Engraving

The highly skilled craft of engraving, in which a wedge-shaped metal tool known as a burin is used to gouge clear, sharp furrows in a metal plate, appears to have been adapted from goldsmithing. Two of the great early masters of the technique in the North, Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer, had fathers who were goldsmiths, and in Italy the medium seems to have its origins in the niello plaques—small engraved plates of silver or gold whose incisions were filled with a dark substance to shade the design—made by Florentine goldsmiths. The earliest engravings were produced in Germany in the 1430s but the first monumental engravings, rivaling painting in their ambition, were created in the 1470s—in Germany by Schongauer and in Italy by the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna. Schongauer raised engraving from a minor craft to a major art form with compelling works like the Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (20.5.2), in which his deeply engraved lines create a vivid linear pattern against the white background. To create texture, Schongauer used a great variety of strokes—from the long, sinuous lines that create the beard of the saint and the curling fur of one of the demons, to the short flecks of the saint's coarsely woven robe; he also made use of cross-hatching in the deepest shadows to model the forms. Mantegna, on the other hand, interested above all in achieving the tone that would give his figures a three-dimensional presence, evolved a technique of shading his engravings with short lines of varying width, a method that seems to have derived from his drawing practice. Mantegna's idiosyncratic approach was not well suited to printing large editions; however, early impressions of his engravings such as the Bacchanal with a Wine Vat (1986.1159) in the Metropolitan Museum show the subtle tonalities that could be obtained with this method. Albrecht Dürer, a great admirer of Mantegna's pictorial inventions, derived his engraving technique from Schongauer and other Northern engravers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Dürer carried the technique to a degree of richness and detail that has never been surpassed. His Adam and Eve (19.73.1) contains an almost unimaginable density of fine distinct lines, whose great variety creates form, texture, and shading simultaneously. Dürer's closest rival was the Netherlandish artist Lucas van Leyden, whose innovative approach to both subject matter and technique can be seen in The Poet Virgil in a Basket (41.1.23). Lucas's style of engraving is characterized by long, flowing, gently curved strokes that impart grace to his draped figures, emphasize gesture, and unify the image.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Italian engraver Marcantonio Raimondi developed an influential technique that effectively translated Raphael's drawings into prints without imitating the painter's actual marks. Marcantonio's system of uniform, equidistant, parallel lines that curve around the forms to give them a sculptural presence is beautifully illustrated by his Judgment of Paris (19.74.1). It was a Flemish engraver, Cornelis Cort, who elaborated on this system by developing a flexible engraved line that became thicker and thinner along its length, thus allowing the engraver to vary the lightness or darkness in an area without adding more lines. Cort's Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence (49.97.537), after Titian, shows the coloristic effects that could be achieved through this technique, so well suited to conveying the color and painterly qualities for which the Venetian painter was famous. The swelling and tapering line was carried to new extremes by the virtuosic Dutch engraver Hendrik Goltzius, whose calligraphic line becomes a marvel in its own right in works like the Hercules Farnese (17.37.59).

Goltzius and his students and followers represent the last heroic age of engraving—in the next century, while the difficult craft of engraving would still be practiced by professionals as a means of reproducing the artwork of others, the most talented artists would turn to the more easily mastered technique of etching.

While engraving evolved from the craft of goldsmithing, etching, in which the work of cutting into the metal is accomplished through the action of acid, is closely related to the armorer’s trade. A plate of metal is first covered with a layer of acid-resistant varnish or wax, called the "ground." The artist then scratches through the ground with an etching needle to expose the metal beneath. When the design is complete, the plate is dipped in acid, which eats away the lines where the metal has been exposed. The depth of the lines depends on the length of time the plate is exposed to the acid. Once the ground has been removed, the metal plate, with its incised lines, can be printed in the same way as any intaglio plate. While the printing requires considerable craft, the incising of the coated plate with the etching needle can be done by anyone who knows how to draw, encouraging many painters to try their hand.

As was the case with woodcut and engraving, the first etchings seem to have been produced in Germany. The early German etchers made use of iron plates, stronger than copper yet susceptible to rust and harder to work. For many German printmakers, such as Albrecht Dürer, etching was a short-lived experiment, but for the artists of the Danube school, famed for their calligraphic draftsmanship and for being the first to create works of pure landscape, the medium proved most congenial. Albrecht Altdorfer’s Landscape with a Double Spruce (1993.1097) marks the beginning of a long and harmonious marriage between the medium of etching and the subject of landscape. In Italy, Marcantonio Raimondi seems to have been the first to take up etching, but it was Parmigianino who recognized the potential of the medium to render the fluid lines of a sketch. Prints like The Lovers (26.70.3 [102]), which read as a direct translation of his drawing technique, were much admired and imitated in Italy, where an artist’s draftsmanship was an important measure of his genius. In the 1540s, a burst of etching took place at Fontainebleau in France, where a group of artists—perhaps motivated by a desire to publicize their accomplishments in that remote locale—began to make use of etching to reproduce the designs drawn by Rosso Fiorentino, Primaticcio, and others for the decoration of the palace of Francis I. A work by Léon Davent, Cadmus Fighting the Dragon (49.97.570), provides a good example of the appealingly light and delicate technique evolved by this school of etchers.

While etching continued to be practiced by some Italian artists, particularly in the Veneto, and usually with an admixture of engraving, it was the intimate and luminous Madonna in the Clouds (17.50.18.147) by Federico Barocci, produced at the end of the sixteenth century, that pointed the way for the centuries to come, when etching would be the favored medium of painters both north and south of the Alps.

The simplest method for producing intaglio prints is drypoint, in which a sharp stylus or needle is used to scratch lines directly into the metal plate. The advantage of this technique is that the metal scrapings on either side of the lines, known as the burr, hold a dense film of ink which prints as a rich, velvety black. Drypoint, however, is not a very practical technique for producing multiple images, for the delicate burr wears away so quickly that only a small number of good impressions, no more than a dozen, can be taken from the plate. For artists who wished to create a large number of high-quality impressions from the same plate (a large edition), this medium had limited appeal. A well-engraved plate can produce several hundred impressions, at times even a thousand, while a woodblock can generate many more. Therefore, with the exception of the fascinating Master of the Housebook (also known as the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet), Renaissance artists rarely made use of drypoint. The great German printmaker Albrecht Dürer produced three drypoints, including the evocative Holy Family (19.73.51), at a time in his career when he was particularly interested in painterly effects. For an artist who was always concerned with the profitability of printmaking, however, drypoint was not a practical technique. A few, such as Mantegna and the Master of 1515, created the effect of drypoint in some of their engravings by allowing the metal burr, normally scraped away when engraving, to remain at the edges of the lines they cut with a burin. The whimsical Hurdy-Gurdy Playing Satyr with a Sleeping Nymph (31.31.19) by the Master of 1515 provides a good example of the rich, fuzzy lines that result when the burr remains to soak up the ink. Other artists, such as Parmigianino and Barocci, made use of touches of drypoint to strengthen the tonal effects of their etched plates.

For further explanation of intaglio techniques, see:

http://www.birdpress.com
Bird Press

For an interactive demonstration of the etching technique, see:

http://www.moma.org/whatisaprint
The Museum of Modern Art