Apostel Judas Taddeüs met een zaag 1583

Agostino Carracci made this engraving of the Apostle Jude Thaddeus sometime before 1602. The halo identifies him, and his attribute, the saw, reminds us of his martyrdom. Carracci was working in Bologna at a time when the Catholic Church was looking for ways to reinvigorate religious art. His family workshop produced prints as part of a broader strategy to disseminate a reformed style. Consider how this small print would have circulated. Inexpensive prints allowed the masses to have access to devotional images. At the same time, prints were collected by connoisseurs as artworks in their own right. A print such as this one, therefore, served two distinct social functions. To understand the image more fully we can look to the historical and textual sources that would have been available to Carracci. In particular, we might consider the institutional history of the Church’s printing and publishing initiatives during the Counter-Reformation. Art history helps us understand the changing role of art in society.