Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/461

Rh E N GRAVING 441 as the most recent critics have called it, a moral and educational series, or instructive picture book.&quot; We liave not space to enter into the controversy about the origin of these engravings. They are supposed to be Florentine ; they are certainly Italian ; and their technical manner is called that of Baccio Baldini, of whose biography nothing is known. But if the history of these engravings is obscure, their style is as clear as a style can be. There is not room for a moment s doubt about the artist s con ception of his art. In all these figures the outline is the main thing, and next to that the lines which mark the leading folds of the drapery, lines quite classical in purity of form and severity of selection, and especially character istic in this, that they are always really engraver s lines, such as may naturally be done with the burin, end they never imitate the freer line of the pencil or etching needle. As for shading, it is used in the greatest moderation with thin straight strokes of the burin, that never overpower the stronger organic lines of tlie design. Of chiaroscuro, in any complete sense, there is none. The sky behind the figures is represented by white paper, and the foreground is sometimes occupied by flat decorative engraving, much nearer in feeling to calligraphy than to modern painting. Sometimes there is a cast shadow, but it is not studied, and is only used to give relief. We may observe that in this 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, too, 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. Draw ing 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 right, and then threw a veil of shading over them, and a very peculiar kind of shading it was, all the lines being straight and all the shading diagonal. This is the primitive method, its pecu liarities 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. But 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 abandoned their old stiff practice and 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 Diirer, who, though with striking differences, had many points in common. Schongauer was the earlier artist of the two, as he died in 1 i88 ; whilst the date of Durer s death is 1528, just forty years later. Schongauer was therefore a whole generation before Diirer, yet scarcely inferior to him in the use of the burin, though Diirer has a much greater reputation, due in great measure to his singular imaginative powers. Schongauer is the first great German engraver who is known to us by name, but he was preceded by an unknown German master, whom we now call the master of 1466, who had Gothic notions of art (in strong contrast to the classicism of Baccio Baldini), but used the burin skilfully in his own way, conceiving of line His mi- nuteues3 - 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 ia a great stride in advance, and we find in him an evident pleasure in the bold use of the burin. Outline and sliade, 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. Diirer continued Schougauer s curved shading, with in- Diirer. creasing manual delicacy and skill ; and as he found him self 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 subordi nating 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 Diirer all objects are on the same plane. In his St Hubert, 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. Diirer 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 and The Coat of Arms with the Cock. Eiirer 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, 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), or even pigs (see the Prodigal Son); 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 car penter. 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 Melancholia) and their texture (see the granular texture of the stones in the same print). From Diirer we come to Italy again, through Marc antouio, who copied Diirer, translating more than sixty of his woodcuts upon metal. It is one of the most remark able 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 after wards 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 him- self evidently considered engraving a distinct art, for he never once set Marcantonio to work from a picture, but alsvays (much more judiciously) gave him drawings, which the engraver might interpret without going outside of his own art ; consequently Marcantonio s works are always genuine engravings, and are never pictorial. Marcantonio was an enirraver of remarkable power. In him the real VTTT. c6 Marc- It