Madonna and Child (after Guercino)

According to legend, St. Luke sat before the Virgin and painted her portrait. His picture, empowered with the holiness of its subject, was venerated as miraculous. Because this holiness was considered transferable through likeness, the purported copies of Luke’s image occupied a special place in Christian artistic tradition.

Bartolozzi’s depiction of this subject, which is a copy of a painting by Guercino, illustrates the important role of printed reproductions in transmitting these central images of the Christian faith—a technological extension, in many ways, of Luke’s original act of portraiture.