Ignorance and Mercury (an allegory of Virtue and Vice), Mercury kneeling at right holding a staff and taking the hand of a man who emerges from a pile of naked bodies, at left a tree with the torso and head of a woman (Daphne)

Printmaking in woodcut and engraving came to Northern Italy within a few decades of their invention north of the Alps. Engraving probably came first to Florence in the 1440s, the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra (1426–64) used the technique. Italian engraving caught the very early Renaissance, 1460–1490. Print copying was a widely accepted practice, as well as copying of paintings viewed as images in their own right.