From the beginning, you cannot miss the power of the medium. Andrea Mantegna’s Entombment is overwrought with figures in various postures of lamentation and distress. At the left of the image, one man strains under the weight of Christ’s mutilated body. Behind the supine Christ, a trio of figures gesticulates and weeps. Further to the right, one woman seems to have fainted from shock; a distraught woman tends to her, while yet another looks on; a standing man at the far edge of the composition clasps his hands above his chest and bellows his pain into the clouded sky. At the picture’s very centre stands a bearded figure, behind whom, hollowed from jagged rocks, the slashing void of the dead god’s grave threatens to engulf the world itself.

Prints, woodcuts, and engravings were new for fifteenth-century Europeans, who took to the media like ducks to water. Philip II of Spain authorised the printing of fifteen thousand breviaries to ensure that his priests would perform their duties in a standardised way, while the Holy Royal Emperor Maximilian I commanded the production of an incredible multi-block Triumphal Arch (in which Dürer and Altdorfer had a hand), copies of which were sent across his vast dominion. As Francis Bacon, corrupt lord chancellor of England and buccinator of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, declaimed in his Novum Organum (1620): ‘Printing, gunpowder, and the compass: these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.’ You can see his point. With print, images do not just travel across established boundaries, but also establish new boundaries – even new kinds of boundaries – as they travel. Print was vital to the domestication, even the banalisation, of images, not merely through mass-reproducibility, but also through the print-image’s complicated relationships to other artworks.

Take Marcantonio Raimondi, a decisive figure in printmaking history, who got himself into hot water for counterfeiting a large number of Dürer’s designs, complete with the famous monogram; he was also briefly incarcerated by Pope Clement VII for a saucy series of sixteen sexual positions, based on the drawings of Giulio Romano. Marcantonio’s rip-offs were, however, of a piece with his entrepreneurial sensitivity to print’s powers of simulation and dissemination. Marcantonio is represented here by two engravings, an emblematic Poetry (c.1515) and a set-piece Martyrdom of St Cecilia (c.1520–25), both adapted from originals by Raphael. In the former, a heavy-set angel is seated upon clouds, her finely feathered wings outspread. She clutches a lyre in her left hand, her right propping up a heavy tome on her knee. Flanked by two putti with sandwich boards, she stares off stage left, a faraway look in her eyes. Marcantonio’s work exemplifies some of the characteristic features of print: the bleaching of image, the primacy of line and its relation to tonal values, the rendering of form through painstaking bundles of marks.

Ugo da Carpi, after Baldassarre Peruzzi, Hercules chasing Avarice from the Temple of the Muses, c.1516–17, chiaroscuro woodcut, 30 x 22.9 cm, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

It was not only Marcantonio’s technical innovations, but also his propensity for copying, that set a real trend. So we find Giovanni Antonio da Brescia copying Marcantonio in his turn, Ugo da Carpi copying Baldassarre Peruzzi (a stunning chiaroscuro woodcut of Hercules chasing Avarice from the Temple of the Muses), Giovanni Britto copying Titian, and so on. Of course, even to name this ‘copying’ is to misrepresent the spirit of print, which puts into question the relation between a model and its derivatives.

Among the most extraordinary works here are Piranesi’s. Born in Venice before moving to Rome in 1740, Piranesi was master of many modes. Architect, set-designer, engraver, draftsman, archaeologist, furniture and fireplace designer, author, and bookseller, Piranesi catered to Grand Tourists, the lettered public and erudite antiquarians – to his great commercial advantage. His prints fuse a variety of genres, including set-designs, views of Rome, and capricci, and generate an extraordinary intensity. The Skeletons (1747–49), an architectural, sculptural and pastoral medley – complete with rotting skulls and moss-laden remains – is a print ‘allegorical of itself’, as Stéphane Mallarmé would later denominate one of his poems. Here, an esoteric, enigmatic subject which patently withholds itself from any absolute decoding is treated with a variety and detail of line, an overgoing virtuosity that induces an attentiveness to tiny marks, to endless contemplation. The relation between an image and its conditions has become a central theme for the print itself.

If you missed the show, you can still pick up the accompanying publication. Nicely designed, carefully organised, stuffed with superlative reproductions and short informative notes on the printmakers by Maria Zagala, the exhibition’s curator, there is something to hold your attention on every page.

Perhaps the best thing about our current situation, which puts so many received notions into question, is that it enables us to see old works with new eyes. Not only can we now appreciate prints for all they did that was previously ignored or misunderstood, considered subordinate or second-rate – such as their contributions to religious, political, linguistic and aesthetic revolutions – but we can also finally appreciate what first-rate works of art some of them really are.