Later Prints and Printmaking

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LATER PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING

Alongside the woodcut, engraving emerged in the fifteenth century as another technique for printing images on paper, but one with different historical roots. Engraving on metal for decorative purposes was very old when, some decades after the appearance of the first woodcuts, engraved lines were filled with ink and printed. Unlike woodcut lines, which are produced negatively by cutting away the wood between them, the engraved line is incised directly into a metal plate with a chisel-like tool known as a burin. The direct correspondence between the engraved and the printed line, as well as the greater flexibility and variety of its lines, made engraving more responsive than woodcut to the mimetic and aesthetic goals of early modern artists, and after initially being associated with goldsmiths, it was taken up by painters like Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) and Martin Schongauer (c. 1430/50–1491). In its size, compositional complexity, and pictorial effects, Schongauer's Bearing of the Cross of c. 1475 more nearly resembles a small monochrome painting than a contemporary woodcut.

Although mostly portraying religious subjects, the secular and classical themes of early engravings, such as Mantegna's splendid Battle of the Sea Gods (printed from two plates and stretching to nearly three feet in length) point to a more educated and affluent public than that aimed at by woodcuts. With Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), however, who devoted greater attention to printmaking than any earlier artist, woodcut acquired the sophistication of engraving and engraving attained unprecedented pictorial and plastic force. Dürer's Apocalypse of 1498, which joined full-page, woodcut illustrations to the biblical text, was the first book to be designed and published by an artist, a practice also adopted by William Blake (1757–1827) for the pictures and poetry of his "illuminated" books. The Apocalypse, along with other sets of prints, as well as single-leaf woodcuts and engravings, were peddled from their native Nuremberg to fairs as far away as Frankfurt by Dürer's mother and wife. Easily transportable, these images on paper traveled widely, enhancing the artist's fame and becoming part of the first print collections.

Prints brought fame not only to their makers, but in an age before photography, to what they represented. Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480–c. 1534), who made pirated copies after Dürer's prints, later collaborated with Raphael to reproduce the artist's paintings in engravings. Such reproductive prints, which made an artist's ideas readily accessible to a distant audience, became an increasingly important part of printmaking and were soon joined by representations of architecture and sculpture. By the eighteenth century, cheap copies of reproductive prints were being produced, and William Hogarth (1697–1764) not only issued more expensive and less expensive versions of his works, but was also instrumental in the passage of the Engraver's Copyright Act of 1735, which enabled "Designers, Engravers, Etchers, &c." to protect their work.

The technical mastery achieved by professional engravers like Cornelis Cort (1533–1578) and Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) in the later sixteenth century led to remarkable displays of virtuosity. In Claude Mellan's Veil of St. Veronica (1649) the swelling and thinning of a single, spiraling line beginning at Christ's nose models the entire face, and in Pierre-Imbert Drevet's Portrait of Cardinal Dubois (1724, after Hyacinthe Rigaud) the burin produces the most stunning effects of varied textures.

After the sixteenth century, most artists who worked their own plates preferred etching to engraving. Etched lines are bitten into the plate by acid after the artist scratches through a thin, acid-impervious coating to expose the metal below. The relative ease with which the metal is exposed imparts a greater freedom to the etched line than one finds in the necessarily more formalized and typically geometricized line produced by the engraver's burin. Although Dürer made three etchings and Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538) and his followers used the technique for representing the larch-forested landscape of the Danube region, the first artist to exploit the pen-like spontaneity of the etched line was Girolamo Mazzola (called Parmigianino, 1503–1540), whose prints display much of the grace and fluidity of his drawings. Similarly personal and immediate are the open lines and dotted modeling with which Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) captured the likenesses of himself and a number of fellow artists (such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Adam van Noort, Frans Snyders, and others) that later appear in the Iconography, a collection of engravings after his portraits of famous men.

More elaborate effects of depth and tone were achieved by Jacques Callot (1592–1635) through multiple bitings and the stopping out or recoating of areas of the plate to prevent further biting. The large number of plates etched by Callot embraces a wide variety of subjects from mostly small representations of beggars, dwarfs, and Morris dancers to more complex scenes of military depredation (The Miseries of War, 1633) and large, densely figured compositions like the Fair at Impruneta (1620).

Although his early pure etchings owe something to Callot in subject and technique, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) created what his Italian contemporary, Filippo Baldinucci, described as his own "astonishing style of etching." Through close hatching and the use of drypoint, in which lines are scratched directly into the plate to produce a particularly velvety and luminous tone, Rembrandt subtly modeled everything from his own face to the Dutch landscape, merging the deepest darks with the most brilliant lights of the unprinted paper. In the mid-1630s, in works like the Annunciation to the Shepherds, with its radiant glory of angels, dumbstruck shepherds, and stampeding animals, such effects intensify the melodrama, but by the 1640s, the chiaroscuro begins to figure in more interior narratives. In the so-called Hundred Guilder Print (c. 1647–1649, from Matthew 19) the sick and the lame stream out of the darkness groping for the light of Christ, while opposite them the Pharisees argue among themselves in the light of day, and in a fourth version of the Three Crosses (1653), the violent clash of light and dark at the cataclysmic moment of Christ's death is transformed into darkest mystery and tragedy. As in his paintings, Rembrandt reveals in his prints the utmost sensitivity to the emotional nuances of the narrative and an unequalled capacity for inventing the mimetic and formal means to realize them.

In the eighteenth century, the tonal effects pioneered by Rembrandt dominated printmaking. Although Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) produced lightly bitten, sun-washed fantasies at once classicizing and romantic, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) strengthened the chiaroscuro effect of his architectural views in the forbidding and gloomy interiors of his imaginary prisons (1750). In northern Europe, artists evenly and thickly nicked the surface of the plate, so that if printed it produced a uniform black; burnishing or scraping away the nicks produced lighter shades. These mezzotints, as they are called, were especially popular in England, where they were most often used for reproducing painted portraits and landscapes.

In etching, tone was achieved by biting through a porous, rather than continuous, acid-resistant ground. Perforating the ground in the crayon manner enabled the print to mimic the broken, textured line of the then highly popular chalk drawings, whereas in aquatint the ground itself was given an open, granular structure. Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) used the wash-like shades of aquatint to probe popular superstitions and the darker corners of the human mind in Los Caprichos (1799) and to modernize Callot with a surfeit of cruelties and terrors in Los Desastres de la Guerra, which were etched in response to the French occupation of Spain from 1808 to 1814. His famous print, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from Los Caprichos, illustrates in its aquatint shadows and multiplying night creatures both the Enlightenment's innocent faith in reason and its imminent collapse.

See also Callot, Jacques ; Caricature and Cartoon ; Dürer, Albrecht ; Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de ; Popular Culture ; Rembrandt van Rijn .