Saint Joachim Holding a Censer, from The Angel Appearing to Zacharias, after Andrea del Sarto

The little known Vito worked as a reproductive engraver before retiring young to a monastery. The same personality, hermetic and involuted, seems evident in this very rare print. It is unusual first in addressing a motif from an early 16th-century Florentine prototype, one of Andrea del Sarto’s frescoes in the cloister of the church of Santissima Annunziata. More unusual still, it translates the motif into a style of less inflected line work and even tonality that revives the language of Marcantonio Raimondi and his immediate followers. Indeed, were the engraving not dated, it might be confused with one of a half-century earlier.