Reproductie van Christus op het stro door Peter Paul Rubens before 1877

This is Joseph Maes's reproduction of Peter Paul Rubens’s “Christ on the Straw,” a print made sometime around the turn of the 20th century. The printmaking process is crucial here, allowing for the wide dissemination of an image that would otherwise be available only to those with access to the original painting. But let's consider the implications of that fact. In Rubens’s time, paintings were made primarily for wealthy patrons, often to convey messages of power, authority and religious narrative. But with reproductive technologies, and especially inexpensive ones like this, those images become accessible to a mass audience, and their meanings are potentially subverted. You can see how this process could be considered either a democratization, or even a debasement, of the original artistic intention. The value, then, lies not only in the image itself, but in its expanded circulation, and the attendant shift in social context.