Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/457

Rh ENGRAVING 437 The very earliest wood engraving consisted of outlines and white spaces with smaller black spaces, but shading is rare or absent. Before passing to shaded woodcuts we may mention a kind of wood engraving practised in the middle of the 15th century by a French engraver, often called Bernard Milnet, though his name is a matter of doubt, and by other engravers nearer the beginning of that century. This method is called the crible, a word for which there is no convenient translation in English. It means, riddled with small holes, as a target may be riddled with small shot. The effect of light and dark is produced in this kind of engraving by sinking a great number of round holes of different diameters in the substance of the wood, which, of course, all come white in the printing; it is, in short, a sort of stippling in white. When a more advanced kind of wood engraving had become prevalent the crible was no longer used for general purposes, but it was retained for the grounds of decorative wood engraving, being used occasionally in borders for pages, in printers marks, and other designs, which were survivals in black and white of the ancient art of illuminating. Curiously enough, this kind of wood engraving, though long disused for purposes of art, has of late years been revived with ex cellent effect for scientific purposes. It is now the accepted method of illustration for astronomical books. The black given by the untouched wooden block represents the night sky, and the holes, smaller or larger, represent in white the stars and planets of lesser or greater magnitude. The pro cess is so perfectly adapted to this purpose, being so cheap, rapid, and simple, that it will probably never be superseded. The objections to it for artistic purposes are, however, so obvious that they were soon perceived even by the untrained critical faculty of the earlier workmen, who turned their attention to woodcut in simple black lines, iu- eluding outline and shading. In early work the outline is firm and very distinct, being thicker in line than the shading, and in the shading the lines are simple, without cross-hatchings, as the workmen found it easier and more natural to take out a white line-like space between two parallel or nearly parallel black lines than to cut out the twenty or thirty small white lozenges into which the same space would have been divided by cross-hatchings. The early work would also sometimes retain the simple black patch which we find in Japanese woodcuts, for example, in the Christmas Dancers of Wohlgeinuth all the shoes are black patches, though there is no discrimination of local colour in anything else. A precise parallel to this treat ment is to be found in a Japanese woodcut of the Wild Boar and Hare given by AimiS Humbert in his book on Japan, in which the boar has a cap which is a perfectly black patch though all other local colour is omitted. The similarity of method between Wohlgemuth and the Japanese artist is so close that they both take pleasure in drawing thin black lines at a little distance from the patch and following its shape like a border. In course of time, as wood engravers became more expert, they were not so careful to spare themselves trouble and pains, and then cross-hatchings were introduced, but at first more as a variety to relieve the eye than as a common method of shading. In the 16th century a simple kind of wood engraving reached such a high degree of perfection that the best work of that time has never been surpassed in its own way. We intend very shortly to render full justice to the highly developed skill of modern wood engravers ; but it is undeniable that in the 16th century the art stood more on its own merits than it does now, respected itself more, and affirmed itself without imitating other arts. Wood engraving in the 16th century was much more con ventional than it is in the present day, and this very con ventionalism enabled it to express what it had to express with greater decision and power. The wood engraver in Wood those days was free from many difficult conditions which engrav- baniper his modern successor. He did not care in the least lllg *&quot; about aerial perspective, and nobody expected him to care ceutury about it ; he did not trouble his mind about local colour, but generally omitted it, sometimes, however, giving it here and there, but only when it suited his fancy. As for light- and shade, he shaded only when he wanted to give relief, but never worked out anything like a studied and balanced effect of light-and-shade, nor did he feel any responsibility about the matter. What he really cared for, and generally attained, was a firm, clear, simple kind of drawing, con ventional in its indifference to the mystery of nature and to the poetic sentiment which comes to us from that mystery, but by no means indifferent to fact, of a decided and tangible kind. The wood engraving of the 16th century was a singularly positive art, as positive as carving ; indeed, most of the famous woodcuts of that time might be translated into carved panels without much loss of char acter. Their complete independence of pictorial conditions might be illustrated by many examples. In Diirer s Salu- Diirer s tation the dark blue of the sky above the Alpine mountains Saluta- is translated by dark shading, but so far is this piece of t)OU- local colour from being carried out in the rest of the com position, that the important foreground figures, with their draperies, are shaded as if they were statues in plaster of Paris. Again, the sky itself is false in its shading, for it is without gradation, but the shading upon it has a purpose, which is to prevent the upper part of the composition from looking too empty, and the conventionalism of wood engraving was so accepted in those days that the artist could have recourse to this expedient in defiance alike of pictorial harmony and of natural truth. In Holbein s Hol- admirabie series of small well-filled compositions, the Vein s Dance of Death, the firm and matter-of-fact drawing is accompanied by a sort of light-and-shade adopted simply for convenience, with as little reference to natural truth as might be expected in a stained-glass window. There is u most interesting series of little woodcuts drawn and engraved in the 16th century by J. Amman as illustrations Amman s of the different handicrafts and trades, and entitled The handi- Baker, The Miller, The Butcher, and so on. Nothing is crafts&amp;gt; more striking in this valuable series than the remarkable closeness with which the artist observed everything in the nature of a hard fact, such as the shape of a hatchet or a spade ; but he sees no mystery anywhere he can draw leaves but not foliage, feathers but not plumage, locks but not hair, a. hill but not a landscape. In the Witches Kitchen, a woodcut by Baldung Grim of Strasburg, dated Balduug 1510, the steam rising from the pot is so hard that it has Gran, the appearance of two trunks of trees denuded of their bark, and makes a pendant in the composition to a real tree on the opposite side which does not look more substantial. The clouds of steam round about the jet are like puddings. Nor was this a personal deficiency in Baldung Griin. It was Diirer s own way of engraving clouds and vapour, and all the engravers of that time followed it. Their conceptions were much more those of a carver than those of a painter. Diirer actually did carve in high relief, and Griin s Witches Kitchen might be carved in the same manner without loss; indeed it has the appear ance of an alto-rilievo with the ground tinted darker than the carvings. When the engravers were rather draughts men than carvers, their drawing was of a decorative character. For example, in the magnificent portrait of Christian III. of Denmark by Jacob Binck, one of the Jiicob very finest examples of old wood engraving, the face and Binck. beard are drawn with few lines and very powerfully, but the costume is treated strictly as decoration, the lines of the patterns being all given, with as little shading as