Rare engraving by Diana Mantovana (c. 1547-1612).

[Women engravers] / Diana Scultori / Diana Mantovana / Correggio. Mi faber est nutrix. Mater pauperrima veste / Me tegit, at caelo cessat uterque labor. [La Sacra Famiglia, i.e., Madonna della cesta]. Rome: Carlo Losi, 1577 [1744]. [37.3 x 27.9 cm, 41.5 x 33.2 cm the backing sheet], [1] f. engraving, hinged to laid paper, thread margins or trimmed to border line, two unidentified collector’s stamps at bottom right corner, various inventory annotations to engraving and backing sheet.
 
 
Rare engraving (third state of three) of the Holy Family executed in 1577 by the celebrated printmaker Diana Mantovana (c. 1547-1612), also known as Diana Scultori. The subject is a painting by Correggio known as the Madonna of the Basket (Madonna della cesta) (c. 1525; now preserved in the London National Gallery). 
 
The engraving is one of just seventy-seven prints attributed to Diana by Paolo Bellini in his catalogue raisonné of her work. He locates only one example if Diana Scultori’s Madonna della cesta in the U.S. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, also the third state), and I fine a further copy at the Harvard Art Museums (second state).
 
Diana Mantovana, in addition to being a skillful and creative artist, was an important figure in the development of privileges to protect a printmaker’s right to make reproductive engravings of certain subjects. She did this by applying directly to the Pope: “The earliest known example of this method of direct petition seems to have been the privilege granted by Gregory XIII to Diana Mantovana on 5 June 1576” (M. Bury, p 128). Note that here she proclaims her exclusive right to Correggio’s Madonna della cesta though the addition of the inscription “Gregorii XIII PM Privilegio.”
 
 
*P. Bellini, L’Opera incisa di Adamo e Diana Scultori, p. 222-23, no. 36, ill. 261; Bartsch, Le Peintre graveur, vol. XV, p. 440, no. 19; Michael Bury, The Print in Italy, 1550-1620; Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-Century Venice and Rome, pp. 181-86.