pupils gathered round about Marcantonio, of whom the two most distinguished were Marco Dente, known as Marco da Ravenna, and Agostino de' Musi, known as Agostino Veneziano; and he and they, during the last ten years of Raphael's life, and for several years following his death, gave forth a great profusion of engravings after the master's work—not copying, in most instances, his finished paint ings, but working up, with the addition of simple backgrounds and accessories, his first sketches and trials, which often give the composition in a different form from the finished work, and are all the more interesting on that account.
Marcantonio's best engravings were done during the first few years after he had attached himself to Raphael. In them he enters into the genius of his master, and loses little of the chas tened science and rhythmical purity of Raphael's contours, or of the inspired and winning sentiment of his faces; while in the parts where he is left to himself—the rounding and shading, the background and landscape—he manages his burin with all the skill and freedom which he had gained by the imitation of northern models, but puts away the northern emphasis and re dundance of detail. His work, however, does not long remain at the height marked by pieces like the Lucretia, the Dido, the Judgment of Paris. the Poetry, the Philosophy, or the first
Massacre of the Innocents. Marcantonio's engravings after the works of Raphael's later years are cold, ostentatious, and soul less by comparison. Still more so, as is natural, were those which he and his pupils produced after the designs of the followers of Raphael and Michelangelo, of a Giulio Romano, a Polidoro, or a Bandinelli.
Marcantonio's association with Giulio Romano was the cause of his first great disaster in life. He engraved a series of obscene designs by that painter in illustration of the Sonnetti lussuriosi of Pietro Aretino, which caused his temporary banishment from Rome. Marcantonio's ruin was completed by the calamities atten dant on the sack of Rome in 1527. He had to pay a heavy ransom in order to escape from the hands of the Spaniards, and fled from Rome, in the words of Vasari, "all but a beggar." It is said that he took refuge in his native city, Bologna; but he never again emerges from obscurity, and all we know with certainty is that in 1534 he was dead.
See H. Delaborde, Marcantonio Raimondi (1887) ; H. Hirth, Marcanton and sein Styl (Munich, 1898) ; Wickhoff, Jahrbuch (Vienna, xx. 181, 1899) ; P. Kristeller, Kupferstich u. Holzschnztt (19°5) ; A. M. Hind, Great Engravers (1912) ; and History of Engraving and Etching (1923) .