Mercury and the Three Graces (after Jacopo Tintoretto)

Agostino Carracci was one of the most highly esteemed engravers of the sixteenth century. According to his seventeenth-century biographer, all who compared Carracci’s reproductive prints to the original models were inspired to lobby for a law declaring that he alone should be permitted to make engravings after the most celebrated artists in Venice—Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, and Palma. In this instance, Carracci has made changes to Tintoretto’s painting in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice. He has enlarged the space surrounding the figures and expanded the landscape, a compositional choice which moves the viewer farther away from the figures’ space.