The Flagellation

The Croatian engraver, painter and sculptor Martino Rota has been called “the last disciple of Marcantonio Raimondi” (1480-1534), an Italian engraver who gained fame for his reproductive prints after Raphael (1483-1520) and other Renaissance artists. Rota often signed his name with his birthplace, Sebenico, appended, but the first records of him are in Rome around 1540. Already during this Roman period, Rota was making prints after Titian (ca. 1488–1576) and working with that artist’s principal engraver, the Fleming Cornelis Cort (ca. 1533–1578), as well as the most distinguished Roman publishers of the day, including Antonio Lafréry, whose magnum opus was the Speculum magnificentiae romanae , or the "Mirror of Roman Magnificence." Rota appears to have settled in Venice around 1558. During several years when Cort was absent from the city, it is plausible that Rota replaced him as Titian’s main engraver of reproductions. In 1568, Rota left Venice for Vienna and a position at the imperial court that Titian’s connections may have helped him secure.

This engraving after Titian’s Flagellation exhibits a confident, mature technique that is exemplary of the tight, sculptural style espoused by the influential printmakers Marcantonio Raimondi and Albrecht Dürer. The subject, the Flagellation, is an episode from the Passion story, before Christ’s crucifixion.