Chances are you’ve never been to the Louvre to see the “Mona Lisa,” but that doesn’t put you at much of a disadvantage. The painting’s likeness is in books, on postcards, and everywhere online.

Imagine none of those reproductions exist. If you want to see that famous smile, a trip to Paris is your only option.

Five hundred years ago, every image, even a celebrated one, was unique, and few could see it. Then something came along that made it possible to create copies for a wider audience: prints.

An exhibition at the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecticut looks at printmaking from its 15th-century origins to the arrival of another invention in the 19th.

“Prints and People Before Photography, 1490-1825” uses the museum’s collection to show how shared images expanded knowledge, celebrated the famous and created propaganda. But the most interesting story traces the complex relationship between prints and paintings.

Take “The Temptation of Christ by the Devil,” a 1630s woodcut based on a painting by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. The artist who made the woodcut, Christoffel Jegher, couldn’t capture the subtleties of every brushstroke in the original, but his work, one of carved lines rather than colors, is richly detailed in its own right.

Still, this isn’t a Rubens painting we’re looking at, but rather the bones of one. The outlines are reproduced while hues and shadings are rendered as something like a good sketch.

How did the artist feel about this reduction of his work in a more basic medium?

To 21st-century eyes, accustomed to photographic fidelity, it might appear a crude forgery, the craftsmanship notwithstanding. But Rubens saw it differently.

A businessman as well as a painter, he viewed prints as a way to spread his reputation and earn money. Accordingly, he employed a workshop of painters and engravers to copy his work under his watchful eye. Then, rather than outsource the results to a printmaker, he even had prints made in-house so the final product met his standards.

When “The Temptation of Christ” was published, those who could afford a copy got a semblance of Rubens’ original without visiting the Church of St. Charles Borromeo in Antwerp, where it was painted on the ceiling.

But this print also served a more far-reaching purpose the artist couldn’t foresee. In 1718, long after his death, lightning struck the church, starting a fire that destroyed 39 ceiling pieces by Rubens, including “Temptation.” Jegher’s woodcut preserves something of the original for us to see today.

For some artists, like Rembrandt, prints were a vehicle for original works. He was a master of etching as well as painting, and one of his last creations in the former medium, “Peter and John Healing the Cripple at the Gate of the Temple,” is among those on view. Its finely drawn lines subtly capture both human figures and architectural details.

Other painters had a cooperative relationship with the printmaking industry as it became a force in 16th-century Europe. Some publishers commissioned designs from artists, then made prints themselves.

A scene called “View of the Tiber” is the product of a journey to Italy by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who, unlike Rubens, didn’t keep total control over his work. In this case he supplied a drawing to publisher Hieronymous Cock, whose engravers took it from there.

Cock, a pioneer of the industry, helped transform printmaking from an individual effort to one driven by division of labor, and his house published 100 prints a year.

“Reproductive” prints of great masters were big sellers in Italy, where draftsmen were dispatched to churches and palaces to copy paintings for conversion. This was seen as “an act of translation” rather than piracy, and sometimes the original artist was credited jointly with the publisher or engraver.

The exhibition doesn’t delve into the mechanics of different print types, but broadly, they fall into two categories: “relief,” exemplified by woodcuts, where the surface of the image is inked with the rest carved away; and “intaglio,” including engraving and etching, which are more or less the opposite.

With engraving, the image is carved into a metal plate, and the grooves hold the ink. Etching is similar, the plate covered with a waxy substance that’s carved, exposing the metal. Acid is then applied, leaving lines in the plate.

One print shows a different intaglio technique called mezzotint, or half-tone, in which an image is produced at better quality with thousands of dots rather than lines. Robert Dunkarton’s “Sextus, Son of Pompey” looks like a grayscale painting, and the technique was big in 18th-century London.

Line-based prints like engravings also achieved a high degree of art. Claude Mellan’s “Head of Christ” is especially fascinating. The subject is the face of Jesus imprinted on St. Veronica’s veil, but look closely and you see this is an image composed not of many lines, but just one. From the tip of the nose, it spirals outward in widening circles, varying in thickness to form the entire picture.

Prints were also visual travelogues, some documenting vanished buildings, from ancient ruins in 18th-century Rome to German churches bombed in World War II. But one subject was especially vulnerable to dispute: newsworthy events. Drama and timeliness were incentives for unauthorized copies.

When British troops fired on an American mob in 1770, Henry Pelham drew a picture of the scene. Before he could have it printed, he unwisely gave it to a silversmith named Paul Revere, who engraved and sold it himself, creating the enduring image of what became known as the Boston Massacre.

Then the depiction was copied again by a London magazine, whose version is the one on display, twice removed from its unheralded creator.

Pelham didn’t benefit from the Engraver’s Act, a law passed by Parliament 35 years earlier at the urging of another artist. William Hogarth had seen his works copied without permission and helped secure legal protection for images instead of physical prints, the previous standard.

Hogarth held off publishing an engraving of his own painting “Southwark Fair” until the Engraver’s Act was law. But in the interim, rival copyists memorized the details of his original, which was being exhibited, and sold their version first.

The artist’s own print, which is on view, and his painting together embody the sometimes uneasy coexistence of two media whose stories are linked for better and worse.

j.ruddy@theday.com

IF YOU GO

What: “Prints and People Before Photography, 1490-1825”

Where: The William Benton Museum of Art, 245 Glenbrook Road, Storrs

When: Through Dec. 17

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 1-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

Admission: Free

Information: https://benton.uconn.edu