Printmaking is inherently linked to reproducibility. Its basic principle is to transfer an image from a matrix to a surface, thereby allowing the production of multiple copies. Reproductive prints—prints that replicate another work of art, such as a painting or a sculpture—intensify the medium’s intricate relationship with duplication. They also disrupt the notion of artistic authorship: when working from a preexisting image, is the printmaker copying, interpreting, or inventing? This essay focuses on a print by Pietro Bettelini derived from a fresco by Annibale Carracci. This print, which belongs to the Columbia Art Properties Collection, is featured in the exhibition Contact: Community and Collaboration Across Five Centuries of Printmaking. The research conducted for this paper revealed that the cataloguing of the print when it first entered the collection presented some inaccuracies. Therefore, the first goal of this study is to update this information. It also investigates the ways in which the conversion from a sixteenth-century fresco to a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century print questions Carracci’s fortune, the technical rendering of pictorial effects, and the role of Bettelini as an author.

Reexamining Bettelini’s print: preliminary remarks 

Pietro Bettelini (1763–1829) was a Swiss artist who worked primarily as a reproductive printmaker of paintings by Italian artists such as Raphael, Correggio, Cristofano Allori, and Guido Reni. Born on September 6, 1763 in Caslano (Switzerland) near the Italian border, he first studied in Bologna under Gaetano Gandolfi, then in Paris at the Académie Royale with Charles-Nicolas Cochin. In 1781 he went to London, where he worked for several publishers and attended Francesco Bartolozzi’s engraving courses at the Royal Academy, exhibiting his work there in 1786.1
He eventually returned to Italy, first settling in Milan, where he won the first prize of the Accademia di Brera for his engraving after Bartolomeo Schedoni’s painting of Saint Mary Magdalene. Later on, he moved to Rome, where he held the chair of engraving at the Accademia di San Luca. He remained there until his death in 1829.2
 

The print in the Art Properties collection is part of a series of four prints (Fig. 1, 2, 3, 4) based on frescoes of the Farnese Gallery that Bettelini, perhaps working with studio assistants, produced for the publisher Pietro Paolo Montagnani-Mirabili (1785–1834).3
The print is based on one of the quadri riportati of the vault depicting Hercules and Iole (Fig. 5). The title of the work is thus Hercules and Iole rather than Hercules and Leonis, as the initial catalogue information indicated, probably because of a mistranslation of the Latin inscription, in which “Leonis” refers to the lion’s fur and not the name of the female figure. 

Furthermore, the catalogue entry dated the print from the sixteenth/seventeenth century, which does not match the artist’s lifetime. To date, research has not established an exact year for the print; however, one can assume that it was created between the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. There are two reasons for this assumption. First, Bettelini returned to Italy after 1786, therefore it is around this date that he could have gone to the Farnese Gallery to copy the frescoes. Second, the four prints were produced for Montagnani, a publisher active in Rome in the second half of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. This presumed dating is substantiated by Evelina Borea and Ginevra Mariani, who write in the catalogue Annibale Carracci e i suoi incisori that Bettelini “had already dealt with prints drawn from the Gallery,”4
referring to Bettelini’s collaboration with Giovanni Volpato for the engravings of views of the Farnese Gallery in 1775–1777. We can therefore date the print from the years 1775–1829.5

When the print entered the Art Properties collection, it was recorded as an engraving, which is confirmed by the observable clear pattern of hard and measured lines, with hatchings that are geometrically defined (Fig. 6). However, loose and curvy lines in some areas of the landscape, notably in details of the foliage (Fig. 7) or on the club (Fig. 8), appear to be etched. This would indicate that the technique is, in fact, a mix of engraving and etching. This is corroborated by the information from the Rijksmuseum, which also owns a copy of the print and describes its technique as engraving and etching.6
This is also the case in Borea and Mariani’s catalogue entry of the Bettelini prints.7
 

Lastly, the Latin inscription transcribed in the catalogue contained a few errors, and no translation has yet been provided.8
I propose the following: “Painted by Annibale Carracci; Engraved by Pietro Bettelini; Hercules subjected to the charms of women yields to Iole the lion’s skin and the club of which she draws pride / after Annibale Carracci’s picture in the Farnese Gallery / in Rome at Montagnani at Pasquino.”9

Reproducing the Farnese Gallery: a long tradition

The Farnese Gallery frescoes were commissioned by Odoardo Farnese from the Carracci family in 1594. The Bolognese painters created a monumental cycle of frescoes depicting mythological gods reduced to irrationality by love. They adapted Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel artistic vocabulary to the profane subject of the loves of gods in a secular space, also looking back to Raphael’s Loggia of Psyche in the ​​Villa Farnesina in Rome. In the seventeenth century, Giovan Pietro Bellori, one of the most famous commentators of this cycle, interpreted it as an allegory of the battle of celestial and terrestrial love.10
More recently, Charles Dempsey argued that the frescoes are a comic, satirical, and burlesque depiction of love victorious over the most powerful of men.11
From an aesthetic standpoint, the cycle has been praised for reconciling Lombard and Roman art, as well as drawing and color.12
From its creation, the fresco series has been seen as a major work, breaking away from the conventions of its time. For this reason, it was often copied by students during their training, but also by printmakers. As André Chastel stated when discussing the remarkable number of prints reproducing the Gallery, “The work of Annibale and his brother benefited in an exceptional way from the professional practice that they had so intelligently exercised.”13

Indeed, the Carracci developed a distinctive relationship with printmaking. From 1574 to 1590, Agostino produced a wide ensemble of reproductive engravings of Italian and European artists, while Annibale’s own works were being copied in prints.14
The fortune of Annibale’s works in prints increased significantly after 1630, when the Italian banker and aristocrat Vincenzo Giustiniani, who owned paintings by the Carracci, decided to have his art collection reproduced. Furthermore, around the same time, the Palazzo Farnese, which had been closed after Odoardo Farnese’s death, reopened, and in 1635, the complete reproduction of the Gallery’s frescoes was commissioned to Nicolas Mignard (1606–1668). Mignard ended up copying another cycle of the Palazzo Farnese, that of the Camerino, limiting himself to a few individual scenes of the Gallery, which he published in France in 1637. In 1641, the first set of engravings reproducing the whole cycle of the Gallery was produced by Jacques Belly (1609–1674). It was followed in 1657 by the publication of a set by Carlo Cesi (1622–1682), which had several reissues, including one in 1753 that Bettelini could have seen. Around 1680, Pietro Aquila published the complete cycle in two series, which were also frequently copied.15
By the eighteenth century, the production of prints after the Farnese Gallery frescoes and after the works of the Carracci in general had become scarcer.16
Two initiatives of reproduction of the cycle of frescoes involving Pietro Bettelini took place during this time.

In 1775, Giovanni Volpato (1740–1803) commissioned drawings of the Gallery Farnese to Francesco Panini and Ludovico Teseo. The artists had the idea of reproducing the immense decoration of the vault and walls as a view, introducing the floors and the windows.17
Several drawings were engraved by Volpato to produce precious plates which were watercolored and gilded and then sold at a very high price (Fig. 9). To produce more affordable plates, Volpato commissioned copper plate versions from Pietro Bettelini. The Swiss artist accentuated the effects of volume, light, and shadow (Fig. 10.)18
He also scraped the names of Teseo and Panini to write his own, affirming his authorship. These works depict visitors inside the Gallery, including students in the act of copying the frescoes. This reflexive detail illustrates the way in which the Farnese Gallery had come to be perceived as a privileged place of reproduction.

Bettelini then decided to create a new series of prints drawn from the Farnese Gallery, this time as the author of an interpretive design. He chose to reproduce three of the four quadri riportati of the vault — Juno and Jupiter, Hercules and Iole, and Diana and Endymion — as well as one of two large rectangular scenes in the center of the ceiling, Aurora and Cephalus. In the catalogue Annibale Carracci e i suoi incisori, Pietro Bettelini is the last artist included in the chronological section dedicated to reproductions of the Farnese Gallery. The series, produced for Montagnani as mentioned earlier, arrived at the tail-end of a long tradition of reproductive prints after the Gallery.

From wall to paper: the translation of Pietro Bettelini 

Like the other frescoes of the vault, the scene of Hercules and Iole has been the subject of much commentary. It depicts the episode in which the mythological hero, captivated by his love for Iole, queen of Lydia, surrenders his warrior’s club and lion’s fur and wears her gown while playing the tambourine. By showing a hero known for his strength as effeminate and submissive, the fresco reveals the hazardous consequences of love.19
The story appears in Ovid’s Heroides (IX:73–134) and Fasti (II:303–358) and in Polizianoʼs Stanze (I:14), but the fresco follows more closely Torquato Tasso in the Gerusalemme liberata (1581), in which the Italian poet describes this episode in a fictive ekphrasis of a sculpted relief on the door of Armida’s palace: “Here they saw Hercules, hero of the war / gossiping with the servant ladies, spinning; / he who had harrowed hell and borne the stars / now turns his loom. Love looked upon him, grinning, / while weakling Iole fulfilled the farce, / lugging his homicidal weapons, pinning / upon her girlish frame a lionʼs skin / too rough to clothe her tender members in!”20
In the Farnese Gallery fresco, the spindle has been replaced by a tambourine, but all the other elements of the poem are depicted, including Cupid appearing behind the couple and grinning.

Pietro Bettelini followed Annibale’s fresco quite closely, but made a few modifications. The first one is the changing of the format: the square fresco becomes a vertical rectangle, extending the upper part of the composition. While the original image stops at the head of the little Cupid, Bettelini enlarges the top of the composition, extending the area devoted to the sky.21
He also extends the lateral sides of the composition, giving more importance to the tree, which appears in full and is brought forward. Finally, the lower part of the composition, which ends at the feet of Hercules in the fresco, continues with the soil in the foreground, creating a greater sense of depth. Annibale, painting on a ceiling, focused his composition on the main characters, giving a sense of immediacy, while Bettelini placed his figures further away from the viewer and gave more importance to the landscape. The printmaker eliminated all ornaments surrounding the fresco and created an illusionary geometrical frame. It is also worth noting that, contrary to Jacques Belly who reversed the composition, Bettelini kept the fresco in its original composition, meaning that he had to design the plate by inverting Carracci’s fresco, as the printing process would reverse it.

The passage from fresco to print implied a conversion from wall to paper, large to small, color to monochrome, paint to ink, and strokes to lines. To render pictorial effects, Bettelini used a combination of engraving and etching. The volume of the bodies, expressed with light and shadow in the fresco, is conveyed through a dense network of geometrical engraved lines. The aspect of Iole’s thigh and buttocks is modified by the weight of her body — probably in reference to a female figure in Raphael’s fresco of the wedding feast of Cupid and Psyche, which was very famously praised at the time for its realistic appearance. This naturalistic detail is expressed by Carracci with lighter and darker tones of carnation (Fig. 11), while Bettelini uses three patterns of lines traced in three different directions to render the body’s volume (Fig. 12). The capacity of monochrome engraving to translate color is a central issue when discussing reproductive prints. The eighteenth-century connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette considered that Rubens “gave new rules to engravers” as he “taught them that with only black and white they could imitate perfectly all the effects of chiaroscuro and render different colour tones.”22
In the description of the sky, Bettelini cannot transcribe Annibale’s technique of a blue dotted pattern which, according to Silvia Ginzburg, is a solution borrowed from Raphael, resulting in a vibrating effect of light in the background.23
To compensate for the impossibility of employing this specifically pictorial technique, Bettelini added details of clouds in the sky, depicted with geometrical patterns of engraved lines creating volume. In other details such as the foliage, he added etching, giving vibrating energy to the landscape.

The translation from the sixteenth-century fresco to the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century print also operated a stylistic transformation. The two characters reflect a neoclassical style. Their facial expressions are softened, Hercules’ body is less muscular, Iole is less authoritative, and Cupid is gently smiling rather than grinning. These transformations give a light and graceful atmosphere to the scene, better corresponding to eighteenth-century taste. One also has to remember that the large fresco was seen from afar, and therefore Annibale had to accentuate facial expressions, while with an engraving, meant to be seen from up close, Bettelini could make use of more nuanced details. This consideration for details is reflected in the depiction of hair, each one being neatly traced and delineated, whereas Carracci did not have to go into such precision and only represented the hair as a mass. Minor elements are also modified: Bettelini strongly insists on a crack on the column, barely visible on the fresco. This can perhaps be interpreted in the light of the late eighteenth-century renewed admiration for ruins of classical antiquity encouraged by the Grand Tour. In his reproductive print, Bettelini is not trying to capture Carracci’s style as much as translating the work into his own. This approach is perceptible in his other works such as the Ecce Homo from Correggio, in which Christ’s face is transformed; like Hercules, he is given wider eyes (Fig. 13). By reproducing works and reinventing them in his own style, Bettelini reminds us that imitation was not a concept loaded with negative connotations at the time, and that reproductive printmakers could claim originality and authorship in their practice, as well as achieve personal fame.24

To conclude: reproductive print and authorship 

When defining reproductive prints, Alexandra M. Korey distinguishes a copy, which is a direct rendering of a text or an image made to look exactly the same as the original, from a reproduction, which implies selecting some elements, accentuating and distorting some features, and therefore foregrounding the printmaker’s own aesthetic.25
Bettelini having erased the names of the designers of the 1775 engravings, it is clear that he sought to promulgate his own. Through the modifications that he introduced, considerably more important than Belly’s or Cesi’s (Fig. 14 and 15), he expressed a desire to establish his own identity as a designer of reproductive prints. Moreover, the function of reproductive prints was often to allow images to circulate and become known to a broader public, thus participating in forging a common visual culture.26
However, as we have seen, by the eighteenth century the Farnese Gallery was already part of that shared culture. As such, Bettelini’s print did not have the aim of diffusing Annibale’s fresco, but rather affirming the artist’s own neoclassical style — a style that would meet the taste of a potential collector. 

• 1 “Bettelini, Pietro,” Benezit Dictionary of Artists, last modified October 31, 2011, accessed March 23, 2022, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/benezit/view/10.1093/benz/9780199773787.001.0001/acref-9780199773787-e-00018788.
• 2Anastasia Gilardi, “Bettelini, Pietro,” Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (DHS), last modified May 18, 2004, accessed March 23, 2022, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/044609/2004-05-18/.
• 3Evelina Borea and Ginevra Mariani, Annibale e i suoi incisori (Rome: École française de Rome, 1986), 201.
• 4“L’incisore si era gia occupato di stampe tratte della galleria,” Borea and Mariani, 201.
• 5Even if it is more likely that Bettelini made the print after 1786, it seems more cautious to adopt a broader dating, using the Volpato prints as a reference point (1775) rather than the date of his return to Italy, which is not certain.
• 6inv. no. RP-P-1949-425.
• 7Borea and Mariani, 201.
• 8The correct transcription is the following: “Inscribed below image lower left: Ann Carracci pinx.; inscribed below image lower right: Petrus Bettelini sculp.; inscribed lower center: Hercules muliebribus oblectamentis indulgens leonis exuvias et clauam Jole cessit quibus ipsa superbit. / Ex pictura Hannibalis Carracci Romae in aedibus farnesianis / Romae apud Montagnani ad Pafquinum.” Neither Evelina Borea and Ginevra Mariani nor any museum or library that owns the print (such as the Rijksmuseum, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, or the Instituto Centrale per la Grafica) have provided a translation of the Latin inscription.
• 9Paolo Montagnani-Mirabili was located on the Piazza del Pasquino in Rome. “Pietro Paolo Montagnani,” The British Museum, accessed April 5, 2022, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG144691.
• 10Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• 11Charles Dempsey, “‘Et Nos Cedamus Amori’: Observations on the Farnese Gallery,” The Art Bulletin 50, no. 4 (1968): 363-374.
• 12Annie Gilet, Giovanni Volpato: les Loges de Raphaël et la Galerie du Palais Farnèse (Tours: Musée des Beaux-arts, 2007), 43.
• 13“L’ouvrage d’Annibale et de son frère a bénéficié de façon exceptionnelle de la procédure professionnelle qu’ils avaient si intelligemment pratiquée.” André Chastel, in Borea and Mariani, IX. The translation is my own.
• 14Borea and Mariani, IX.
• 15Other artists, such as Louis de Chatillon (1639-1734), Giovanni Battista Galestruzzi (1618-1677), Simon Thomassin (1652-1732), and Domenico Cunego (1727-1784) also reproduced individual frescoes from the Gallery.
• 16Borea and Mariani, XV-XXVII.
• 17Borea and Mariani, XXVI.
• 18Gilet, 198.
• 19Esthy Kravitz-Lurie, “Hercules and Rinaldo: Annibale Carracciʼs Invenzione of Tassoʼs Epic Hero,” Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts 3, no. 2 (2016): 135.
• 20Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Gerusalemme liberata, Canto XVI:3, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000).
• 21The extended space of his invention covers almost one-sixth of the plate.
• 22Quoted in Rebecca Zorach, Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800 (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005), 19.
• 23Silvia Ginzburg, La Galerie Farnèse: les fresques des Carrache à l'ambassade de France à Rome (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 81.
• 24On this matter, see Alexandra M. Korey, “Creativity, Authenticity, and the Copy in Early Print Culture” in Zorach, 31-50; and Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi. Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
• 25Alexandra M. Korey, “Creativity, Authenticity, and the Copy in Early Print Culture,” in Zorach, 32.
• 26Zorach, VII.