work in imitating in a finer material the energetic characters of these northern woodcuts. He was soon to come under a totally different influence, and to turn the experience he had gained to account in interpreting the work of a master of a quite other stamp. Up till the year 1510 Marcantonio had lived entirely at Bologna, with the exception, it would appear, of a visit or visits to Venice. (A few of his early engravings are from drawings of the school of Giorgione.) Very soon afterwards he was attracted, for good and all, into the circle which surrounded Raphael at Rome. Where or when he had first made Raphael’s acquaintance is uncertain. His passage to Rome by way of Florence has been supposed to be marked by an engraving, dated 1510, and known as “The Climbers,” Les Grimpeurs (Bartsch, 487), in which he has reproduced a portion of the design of Michelangelo’s cartoon of the Soldiers surprised bathing, and has added behind the figures a landscape imitated from the then young Dutch engraver Lucas of Leiden. Contemporary or somewhat earlier than this is a large engraving done by him from a design by Baldassare Peruzzi, a Sienese artist drawn about the same time into the Raphael circle. The piece in which he is recorded to have first tried his hand after Raphael himself is the Lucretia (Bartsch 192). From that time until he disappears in the catastrophe of 1527, Marcantonio was almost exclusively engaged in reproducing by means of engraving the designs of Raphael or of his immediate pupils. Raphael, the story goes, was so delighted with the print of the Lucretia that he personally trained and helped Marcantonio afterwards. A printing establishment was set up under the charge of Raphael’s colour-grinder, Il Baviera, and the profits, in the early stage of the business, were shared between the engraver and the printer. The sale soon became very great; pupils gathered round about Marcantonio, of whom the two most distinguished were Marco Dente, known as Marco da Ravenna, and Agostino de’ Musi, known as Agostino Veneziano; and he and they, during the last ten years of Raphael’s life, and for several years following his death, gave forth a great profusion of engravings after the master’s work—not copying, in most instances, his finished paintings, but working up, with the addition of simple backgrounds and accessories, his first sketches and trials, which often give the composition in a different form from the finished work, and are all the more interesting on that account.
The best of these engravings produced in the workshop of Marcantonio—those, namely, done by his own hand, and especially those done during the first few years after he had attached himself to Raphael—count among the most prized and coveted examples of the art. In them he enters into the genius of his master, and loses little of the chastened science and rhythmical purity of Raphael’s contours, or of the inspired and winning sentiment of his faces; while in the parts where he is left to himself—the rounding and shading, the background and landscape—he manages his burin with all the skill and freedom which he had gained by the imitation of northern models, but puts away the northern emphasis and redundance of detail. His work, however, does not long remain at the height marked by pieces like the Lucretia, the Dido, the Judgment of Paris, the Poetry, the Philosophy, or the first Massacre of the Innocents. Marcantonio’s engravings after the works of Raphael’s later years are cold, ostentatious, and soulless by comparison. Still more so, as is natural, were those which he and his pupils produced after the designs of the degenerate scholars of Raphael and Michelangelo, of a Giulio Romano, a Polidoro, or a Bandinelli. Marcantonio’s association with Giulio Romano was the cause of his first great disaster in life. He engraved a series of obscene designs by that painter in illustration of the Sonnetti lussuriosi of Pietro Aretino, and thereby incurred the anger of pope Clement VII., at whose order he was thrown into prison. Marcantonio’s ruin was completed by the calamities attendant on the sack of Rome in 1527. He had to pay a heavy ransom in order to escape from the hands of the Spaniards, and fled from Rome, in the words of Vasari, “all but a beggar.” It is said that he took refuge in his native city, Bologna; but he never again emerges from obscurity, and all we know with certainty is that in 1534 he was dead. (S. C.)
MARCASITE, a mineral with the same chemical composition
as pyrites, being iron disulphide FeS2, but crystallizing in the
orthorhombic instead of in the cubic system. The name is of
Arabic origin and was long applied to crystallized pyrites (q.v.);
it was restricted to the present species by W. Haidinger in
1845. The mineral was known to G. Agricola in 1546 under
the names Wasserkies or Weisserkies and Leberkies, and it
has been variously known as white pyrites, hepatic pyrites,
lamellar pyrites, radiated pyrites (German Strahlkies) and
prismatic pyrites. The orthorhombic form of the crystals,
as distinct from the cubic form of pyrites, was recognized by
Romé de l’Isle in 1772, though later R. J. Haüy considered
the crystals to be only distorted cubic forms.
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The crystals are isomorphous with mispickel (q.v.), but only rarely are they distinctly developed and simple (fig.). Usually they are twinned on a prism plane, M, producing pentagonal stellate groups of five crystals; twinning on the plain g, in which the crystals intercross at angles of nearly 60°, is less common. This frequent twinning gives rise to characteristic forms, with many re-entrant angles, to which the names “spear pyrites” and “cockscomb pyrites” are applied. The commonest state of aggregation is that of radially arranged fibres, the external surface of the mass being globular, nodular or stalactitic in form.
Apart from crystalline form, the external characters of marcasite are very similar to those of pyrites, and when distinct crystals are not available the two species cannot always be easily distinguished. The colour is usually pale bronze-yellow, often rather lighter than that of pyrites; on freshly fractured surfaces of pure marcasite the colour is tin-white, but this rapidly tarnishes on exposure to air. The lustre is metallic and brilliant. The streak is greyish or brownish-black. The hardness (6–612) is the same as that of pyrites, and the specific gravity (4.8–4.9) as a rule rather less. Arsenical varieties of marcasite, containing up to 5% of arsenic, are known as lonchidite and kyrosite.
Marcasite readily oxidizes on exposure to moist air, with the production of sulphuric acid and a white fibrous efflorescence of ferrous sulphate, and in course of time specimens in collections often became completely disintegrated. In nature it is frequently altered to limonite with the separation of native sulphur. Marcasite is thus the less stable of the two modifications of iron disulphide. Many experiments have been made with a view to determining the difference in chemical constitution of marcasite and pyrites, but with no very definite results. It is a noteworthy fact that whilst pyrites has been prepared artificially, marcasite has not.
Marcasite occurs under the same conditions as pyrites, but is much less common. Whilst pyrites is found abundantly in the older crystalline rocks and slates, marcasite is more abundant in clays, and has often been formed as a concretion around organic remains. It is abundant, for example, in the plastic clay of the Brown Coal formation at Littmitz, near Carlsbad, in Bohemia, at which place it has been extensively mined for the manufacture of sulphur and ferrous sulphate. In the Chalk of the south-east of England nodules of marcasite with a fibrous radiated structure are abundant, and in the Chalk Marl between Dover and Folkestone fine twinned groups of “spear pyrites” are common. The mineral is also met with in metalliferous veins, though much less frequently than pyrites; for example the “cockscomb pyrites” of the lead mines of Derbyshire and Cumberland. (L. J. S.)
MARCEAU-DESGRAVIERS, FRANÇOIS SÉVERIN (1769–1796), French general, was born at Chartres on the 1st of March 1769. His father was a law officer, and he was educated for a legal career, but at the age of sixteen he enlisted in the regiment of Savoy-Carignan. Whilst on furlough in Paris Marceau joined in the attack on the Bastille (July 14, 1789); after that event he took his discharge from the regular army and returned to Chartres, but the embarrassments of his family soon compelled him to seek fresh military employment. He became drill instructor, and afterwards captain in the departmental (Eure-et-Loire) regiment of the National Guard. Early
