This article considers printmaking and photography as media of inscription in late nineteenth-century Mexican archaeology. Specifically, it analyzes a debate about the relative virtues of drawn and photographic archaeological images between the Mexican polymath Antonio Peñafiel (1830–1922) and the British and French-American explorers Alice Dixon Le Plongeon (1851–1910) and Augustus Le Plongeon (1826–1908). Peñafiel, tasked with assembling comprehensive documentation of Mexico’s patrimony, found the constructed image of the print an ideal venue for demonstrating national scientific accomplishment, while the Le Plongeons celebrated the apparent presence and documentary holism afforded by photography. However, despite contentious epistemic debates about how scientists should navigate an unsettled ecology of nineteenth-century reproductive media, archival materials in the GRI collections reveal these scholars’ practices to be thoroughly intermedial. This article argues for further attention to local cultures of archaeological knowledge- and image-making as well as a complication of the frequently coupled historiographies of nineteenth-century archaeology and photography.

A close study of Mantegna's Entombment engraving reveals how Mantegna inscribed into the facture of his engravings their ephemerality and destruction. Mantegna's prints introduced a new paper form of perpetuation into western European art, a form of continuation founded not in the endurance of the material but in the kinesis of the material. Through this movement, Mantegna's engravings were translated into other mediums and achieved a new form of continuation reliant not on the original but on the act of copying.

This paper investigates the series of etchings that German-born Catholic convert artist Mattheus Greuter produced in Rome to illustrate Galileo Galilei’s 1613 astronomical publication on sunspots. Greuter used an experimental copperplate etching technique that subsumed Galileo’s observation-based conclusions about the sunspots’ ontological essence, and adapted an exceptionally subtle linear manner from devotional prints, their fine style inflecting Lucretian mechanics and metaphors of vision, and complicating early modern perceptions regarding northern lines as inherently devout and accurate. Greuter’s sunspots capture the poignancy of the all-too-brief historical moment in which Galileo, the German diaspora artist, Jesuit scientists, and Roman inquisitors might coexist.

"Looking for the Longitude" was published as a sequence over 12 days to coincide with the anniversary of the Hogarth Act, culminating on 25 June. Looking for “the Longitude” takes us on an interactive exploration of the ‘Longitude Problem’, drawing in contributions from experts in the field as it grows. Locating a detail from the final plate of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress as its starting point, the article will unfold over subsequent weeks to include a range of connected images and objects, including a Twitter tour of associated places and sites.

This article and checklist present the contents of the Spencer Album of Marcantonio Raimondi prints, long considered to be lost. By examining its composition and tracing its provenance from the Spencer collection at Althorp House to the John Rylands Library, Manchester, we offer new insight into how attitudes toward Marcantonio Raimondi’s work evolved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in Great Britain. Our article also explores Victorian collecting practices and the importance of the graphic arts for Mrs Rylands vision for the Library to be dedicated to her late husband’s memory.

Over the course of the twentieth century, numerous artists and theorists sought to challenge the historical bias toward vision in Western culture by reclaiming touch as a key perceptual modality. At the Bauhaus, a revived emphasis on haptic perception became a fundamental component of the school’s philosophy and curriculum. Of the artists and educators associated with the school, Josef and Anni Albers were among the most committed proponents of touch. In some of their works on paper, they exploited the inseparability of visual and haptic perception: Josef attempted to emulate kinaesthetic experience in a series of photo-collage portraits; he thematised touch in several cork and wood relief prints; he and Anni replaced visually perceptible forms with haptically perceptible designs in their inkless intaglio prints; and she attempted to simulate the haptic manipulation of knots through vision in a number of drawings and prints. This paper considers the interplay of vision and touch in these works in relation to both artists’ larger ambition – reflected in their teaching and theoretical writing – of sharpening what they saw to be a deteriorating sense of touch in modern society. The multi-faceted notion of haptic perception in cognitive psychology is defined and applied to these artworks, and the central role of touch in Josef’s teaching and Anni’s theoretical writing is examined in the context of their pioneering Bauhaus colleagues Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, and Otti Berger.