Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/456

Rh 436 ENGRAVING and is still much used without any connection with printing, as in the chased ornamentation of silver plate, fire-arms, jewellery, and other objects of luxury. It is our intention, in the present article, to confine ourselves strictly to engraving as one of the fine arts. Its present position is almost universally secondary to paint ing. The engraver, in the fine arts, is almost invariably occupied in translating the works of painters, as by his intervention they can afterwards, at least in translation, be widely disseminated by the press. Principal There are several different varieties of engraving, the varieties chief of which are (1) Line engraving on metal plates, &quot; usually of copper or steel, in which the line is always incised ; (2) Etching, usually on metal, in which the lines are corroded by means of acid ; (3) Mezzotint, in which there are no lines whatever, but only shades produced by roughening the surface of the metal ; and (4) Woodcut, in which the lines which print black have to be left in relief, whilst the surface round them is cut away. These primary technical conditions have an irresistible influence even upon the mental qualities exhibited in the different kinds of engraving. Each kind is favourable to certain mental states, and unfavourable to others, each being in itself an artistic as well as a technical discipline. A line engraver will not see or think like an etcher, nor an etcher like an engraver in mezzotint ; and the con sequence of this difference is that the manner in which a line has to be cut has a great influence in determining the direction of artistic taste and feeling. Nor is this influence confined to the engravers themselves. The enormous multiplication of their works by printing makes engravers only second to writers in their power over public taste, which they can refine or vitiate by spreading refined or vulgar interpretations of pictures. Engrav- There is no inherent reason why engraving should be ing mile- usec i on ]y to translate painting. The early engravers were ofp au it- ^ ten original artists who worked out designs of their own, ing but in course of time a commercial reason prevailed over originality. It was found that a well-known picture assured the sale of an engraving from it beforehand, whereas an engraving which stood entirely on its own merits came into the world without advantages, and had its own way to make. Besides this, the engraver who copied a picture saved himself all the trouble of thinking out and composing the design, which he found ready to his hand. The same reasons have prevailed against original etching in our own day. There has been a great revival of etching during the last fifteen or twenty years, especially on the Continent, and many artists have acquired very great skill in this mode of engraving. It was hoped, at first, that they would employ their skill upon original works, but the convenience, both of publishers and etchers, soon led them to employ etching, as engraving had been employed before, almost exclusively in translating pictures. We cannot but deplore this subordination of engraving to painting ; and when ?re recur to the great engravers of past times who composed and invented their own works, it is with a feel ing of regret that they have left so very few successors. Although we mentioned the four chief kinds of engrav ing in the order of what is usually considered to be their relative importance, putting line engraving in the first place and woodcut in the last, this is not the chronological order of their discovery. Woodcut is the oldest kind of engrav ing from which impressions were printed, and must there fore be taken first in a paper of this kind, which proposes to deal only with engraving for the press. Wood Engraving. It is natural that wood engraving should have occurred first to the primitive mind, because the manner in which woodcuts are printed is the most obvious of all the kinds of printing. If a block of wood is inked with a greasy ink and then pressed on a piece of paper, the ink from the block will be transferred at once to the paper, on which we shall have a black patch exactly the size and shape of the inked surface. Now, suppose that the simple Chinese who first discovered this was ingenious enough to go a step further, it would evidently occur to him that if one; of the elaborate signs, each of which in his own language stood for a word, were drawn upon the block of wood, in reverse, and then the whole of the white wool sufficiently cut away to leave the sign in relief, an image of it might be taken on Origh the paper much more quickly than the sign could be copied wood with a camel-hair brush and Indian ink. No sooner had. 6 rdvil tin s experiment been tried and found to answer than block- printing was discovered, and from the printing of signs to the printing of rude images of things, exactly in the same manner, the step was so easy that it must have been made insensibly. Wood engraving, then, is really nothing but that primitive-block-cutting which prepared for the printer the letters in relief now replaced by movable types, and the only difference between a delicate modern woodcut and the rude letters in the first printed books is a difference of artistic skill and knowledge. In Chinese and Japanese woodcuts we can still recognize traditions of treatment which come from the designing of their written characters. The main elements of a Chinese or a Japanese woodcut, uninfluenced by European example, are dashing or delicate outlines and markings of various thickness, exactly such as a clever writer with the brush would make with his Indian ink or vermilion. Often we get a perfectly black blot, ex quisitely shaped and full of careful purpose, and these broad vigorous blacks are quite in harmony with the kind of printing for which wood engraving is intended. It has not hitherto been satisfactorily ascertained whether The ei wood engraving came to Europe from the East or was re- liest E discovered by some European artificer. The precise date r P eaI of the first European woodcut is also a matter of doubt,&quot; &quot;. -, but here we have certain data which at least set limits to the possibility of error. European wood engraving dates certainly from the first quarter of the 15th century. It used to be believed that a cut of St Christopher, very rudely executed, and dated 1423, was the Adam of all our woodcuts, but subsequent investigations have shaken this theory. There is a cut in the Brussels library, of the Virgin and Child surrounded by four saints, which is dated 1418, but the composition is so very elegant and the drawing so refined and beautiful, that one has a difficulty in believing the date, though it is received as authentic. The Virgin and Child of the Paris library is without date, but is sup posed, apparently with reason, to be earlier than either of the two we have mentioned ; and M. Delaborde has proved that two cuts were printed in 1400. The Virgin and Child at Paris may be taken as a good representative specimen of very early European wood engraving. It is simple art, but not bad art. The forms are drawn in bold thick lines and the black blot is used with much effect in the hollows and recesses of the design. Beyond this there is no shading. Rude as the work is, the artist has expressed exquisite maternal tenderness in the pressure of the Virgin s cheek to that of the Child, whilst the attitude of the Ohild itself, with its foot in its hand and its arm round the mother s neck, is most true to nature, as is the pose of the other foot against the mother s arm, and also the baby-like bend-. ing and twisting of the legs. The Virgin is crowned, and stands against a niche-like decoration with pinnacles as often seen in illuminated manuscripts. In the woodcut this architectural decoration is boldly but effectively drawn. Here, then, we have real art already, art in which appeared both vigour of style and tenderness of feeling.