early metal engraving the lines are often crossed in the shading,
whereas in the earliest woodcuts they are not; the reason being
that when lines are incised they can as easily be crossed as not,
whereas, when they are reserved, the crossing involves much
labour of a non-artistic kind. Here, then, we have pure line-engraving
with the burin, that is, the engraving of the pure
line patiently studied for its own beauty, and exhibited in an
abstract manner, with care for natural form combined with
inattention to the effects of nature. Even the forms are idealized,
especially in the cast of draperies, for the express purpose of
exhibiting the line to better advantage. Such are the characteristics
of those very early Italian engravings which were attributed
erroneously to Mantegna. When we come to Mantegna himself
we find a style equally decided. Drawing and shading were for
him two entirely distinct things. He did not draw and shade
at the same time, as a modern chiaroscurist would, but he first
got his outlines and the patterns on his dresses all very accurate,
and then threw over them a veil of shading, a very peculiar
kind of shading, all the lines being straight and all the shading
diagonal. This is the primitive method, its peculiarities being
due, not to a learned self-restraint, but to a combination of natural
genius with technical inexperience, which made the early Italians
at once desire and discover the simplest and easiest methods.
Whilst the Italians were shading with straight lines the Germans
had begun to use curves, and as soon as the Italians saw good
German work they tried to give to their burins something of
the German suppleness.
The characteristics of early metal engraving in Germany are seen to perfection in Martin Schongauer and Albert Dürer, who, though with striking differences, had many points in common. Schongauer died in 1488; whilst the date of Dürer’s death is 1528. Schongauer was therefore a whole generation before Dürer, yet not greatly inferior to him in the use of the burin, though Dürer has a much greater reputation, due in great measure to his singular imaginative powers. Schongauer is the first great German engraver known by name, but he was preceded by an unknown German master, called “the Master of 1466,” who had Gothic notions of art (in strong contrast to the classicism of Baccio Baldini), but used the burin skilfully, conceiving of line and shade as separate elements, yet shading with an evident desire to follow the form of the thing shaded, and with lines in various directions. Schongauer’s art is a great stride in advance, and we find in him an evident pleasure in the bold use of the burin. Outline and shade, in Schongauer, are not nearly so much separated as in Baccio Baldini, and the shading, generally in curved lines, is far more masterly than the straight shading of Mantegna. Dürer continued Schongauer’s curved shading, with increasing manual delicacy and skill; and as he found himself able to perform feats with the burin which amused both himself and his buyers, he over-loaded his plates with quantities of living and inanimate objects, each of which he finished with as much care as if it were the most important thing in the composition. The engravers of those days had no conception of any necessity for subordinating one part of their work to another; they drew, like children, first one object and then another object, and so on until the plate was furnished from top to bottom and from the left side to the right. Here, of course, is an element of facility in primitive art which is denied to the modern artist. In Dürer all objects are on the same plane. In his “St Hubert” (otherwise known as “St Eustace”) of c. 1505, the stag is quietly standing on the horse’s back, with one hoof on the saddle, and the kneeling knight looks as if he were tapping the horse on the nose. Dürer seems to have perceived the mistake about the stag, for he put a tree between us and the animal to correct it, but the stag is on the horse’s back nevertheless. This ignorance of the laws of effect is least visible and obtrusive in plates which have no landscape distances, such as “The Coat of Arms with the Death’s Head” (1503) and “The Coat of Arms with the Cock” (c. 1512).
Dürer’s great manual skill and close observation made him a wonderful engraver of objects taken separately. He saw and rendered all objects; nothing escaped him; he applied the same intensity of study to everything. Though a thorough student of the nude—witness his Adam and Eve (1504) and other plates—he would pay just as much attention to the creases of a gaiter as to the development of a muscle; and though man was his main subject, he would study dogs with equal care (see the five dogs in the “St Hubert”), as well as pigs (see the “Prodigal Son,” c. 1495); and at a time when landscape painting was unknown he studied every clump of trees, every visible trunk and branch, nay, every foreground plant, and each leaf of it separately. In his buildings he saw every brick like a bricklayer, and every joint in the woodwork like a carpenter. The immense variety of the objects which he engraved was a training in suppleness of hand. His lines go in every direction, and are made to render both the undulations of surfaces (see the plane in the Melencolia, 1514) and their texture (see the granular texture of the stones in the same print).
From Dürer we come to Italy again, through Marcantonio, who copied Dürer, translating more than sixty of his woodcuts upon metal. It is one of the most remarkable things in the history of art, that a man who had trained himself by copying northern work, little removed from pure Gothicism, should have become soon afterwards the great engraver of Raphael, who was much pleased with his work and aided him by personal advice. Yet, although Raphael was a painter, and Marcantonio his interpreter, the reader is not to infer that engraving had as yet subordinated itself to painting. Raphael himself evidently considered engraving a distinct art, for he never once set Marcantonio to work from a picture, but always (much more judiciously) gave him drawings, which the engraver might interpret without going outside his own art; consequently Marcantonio’s works are always genuine engravings, and are never pictorial. Marcantonio was an engraver of remarkable power. In him the real pure art of line-engraving reached its maturity. He retained much of the early Italian manner in his backgrounds, where its simplicity gives a desirable sobriety; but his figures are boldly modelled in curved lines, crossing each other in the darker shades, but left single in the passages from dark to light, and breaking away in fine dots as they approach the light itself, which is of pure white paper. A school of engraving was thus founded by Raphael, through Marcantonio, which cast aside the minute details of the early schools for a broad, harmonious treatment.
The group known as the engravers of Rubens marked a new development. Rubens understood the importance of engraving as a means of increasing his fame and wealth, and directed Vorsterman and others. The theory of engraving at that time was that it ought not to render accurately the local colour of painting, which would appear wanting in harmony when dissociated from the hues of the picture; and it was one of the anxieties of Rubens so to direct his engravers that the result might be a fine plate independently of what he had painted. To this end he helped his engravers by drawings, in which he sometimes indicated what he thought the best direction for the lines. Rubens liked Vorsterman’s work, and scarcely corrected it, a plate he especially approved being “Susannah and the Elders,” which is a learned piece of work well modelled, and shaded everywhere on the figures and costumes with fine curved lines, the straight line being reserved for the masonry. Vorsterman quitted Rubens after executing fourteen important plates, and was succeeded by Paul Pontius, then a youth of twenty, who went on engraving from Rubens with increasing skill until the painter’s death. Boetius a Bolswert engraved from Rubens towards the close of his life, and his brother Schelte a Bolswert engraved more than sixty compositions of Rubens, of the most varied character, including hunting scenes and landscapes. This brings us to the engraving of landscape as a separate study. Rubens treated landscape in a broad comprehensive manner, and Schelte’s way of engraving it was also broad and comprehensive. The lines are long and often undulating, the cross-hatchings bold and rather obtrusive, for they often substitute unpleasant reticulations for the refinement and mystery of nature, but it was a beginning, and a vigorous beginning. The technical developments of engraving under the influence of
