Learning, memory and collecting practice: the copy and its uses in Hispanic late Gothic

Abstract

The text analyses the different functions assumed by copying in the late mediaeval period: as a tool for learning in artistic workshops, as recognition of the authorship of a master or a celebrated work, and as a sort of label or code of identity for a collection. The common nexus of these multifaceted functions is that they share in a positive consideration of the practice of copying, whereas they distance it by contrast from its undervaluation in later periods owing to its presumed counterposition with the concepts of originality and artistic quality.