ABSTRACT
Throughout the early modern period, copies played an important reproductive role in the visual culture of Western Europe. Although prints could and did duplicate the subject matter and format of an image, the colour, style and particular qualities of the original medium were absent. Before the 19th-century development of planographic and photo-mechanical techniques of reproduction, copying a painting in the same medium as the original was one of the few viable means to achieve a close replication of all its qualities. The copy and copying were thus important both to the practices of the consumers who commissioned or purchased such images and to those of the artists who made them.
