Baccio Baldini (Italian, c. 1436-1487)
text by Antonio Bettini, Bishop of Foligno (Italian, 1396-1487)
The Holy Mountain, folio 3 from The Holy Mountain (Monte Sancto di Dio)
INV-2976
Baccio Baldini (Italian, c. 1436-1487)
text by Antonio Bettini, Bishop of Foligno (Italian, 1396-1487)1477
The Holy Mountain, folio 3 from The Holy Mountain (Monte Sancto di Dio)
Baccio Baldini (Italian, c. 1436-1487) text by Antonio Bettini, Bishop of Foligno (Italian, 1396-1487) →engravingprint
Date
1477
Medium
Engraving in black with letterpress on verso, on ivory laid paper
Dimensions
Plate: 25.7 × 18.5 cm (10 1/8 × 7 5/16 in.); Sheet: 27.5 × 18.9 cm (10 7/8 × 7 1/2 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Purchased with funds provided by the Blum-Kovler Foundation
A pair of prints from opposite sides of the Alps demonstrates the didactic capabilities of devotional printmaking. Both depict a sacred mountain that the soul must climb toward heaven. In Baccio Baldini’s extremely early engraved book illustration of an Italianate ladder of virtues, a monk successfully ascends, while a fashionable young man is dragged away by a demon representing worldly pleasures. Its thistle-laden German counterpart (1947.473) consists of banderole rungs filled with xylographic text and a crowned Christ waiting in glory. A nun kneeling at the bottom may have commissioned the print. She envisions a torturous journey up the steep incline, her twelve-step program advocating different Christian virtues: faith, generosity, modesty, constancy, justice, strength, will, patience, obedience, humility and at long last, divinity.