What was the role of copies in the early modern art market? Why were copies produced, and how were they made? What methods do we have for identifying copies, variants, quotations, and reproductions? What was the role of the copy in relation to an original, and how was that relationship understood and valued? To what extent can we answer these questions, and to what extent are the answers we locate universally true across temporal and cultural boundaries? These are just a few of the many questions that the authors of this volume address.

In sum, the essays may raise more questions than they answer, but this is not a drawback, nor is it unintended. Over the last thirty years, the topic of copies has been extensively discussed in relation to originality in the age of mechanical reproduction, but much remains to be discussed surrounding the role of the copy in western Europe in the early modern period. The titular word copy is used broadly in reference to the repetition of the style, subject, form, material, purpose, or spirit of a work. It is here applied as a catch-all term that can describe a wide range of nuanced terminologies for related concepts addressed in these essays, including partial copies, visual quotations, stylistic reproductions, figurative models, phantom copies, and variants. The central premise of the text is that, in all these forms, the copy is ubiquitous and simultaneously introduces something novel.

The topics covered in the sixteen essays that comprise this volume, edited by Maddalena Bellavitis, represent a wide variety of backgrounds and approaches. Each essay addresses a specific aspect of the early modern copy relating to workshop practice, models, the market, contracts, taste, or patronage, providing examples of the many avenues of research in this area. The result is a remarkably unified glimpse of an expansive subject. The essays primarily focus on specific artists, workshops, or series, with more theoretical interpretation and placement of the topic within broader historiographic contexts left to the insightful introduction by Peter M. Lukehart.

The volume is well illustrated and organized chronologically, spanning roughly two hundred years of production primarily in Spain, Flanders, Italy, and the Netherlands. The essays range in topic, from hyper-local individual or workshop practices to regional traditions and cross-cultural communication of themes and images. While not organized by location or approach, topics broadly germane to the issue of copies, such as perceived cultural and actual monetary values of copies; taste and patronage; identification of copies and the use of models; and concepts of authenticity, run as strong thematic currents throughout the text. Additionally, some artists, such as Titian, van Eyck, and Raphael, are referenced in multiple essays due to their popularity, mobility, or technical practice, lending cohesion to the volume.

There are moments of wonderful resonance and indirect conversation between the essays which allow the reader to build connections considered, but not constructed for them, by the editor. This is exemplified by the discussion of devotional images by Caterina Virdis Limentani and Carmen Morte García, who address the topic in Aragon, and Catheline Périer-D'Ieteren, whose essay focuses on images of Virgin and Child in the Netherlands. Barbara von Barghahn addresses cross-cultural quotation and understanding a lost original through copies in her discussion of van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait and Woman and Her Toilette, while the question of loss also appears in Leslie Blacksburg's discussion of ephemeral copies and trans-media variants of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece. Angela Ho explores the economy of artists’ copies of their own work in the Dutch market, while Irene Brooke examines Italian artist Giulio Campagnola's copies after other artists. Encarna Montero Tortajada touches on both these discussions in her analysis of artists in eastern Spain contracted not only to copy their own work and works by fellow artists but also to complete unfinished projects begun by others.

The collected essays will be of interest to early modernists in a broad range of disciplines but may be of particular interest to those interested in the art market and cross-cultural studies.