Chapter II: Preface (1)

“Good wine needs no bush,” and these essays need no commendatory word from the Editor. The plan of this book is a simple one. Certain lovers of prints have been asked to write on the engravers, etchers, or periods which chiefly interest them and upon which they are best qualified to speak; and, furthermore, to treat their special subjects in their own way. So far as subject matter is concerned, the essays are grouped approximately in chronological order, and the reader may range from Italian engravers before the time of Raphael and woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer to contemporary etchings by Zorn, Lepère, and Herman A. Webster. Throughout the essays one dominant note will be found--a sincere love of Prints and an interest in their Makers.

FITZROY CARRINGTON.

New York,

September, 1912.

DÜRER’S WOODCUTS

BY CAMPBELL DODGSON, M.A.

Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum Author of the Catalogue of German and Flemish Woodcuts in the British Museum and Honorary Secretary of the Dürer Society

The first decade of the twentieth century lies not very far behind us, but perhaps it is not too soon to assert that one of its marked features, in the retrospect of a print-lover, is a great revival or extension of interest in every form of engraving among cultivated people who are not specialists. Increased attention has been paid, among other things, to the German woodcuts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which used to be rather despised by the old-fashioned nineteenth-century collector, with a few enlightened exceptions, as rough and ugly old things which were curious as specimens of antiquity or instructive as illustrations of the life and religion of the generations that produced them, but were not to be taken very seriously as works of art. That estimate is being revised. A generation no longer blinded to the merits of primitive art by the worship of Raphael and the antique is ever tapping fresh sources of delight and enriching itself by the perception of beauty where its fathers saw nought but the grotesque and quaint. It is not surprising, indeed, that German art has made slower progress than Italian on the road to popularity. Even the primitives, on the south side of the Alps, shared in the winning grace and suavity of the old Mediterranean culture, while their brethren in the North, the French excepted, were indisputably more rugged and barbarous in draughtsmanship and painting, and few of their engravers, except Schongauer, can vie with the Florentines if their achievements are judged by the test of formal beauty. But it is wonderful how, in the North, now and again, art could suddenly blossom and ripen under the creative impulse of an innovator, whose successors, rather than the pioneer himself, lay themselves open to the charge of angularity and uncouthness. The perfection of the very earliest printed books is a commonplace. Less generally known, perhaps, is the great beauty to which the earliest of all the German engravers known to us at all as a personality, though not by name, was capable of attaining. The “Master of the Playing-Cards,” who was at work about 1430-40, produced work of extraordinary charm, not only in some of the figures, animals and flowers of the playing-cards themselves, but especially in the large engraving of the Virgin Mary with the human-headed serpent, or Lilith, beneath her feet, which is one of the most splendid and mature creations of the fifteenth century. Then, again, the early book illustrators of Augsburg and Ulm, in the seventies, when the use of blocks for such a purpose had only recently come in, produced woodcuts that were never surpassed by any successors in their simple and direct vivacity and strength, with the utmost economy of line. But the real beauty of some of the much earlier single woodcuts, illustrating, chiefly, the legends of Our Lady and the Saints, has been much less generally appreciated. They are very rare, and most of them repose, in a seclusion seldom disturbed, in their boxes in the great European print-rooms or even in monastic libraries. They are only beginning to be reproduced, and they are rarely exhibited. But such an exhibition of the earliest German woodcuts as was held at Berlin in the summer of 1908 was truly a revelation. The soft and rounded features, the flowing lines of the drapery, in the prints of the generation before sharp, broken folds were introduced under the influence of the Netherlands, have something of the charm of Far Eastern art, and the gay coloring with which most of the prints were finished has often a delightfully decorative effect when they are framed and hung at a proper distance from the eye. Such praise is due, of course, only to some of the choicer examples; there are plenty of fifteenth-century woodcuts in which the line is merely clumsy and the coloring merely gaudy, but these are more often products of the last quarter of the century than of its beginning or middle. It would not be true to say that the advance of time brought with it progress and perfection in the woodcutter’s art; on the contrary, the first vital impulse spent itself all too soon, and gave way to thoughtless and unintelligent imitation.

Des L V I. Jares.

DÜRER. PORTRAIT OF ALBERT DÜRER, AGED 56

The rare second state (of 3 states) before the monogram of Dürer and the date 1527

Size of the original woodcut, 12¾ × 10 inches]

From “The Apocalypse”

Size of the original woodcut, 15¼ × 11 inches]

What was the state of things when Dürer appeared upon the scene? He did so long before the close of the fifteenth century, for his first authenticated woodcut is an illustration to St. Jerome’s Epistles, printed at Basle in 1492. Whether he or an unknown artist is responsible for a large number of other illustrations produced at Basle about 1493-95, is a question about which no consensus of opinion has been formed, and this is not the place to discuss it. All the woodcuts that the world knows and esteems as Dürer’s were produced at Nuremberg after his return from the first Venetian journey (1495). Let us see, for a moment, how they stand comparison with what had gone before them. The older woodcuts are nearly all anonymous, and if they bear any signature, it is that of a woodcutter (Formschneider or Briefmaler) who was a craftsman allied to the joiner, rather than the painter. Just before Dürer’s time the painter begins to make his appearance on the scene as a designer of woodcuts. There are a few isolated cases in which the almost universal rule of anonymity is broken, and we learn from the preface to a book the name of the artist who designed the illustrations. Breydenbach’s “Travels to the Holy Land” (Mainz, 1486) was illustrated by woodcuts after Erhard Reuwich, or Rewich, a native of Utrecht, who had accompanied the author on his journey, and the immense number of woodcuts in the “Nuremberg Chronicle” by Hartmann Schedel (1493) were the work of the painters Wohlgemuth and Pleydenwurff; to whom the much finer illustrations of the “Schatzbehalter” (1491) may also safely be attributed. It is now almost universally believed that the “Master of the Hausbuch,” one of Dürer’s most gifted predecessors in the art of engraving on copper, was also a prolific illustrator, the principal work assigned to him being the numerous illustrations in the “Spiegel der menschlichen Behaltnis” printed by Peter Drach at Speyer about 1478-80. There are speculations, more or less ill-founded, about the illustrators of a few other woodcut books of the fifteenth century, but I believe it is true that the first book after those already named in which the artist’s name is settled beyond doubt is Dürer’s “Apocalypse” of 1498.

From “The Apocalypse”

Size of the original woodcut, 15¼ × 11 inches]

From “The Great Passion”

Size of the original woodcut, 15¼ × 11⅛ inches]

Dr. Naumann, the editor of a recent facsimile of the cuts in the Speyer book just mentioned, claims for the “Hausbuchmeister” that he was the first painter, or painter-engraver, who attempted to get the most out of the craftsmen employed in cutting blocks from his designs. That is rather a speculative opinion, and the woodcuts in question are not, from the technical point of view, superior to many other contemporary illustrations. But there can be no question that Dürer effected an immense reform in this respect, and carried the technique of wood-engraving to a perfection unparalleled in its previous history. Not by his own handiwork, for there is no reason to suppose that Dürer ever cut his blocks himself. All the evidence points, on the contrary, to his having followed the universal practice of the time, according to which the designer drew the composition in all detail upon the wood block, and employed a professional engraver to cut the block, preserving all the lines intact, and cutting away the spaces between them, so that the result was a facsimile of the drawing as accurate as the craftsman was capable of making it. Dürer set his engravers, we may be sure, a harder task than they had ever had to grapple with before, and he must have succeeded in gradually training a man, or group of men, on whom he could rely to preserve his drawing in all its delicacy and intricate complexity. This was a work of time, and perfection was not reached till after Dürer’s return from his second journey to Venice, when a great increase of refinement on the technical side becomes noticeable, culminating in that extraordinary performance, the _Holy Trinity_ woodcut of 1511. But even in the large fifteenth-century blocks, the “Apocalypse,” the earlier portion of the “Great Passion” and the contemporary single subjects, much cross-hatching is used and the space is filled with detail to an extent hitherto unknown. Without ever losing sight of the general decorative effect, the telling pattern of black and white, Dürer put in a vast amount of interesting little things, with the conscientiousness and care that characterized everything that he did, and every detail of the leaves of a thistle or fern, or of the elaborate ornament, birds and flowers and foliage and rams’ heads, on the base of a Gothic candle-stick, had to be reproduced so that the crisp clearness of the original pen-drawing lost nothing of its precision. The result was a work so perfectly complete in black and white, as it stood, that nobody ever thought of coloring it, and that in itself was a great innovation and advance. The fifteenth-century “Illuminirer,” or the patron who gave him his orders, seems to have had an instinctive respect for excellent and highly finished work in black and white, which made him leave it alone. Line-engravings of the fifteenth century are very frequently found colored, but they are usually quite second-rate specimens, and prints by the great men, such as the “Master E. S.” and Schongauer, were respected and left alone. But such consideration was not often shown to woodcuts, which were frequently colored, especially when used as illustrations, well into the sixteenth century. It was very rarely, however, that any illuminator laid profane hands on anything of Dürer’s, woodcut or engraving, and when he did so the result is stupid and disagreeable, for it is always the work of a later generation, out of touch with Dürer’s genius.

From “The Great Passion”

Size of the original woodcut, 15⅜ × 10⅞ inches]

Size of the original woodcut, 15 × 10⅞ inches]

It may be said that if Dürer and his contemporaries did not cut their own blocks, the woodcuts are not original prints by the masters themselves. It must be conceded that they are not original prints quite in the same sense as engravings and etchings, in which the whole work was carried out upon the plate by the masters’ own hand, but it would be a mistake to describe them as examples of reproductive engraving. Such a thing as a reproductive engraving was, in fact, unknown in the Germany of Dürer’s time. A design originally projected in one medium might be reproduced in another in a case where an engraving by Schongauer, or Meckenen, or Dürer himself, was copied by some inferior woodcutter, as an act of piracy, for a bookseller who was too stingy to pay an artist to draw him a new Virgin or Saint for his purpose. But it would never have occurred to any one to reproduce an engraving or woodcut, a picture or drawing, done for its own sake, as a separate and complete work of art. Reproductions of pictures scarcely exist in German art of the sixteenth century; they are commoner in the Venetian School, among the woodcutters influenced by Titian, and Rubens established the practice once for all by his encouragement of engraving from his pictures, a century after Dürer’s time. But when woodcutting was taken up by the German painters, with Dürer as their leader, for the purpose of circulating their compositions at a cheaper price than they could charge for engravings of their own, they always had a strictly legitimate object according to the canons of graphic art. Rarely working even from sketches, never from a work already finished in another medium, they drew the subjects intended for printing directly upon the block in a technique adapted for the purpose, avoiding such combinations of lines as the most skilful craftsmen would be unable to cut. Their actual handiwork was preserved upon the surface of the block, much as in the modern original lithograph the artist’s actual work survives upon the surface of the stone; if it was in any way disfigured, as often, no doubt, it was, that must be set down to failure on the cutter’s part. Anything original that the cutter puts in, any swerving that accident or clumsiness permits him to make from the line fixed by the painter’s pen for him to follow, is a blemish, and the best woodcuts of Dürer, Holbein, Baldung, Cranach, Burgkmair and the rest of their generation have no such blemishes. They are strictly autographic: the lines that the artist’s pen has traced remain and are immortalized by the printing-press; the white spaces, also limited by his controlling will and purpose, result from the mere mechanical cutting away of blank wood that any neat-handed workman can perform. So when we speak of the woodcuts of Millais, Rossetti, Whistler, Walker, Pinwell, Sandys and the rest of the “Men of the Sixties,” we know that the blocks were cut by Dalziel or Swain, but every good print is none the less what the designer meant it to be, and what none but himself could have made it.

From “The Life of the Virgin”

Size of the original woodcut, 11⅝ × 8³/₁₆ inches]

From “The Life of the Virgin”

Size of the original woodcut, 11⅝ × 8¼ inches]

Of Dürer’s woodcutters, unluckily, we know nothing till the comparatively late period when he had been enlisted in the service of the Emperor Maximilian, whose imposing, but somewhat ponderous and pedantic, _Triumphal Arch_ was cut from the designs of Dürer and his school by Hieronymus Andreä. There is much more information about the Augsburg cutters than about those of Nuremberg, and there is no single artist in the latter city whose work is so strongly marked out by its excellence from that of his contemporaries as was Lützelburger’s, who cut Holbein’s “Dance of Death.”

To understand Dürer’s woodcuts aright, it is necessary to get to know them in their chronological sequence. In conservative collections, where they are arranged by order of subject, on the system of Bartsch, the student is continually confused by the juxtaposition of quite incongruous pieces, placed together merely because “Jérôme,” for instance, comes in alphabetical order next after “Jean.” The British Museum collection has been arranged for more than ten years past in chronological order, which, in Dürer’s case, is unusually easy to determine with approximate accuracy, because his methodical turn of mind caused him to be fond of dates, while the undated pieces can be fitted in without much difficulty by the evidence of style. The justification of the system became all the more apparent when the woodcuts were exhibited for a few months in 1909, and fell naturally into consistent and coherent groups upon the screens, while separated, as a matter of practical convenience, from the engravings. Since then two even more interesting experiments have been made, in exhibitions held at Liverpool and Bremen, toward a reconstruction of Dürer’s entire life-work in its chronological sequence, his pictures, drawings, engravings and woodcuts--represented mainly, of course, by reproductions--being merged in a single series. That is a timely warning against the risks of excessive concentration upon one single side of his many activities, but here we will not digress further from the woodcuts, which are at present our theme.

From “The Life of the Virgin”

Size of the original woodcut, 11⅝ × 8¼ inches]

From “The Life of the Virgin”

Size of the original woodcut, 11½ × 8⅛ inches]

The series opens magnificently with the group of large and stately woodcuts, abounding in vitality and dramatic invention, produced by Dürer between 1495 and 1500. These include the fifteen subjects of the “Apocalypse,” the seven early subjects of the “Great Passion” (not completed until 1510-11) and seven detached pieces uniform with the two series already named in dimensions and style, but independent of them in subject. The blocks of the majority of these single pieces are now, by the way, in an American collection, that of Mr. Junius S. Morgan, but they have suffered sadly from the ravages of the worm. There is a certain exaggeration and over-emphasis of gesture in the “Apocalypse” woodcuts, but Dürer never invented anything more sublime than the celebrated _Four Riders_ or the _St. Michael defeating the Rebel Angels_, which I regard as at least equal to the subject more frequently praised. Superb, too, is the group of _Angels restraining the Four Winds_. The landscape at the foot of _St. John’s Vision of the Four-and-twenty Elders_ (B. 63) is a complete picture by itself, and there is a rare early copy of this portion alone, which is itself a beautiful print, and doubtless the earliest pure landscape woodcut in existence. _Samson and the Lion_, the mysteriously named _Ercules_ and the _Knight and Man-at-arms_, often described as its companion, and the _Martyrdom of St. Catherine_ are among the finest of the single subjects. After this tremendously impressive group, there is for a time a certain relaxation of energy, or rather Dürer was more bent on other things, especially engraving. To the years 1500-04 belong a number of woodcuts of Holy Families and Saints, much smaller than the “Apocalypse,” and rather roughly cut. Some critics have wished to dismiss one or another of them as pupils’ work, but for this there is really no justification. Then comes another very good period, that of the “Life of the Virgin,” of which set Dürer had finished seventeen subjects before he left for Venice in 1505, while the _Death of the Virgin_ and _The Assumption_ were added in 1510, and the frontispiece in 1511, when the whole work came out as a book, assuredly one of the most desirable picture-books the world has ever seen! It is impossible to weary of the beautiful compositions, the details drawn with such loving care, the tender and homely sentiment, the humor, even, displayed in the accessory figures of _The Embrace of Joachim and Anne_, the beer-drinking gossips in the _Birth of the Virgin_, where the atmosphere of St. Anne’s chamber is sweetened by an angelic thurifer, and the merry group of angelic children playing round Joseph, bent on his carpenter’s business, while their elders keep solemn watch round Mary at her distaff and the Holy Child in the cradle. We find landscapes at least as beautiful as those in Dürer’s best engravings in the pastoral background of the _Annunciation to Joachim_ and the mountainous distance of the _Visitation_. The architectural setting of the _Presentation of Christ in the Temple_, and the tall cross held aloft, with the happiest effect on the composition, by the Apostle kneeling on the left in Mary’s death-chamber, are among the memorable features of the set.

Beautiful again, especially in fine proofs, is the next and latest of the long sets, the “Little Passion,” consisting of thirty-six subjects and a title-page, begun in 1509 and finished, like all the other books, in 1511. But it has not the monumental grandeur of the earlier religious sets, and there is an inevitable monotony about the incessant recurrence of the figure of Our Lord, when the history of the Passion is set forth in such detail. The most original and impressive subjects, in my opinion, are _Christ Appearing to St. Mary Magdalen_ and the next following it, _The Supper at Emmaus_.

Size of the original woodcut, 9¼ × 6¼ inches]

St. Anne, attended by St. Joseph and St. Joachim, receiving from His Mother the Infant Jesus

Size of the original woodcut, 9¼ × 6⅛ inches]

The years 1510 and 1511 were the most prolific of all, and witnessed the publication of other connected pieces, the _Beheading of John the Baptist_ and _Salome bringing the Baptist’s Head to Herod_, and then the three little woodcuts, _Christ on the Cross_, _Death and the Soldier_, and _The Schoolmaster_, which Dürer brought out on large sheets at the head of his own verses, signed with a large monogram at the end of all. The single sheets of 1511 include, besides the marvelous _Trinity_ already mentioned, the large _Adoration of the Magi_, the _Mass of St. Gregory_, a _St. Jerome in his Cell_, which is the best, after the celebrated engraving of 1514, of Dürer’s repeated versions of that delightful subject; the _Cain and Abel_, which is one of the great rarities; two rather unattractive _Holy Families_; and the beautiful square _Saint Christopher_, of which many fine impressions are extant to bear witness to its technical virtues. The average level of all the work of the year 1511 is so astonishingly high, that it must be regarded as the culminating period of the woodcuts, just as a slightly later time, the years 1513-14, witnesses the climax of the engravings. In the next few years Dürer’s time was much taken up with carrying out the emperor’s important but rather tiresome commissions for the _Triumphal Arch_ and two _Triumphal Cars_, the small one which forms part of the _Procession_, and the much bigger affair, with the twelve horses and allegorical retinue, which did not appear till 1522. All this group offers a rich field of research to the antiquary, but is simply unintelligible without a learned commentary, and appeals much less than the sacred subjects to the average collector and lover of art, who cannot unearth the heaps of pedantic Latin and German literature in which the motives by which Dürer was inspired, if I may use the word, lie buried. Inspiration certainly flagged under the influence of Wilibald Pirkheimer and other learned humanists who encouraged Maximilian in his penchant for allegory, and compelled Dürer, probably somewhat against his will, to use a multitude of symbols, intelligible only to the learned, instead of speaking directly to the populace in the familiar pictorial language derived from old tradition but enriched and ennobled by his own matchless art.

The later woodcuts are comparatively few in number. They include a few that are primarily of scientific interest, such as the celestial and terrestrial globes and the armillary sphere, besides the numerous illustrations to Dürer’s own works on Measurement, Proportion, and Fortification. But among them are the two splendid portraits made from drawings now in the Albertina, the _Emperor Maximilian_ of 1518 and the _Ulrich Varnbüler_ of 1522. Of the former several varieties exist, from no less than four different blocks, and it is now established that the only original version is the very rare one in which the letters “ae” of the word “Caesar” are distinct, not forming a diphthong, and placed within the large “C.” The other cuts are all copies, produced probably at Augsburg, the fine large one, with an ornamental frame and the imperial arms supported by griffins, being indisputably the work of Hans Weiditz. Only three impressions of the original are known, in the British Museum, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, and the Hofbibliothek at Vienna, in addition to which the École des Beaux-Arts at Paris possesses a fragment damaged by fire at the time of the Commune, when it was still in private hands. It is more generally known that the handsome chiaroscuro impressions of the _Varnbüler_ date, like those of the _Rhinoceros_, from the seventeenth century, the color blocks having been added in Holland. The brown and green varieties belong to different editions, distinguished by the wording of the publisher’s address at the foot, which in the majority of cases has been cut off.

Size of the original woodcut, 8⁵⁄₁₆ × 8¼ inches]

Size of the original woodcut, 11¹³/₁₆ × 8⅜ inches]

The _Virgin with the many Angels_, of 1518, is one of Dürer’s most accomplished woodcuts, and quite good impressions of it are comparatively common to-day. The latest of his compositions of this class, the _Holy Family with Angels_, of 1526, is, on the other hand, extremely rare. Some critics doubt its being an authentic work of Dürer, but in spite of certain rather eccentric and unpleasant peculiarities in the drawing, I consider this scepticism unfounded. Quite at the end of Dürer’s life comes that rather fascinating subject, _The Siege of a Fortress_, unique among Dürer’s woodcuts in the tiny scale on which its countless details are drawn. Of the many heraldic woodcuts and ex-libris attributed by Bartsch and others to Dürer, very few can be regarded as his genuine work, and most of these are very rare. The best authenticated are his own coat of arms; the arms of Ferdinand I in the book on Fortification; those of Michel Behaim, of which the block is extant with a letter written by Dürer on the back; the arms of Roggendorf, mentioned in the Netherlands _Journal_, of which only one impression is known, and the arms of Lorenz Staiber, of which the original version is also unique. There can be no doubt that the Ebner book-plate of 1516 is by Dürer; the much earlier Pirkheimer book-plate is intimately connected with the illustrations to the books by Celtes, and cannot be regarded as a certain work of the master himself, while the arms of Johann Tschertte are also doubted.

It is a fortunate circumstance for the museums and collectors of to-day that Dürer’s prints have always been esteemed, and his monogram was held in such respect and so generally recognized as the mark of something good that they have been preserved during four centuries, while so much that was interesting was allowed to perish because it was unsigned or its signature was not recognized as the work of any one important. It may be paradoxical to say that Dürers are common; few of them are to be had at any particular moment when one wants to get them; but they are commoner than any other prints of their period, and a large number of impressions of some subjects must come into the market in the course of every ten years. But the sort of Dürer the collector wants, the really beautiful, fresh, clean impression, with the right watermark and genuine, unbroken border-line, is not, and never has been, common. It is surprising how few, even of the famous museums of Europe, have a really fine collection of the woodcuts, perhaps because so many of them were formed some generations ago in uncritical times, when people were apt to think it enough if the subject was represented, in whatever condition it might be. The first-rate proofs are scarce, and getting scarcer every year; when they are to be had, they should be grasped and treasured.

SOME EARLY ITALIAN ENGRAVERS BEFORE THE TIME OF MARCANTONIO

BY ARTHUR M. HIND

Of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum

Author of “Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings in the British Museum,” “Short History of Engraving and Etching,” “Rembrandt’s Etchings: an Essay and a Catalogue,” etc.

Fifteenth-century Italian engraving is not an easy hunting-ground for the collector, but it is one of the most fascinating not less for its own sake than for the difficulty of securing one’s prize.

From the time of Raphael onward Italian engraving presents an overwhelmingly large proportion of reproductions of pictures, and loses on that account its primary interest. But in the fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, the engravers, though for the most part less accomplished craftsmen, were artists of real independence. We may in some cases exaggerate this independence through not knowing the sources which they used, but the mere lack of that knowledge adds a particular interest to their prints. Treated not only in virtue of their special claim as engravings, but merely as designs, we find something in them which the paintings of the period do not offer us.

In general, the presence and influence of one of the greater artistic personalities of the time may be recognized, but seldom definitely enough for us to trace the painter’s immediate direction. Mantegna is the most brilliant exception of a painter of first rank who is known to have handled the graver at this period. But forgetting the great names it is remarkable how in the early Renaissance in Italy even the secondary craftsmen produced work of the same inexpressible charm that pervades the great masterpieces.

One of the most beautiful examples I can cite is the _Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne_, which is known only in the British Museum impression. It has all the fascination of Botticelli’s style without being quite Botticelli--unless the engraver himself is to account for the coarsening in the drawing of individual forms. Mr. Herbert P. Horne, the great authority on Botticelli and his school, thinks it is by Bartolommeo di Giovanni (Berenson’s “Alunno di Domenico”). But whether immediately after Botticelli or after some minor artist of the school, there is the same delightful flow and rhythmic motion in the design that one thinks of in relation to Botticelli’s _Spring_.

After a design by a close follower of Botticelli, possibly by Bartolommeo di Giovanni

“But whether immediately after Botticelli or after some minor artist of the school, there is the same delightful flow and rhythmic motion in the design that one thinks of in relation to Botticelli’s _Spring_.... We could ill afford to lose the charm of the early Florentine _Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne_ for all the finished beauty of Marcantonio’s _Lucretia_, and it is still the youth of artistic development, with its naïve joy and freshness of outlook, which holds us with the stronger spell.”

Arthur M. Hind.

Reproduced from the unique impression in the British Museum

Size of the original engraving, 8⅛ × 22 inches]

Florentine engraving, in the Broad Manner, after a design by Botticelli

“Most important of all the contemporary engravings after Botticelli is the _Assumption of the Virgin_.... An original study by Botticelli for the figure of St. Thomas, who is receiving the girdle of the Virgin, is in Turin, and clinches the argument in favor of Botticelli’s authorship. The view of Rome, a record of Botticelli’s visit, is an interesting feature of the landscape.” Arthur M. Hind.

Size of the original engraving, 32⅝ × 22¼ inches]

Botticelli was in early life under the immediate inspiration, if not in the very service, of the great goldsmith Pollaiuolo (witness his picture of _Fortitude_ in Florence). One almost expects in consequence that he may at some period have tried his hand at engraving, but there is no proof that he did anything besides supplying the engravers with designs. His chief connection with the engravers was in the series of plates done for Landino’s edition of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” (Florence, 1481). Altogether nineteen plates (and a repetition of one subject) are known, but although spaces are left throughout the whole edition for an illustration to each canto, it is only in rare copies that more than two or three are found. Even the fine presentation copy to Lorenzo de’ Medici (now in the National Library, Florence) is without a single plate, showing perhaps the small regard that was paid to engraving for book decoration at that period. This lack of appreciation and the difficulties (or double labor) the printers experienced in combining copperplate impressions with type led soon after this and a few other experiments of the period to the use of woodcut as the regular mode of book illustration for well over a century. Apart from the plates to this edition, Botticelli’s devotion to Dante is shown in the beautiful series of pen drawings--in the most subtly expressive outline--preserved at Berlin and in the Vatican. It seems on the whole probable that they are later than the 1481 edition, so that we cannot point to the original drawings for the prints.

Most important of all the contemporary engravings after Botticelli is the _Assumption of the Virgin_, the largest of all the prints of the period (printed from two plates, and measuring altogether about 82.5 × 56 cm.). An original study by Botticelli for the figure of St. Thomas, who is receiving the girdle of the Virgin, is in Turin, and clinches the argument in favor of Botticelli’s authorship. The view of Rome, a record of Botticelli’s visit, is an interesting feature of the landscape.

This engraving is produced in what has been called the BROAD MANNER in contradistinction to the FINE MANNER, e.g. of the _Dante_ prints. In the BROAD MANNER the lines are laid chiefly in open parallels, and generally the shading is emphasized with a lighter return stroke laid at a small angle between the parallels. Its aim is essentially the imitation of pen drawing after the manner of such draughtsmen as Pollaiuolo and Mantegna. The FINE MANNER on the other hand shows shading in close cross-hatching (somewhat patchy and cloudy in effect in most of the early Florentine prints), and gives the appearance of imitating a wash drawing.

The two manners may be well compared in the series of “Prophets and Sibyls,” which exists in two versions, the earlier being in the Fine, and the later in the Broad Manner. The first series shows a craftsman who drew largely from German sources (putting a _St. John_ of the Master E. S. into the habit of the _Libyan Sibyl_). In the second we have an artist who discarded all the ugly and awkward features which originated in the German originals, and showed throughout a far truer feeling for beauty and a much finer power of draughtsmanship than the earlier engraver. Mr. Herbert Horne suspects, rightly I think, that Botticelli himself directly inspired this transformation of the “Prophets and Sibyls.”

Through our lack of knowledge of the engravers of this early period in Florence we are driven to a rather constant use of the somewhat unattractive distinctions of the Fine and Broad Manners. We may claim, however, to have advanced a little further in the elucidation of questions of authorship, though the great German authority on this period, Dr. Kristeller of Berlin, would still keep practically all the early Florentine engravings in an unassailable anonymity. This is of course better than classing all the engravings of the period and school, both in the Fine and Broad Manners, under the name of Baccio Baldini, which has long been the custom. A certain “Baccio, _orafo_” has been found in documents as buried in 1487, but there is practically nothing to connect his name with the substance of our prints. We would not on that account regard him as a myth, but are reduced at the moment to Vasari’s statement that “Baldini, the successor of Finiguerra in the Florentine school of engraving, having little invention, worked chiefly after designs by Botticelli.” Considering the fact that both Broad and Fine Manners (in all probability the output of two distinct workshops) show prints definitely after Botticelli, we are still in entire darkness as to the position of Baldini.

From a series of the “Prophets and Sibyls,” engraved in the Fine Manner of the Finiguerra School

Size of the original engraving, 7 × 4¼ inches]

From a series of the “Prophets and Sibyls,” engraved in the Broad Manner of the Finiguerra School

Size of the original engraving, 7 × 4¼ inches]

With regard to an important group of Fine Manner prints, Sir Sidney Colvin has given strong reasons for the attribution to Maso Finiguerra, made famous by Vasari as the inventor of the art of engraving. Considering Vasari’s evident error in regard to the discovery of engraving (for there were engravings in the north of Europe well before the earliest possible example of Finiguerra), modern students have been inclined to regard Finiguerra as much in the light of a myth as Baldini. But there is no lack of evidence as to his life and work, and without repeating the arguments here, which are given in full in Sir Sidney Colvin’s “Florentine Picture-Chronicle” (London, 1898), we would at least state our conviction that a considerable number of the early Florentine engravings, as well as an important group of nielli, must be from his hand. Vasari speaks of him as the most famous niello-worker in Florence, and he also speaks of his drawings of “figures clothed and unclothed, and histories” (the “figures” evidently the series traditionally ascribed to Finiguerra in Florence, but now for a large part labeled with an extreme of timidity “school of Pollaiuolo”; the “histories,” probably the “Picture-Chronicle” series, acquired from Mr. Ruskin for the British Museum). Then considering Vasari’s fuller statement that Finiguerra was also responsible for larger engravings in the light of a group of Florentine engravings which correspond closely in style with many of the only important group of Florentine nielli (chiefly in the collection of Baron Édouard de Rothschild, Paris) as well as with the Uffizi drawings, we can hardly escape the conviction that Vasari was correct in his main thesis. A curiously entertaining side-light is given by one of these engravings, the _Mercury_ for the series of “Planets.” Here we see the representation of a goldsmith’s shop in the streets of Florence, stocked just as we know from documents Finiguerra’s to have been. And the goldsmith is evidently engaged in engraving, not a niello, but a large copperplate.

Florentine engraving in the Fine Manner, attributed to Maso Finiguerra, or his school

“A curiously entertaining side-light is given by one of these engravings, the _Mercury_ for the series of ‘Planets.’ Here we see the representation of a goldsmith’s shop in the streets of Florence, stocked just as we know from documents Finiguerra’s to have been. And the goldsmith is evidently engaged in engraving, not a niello, but a large copperplate.” Arthur M. Hind.

Size of the original engraving, 12¾ × 8⁹⁄₁₆ inches]

A Florentine engraving in the Fine Manner, attributed to the school of Finiguerra

“One of the “Otto Prints” (so called from the eighteenth-century collector who possessed the majority of the series), _A Young Man and Woman Each Holding An Apple_, is in the Gray Collection, Harvard, and it is a charming example of the amatory subjects of the series, prints such as the Florentine gallant might have pasted on the spice-box to be presented to his _inamorata_. The badge of Medici (the six “palle” with three lilies in the uppermost) added by a contemporary hand in pen and ink suggests that this one may have been used by the young Lorenzo himself between about 1465 and 1467, which accords well with the probable date of the engravings.” Arthur M. Hind.

(The inscription above reads _ò amore te qª_ (questa) and _piglia qª_: “O Love, this to you” and “Take this.”)

Size of the original engraving, 4¼ × 4¼ inches]

The engravings most certainly by Finiguerra, such as the _Judgment Hall of Pilate_ (Gotha), the _March to Calvary and the Crucifixion_ (British Museum), _Various Wild Animals Hunting and Fighting_ (British Museum), are of course rarities which most collectors can never hope to possess. The same may also be said of somewhat later prints in the same manner of engraving (which may be the work of the heirs of Finiguerra’s atelier, which is known to have been carried on by members of his family until 1498), such as the Fine Manner “Prophets and Sibyls” and the “Otto Prints.” We will in consequence devote less space to these rarities, possessed chiefly by a few European collections, than their artistic interest would justify, keeping our argument henceforward more to the engravings that the American amateur has the chance of seeing or acquiring at home.

One of the “Otto Prints” (so called from the eighteenth-century collector who possessed the majority of the series), _A Young Man and Woman Each Holding An Apple_, is in the Gray Collection, Harvard, and it is a charming example of the amatory subjects of the series, prints such as the Florentine gallant might have pasted on the spice-box to be presented to his _inamorata_. The badge of Medici (the six “palle” with three lilies in the uppermost) added by a contemporary hand in pen and ink suggests that this one may have been used by the young Lorenzo himself between about 1465 and 1467, which accords well with the probable date of the engravings.

The only known engraving by the goldsmith and painter Antonio Pollaiuolo, the large _Battle of Naked Men_, shows a far greater artist than his slightly elder contemporary Finiguerra. They had both studied in the same workshop and probably continued a sort of partnership until Finiguerra’s death. Pollaiuolo’s draughtsmanship evinces a grip and intensity that Finiguerra entirely lacks in his somewhat torpid academic drawings, and it is seen at its best in this magnificently vigorous plate. An excellent impression, surpassed by few in the museums of Europe, is, I believe, in the collection of Mr. Francis Bullard of Boston.

Before leaving Florence for north Italy we would allude to that attractive engraver of the transition period, Cristofano Robetta. His art has lost the finest flavor of the primitive Florentine without having succeeded to the sound technical system of the contemporaries of Dürer, but it has a thoroughly individual though delicate vein of fancy. The _Adoration of the Magi_, one of his finest plates, is a free translation of a picture by Filippino Lippi in the Uffizi, but the group of singing angels is an addition of his own, and done with a true sense for graceful composition. Fine early impressions of this print are of course difficult to get, but it is perhaps the best known of Robetta’s works, because of the number of modern impressions in the market. The original plate (with the _Allegory of the Power of Love_ engraved on the back) belonged to the Vallardi Collection in the early nineteenth century, and is now in the British Museum, happily safe from the reprinter.

Among the greatest rarities of early engraving in north Italy is the well-known series traditionally called the “Tarocchi Cards of Mantegna”--somewhat erroneously, for they are neither by Mantegna, nor Tarocchi, nor playing-cards at all. As in the case of the “Prophets and Sibyls,” there are two complete series of the same subjects by two different engravers. Each series consists of fifty subjects divided into five sections and illustrating: (1) the Sorts and Conditions of Men; (2) Apollo and the Muses; (3) the Arts and Sciences; (4) the Genii and Virtues; (5) the Planets and Spheres. A considerable number of the earliest impressions known are still in contemporary fifteenth-century binding, and it seems as if the series was intended merely as an instructive or entertaining picture-book for the young. There is the most absolute divergence of opinion as to which is the original series, and the student is encouraged to whet his critical acumen on the problem by the excellent set of reproductions which has recently been issued by the Graphische Gesellschaft and edited by Dr. Kristeller. Unfortunately Dr. Kristeller takes what seems to me an entirely wrong view of the matter. I cannot but feel that the more finely engraved series is at the same time the more ancient, and almost certainly Ferrarese in origin, so characteristic of Cossa is the type of these figures with large heads, rounded forms, and bulging drapery. The second series shows a more graceful sense of composition and spacing (the heads and figures being in better relation to the size of the print), but its very naturalism is to me an indication of its somewhat later origin. The less precise technical quality of this second series is closely related to the Florentine engravings in the Fine Manner, and I am inclined to regard it as the work of a Florentine engraver of about 1475 to 1480, i.e. about a decade later than the original set.

“The only known engraving by the goldsmith and painter Antonio Pollaiuolo, the large _Battle of Naked Men_, shows a far greater artist than his slightly elder contemporary, Finiguerra. Pollaiuolo’s draughtsmanship evinces a grip and intensity that Finiguerra entirely lacks in his somewhat torpid academic drawings, and it is seen at its best in this magnificently vigorous plate.” Arthur M. Hind.

Reproduced from the impression in the Print Department, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Size of the original engraving, 15¹¹⁄₁₆ × 23⁷⁄₁₆ inches]

“Cristofano Robetta’s art has lost the finest flavor of the primitive Florentine without having succeeded to the sound technical system of the contemporaries of Dürer, but it has a thoroughly individual though delicate vein of fancy. The _Adoration of the Magi_, one of his finest plates, is a free translation of a picture by Filippino Lippi in the Uffizi, but the group of singing angels is an addition of his own, and done with a true sense for graceful composition.” Arthur M. Hind.

Size of the original engraving, 11⅝ × 11 inches]

Leaving the pseudo-Mantegna for the master himself, we are in the presence of the greatest of the Italian engravers before Marcantonio--if not of all time. Like the Florentines, Mantegna was an ardent lover of antiquity, but his spirit was far more impassive, far more like the antique marble itself. His classical frame of mind was to some extent the offspring of his education in the school of Squarcione and in the academic atmosphere of Padua. His art has a monumental dignity which the Florentines never possessed, but it was without the freshness and inexpressible charm that pervade Tuscan art. An engraving like the _Risen Christ between St. Andrew and St. Longinus_ is an indication of the genius that might have made one of the noblest sculptors, and one regrets that he never carried to accomplishment the project of a monument to Vergil in Mantua, which Isabella d’Este wished him to undertake.

Seven of the engravings attributed to Mantegna (including the _Risen Christ_) are so much above the rest in subtle expressiveness, as well as in technical quality, that we cannot but agree with Dr. Kristeller’s conclusion that these alone are by Mantegna’s hand, and the rest engraved after his drawings. They are similar to Pollaiuolo’s _Battle of Naked Men_ in style, engraved chiefly in open parallel lines of shading with a much more lightly engraved return stroke between the parallels. It is this light return stroke, exactly in the manner of Mantegna’s pen drawing, which gives the wonderfully soft quality to the early impressions. But it is so delicate that comparatively few printings must have worn it down, and the majority of impressions that come into the market show little but the outline and the stronger lines of shading. Even so these Mantegna prints do not lose the splendidly vigorous character of their design, but it is of course the fine early impressions which are the joy and allure of the true connoisseur. The seven certainly authentic Mantegna engravings are the _Virgin and Child_, the two _Bacchanals_, the two _Battles of the Sea-Gods_, the horizontal _Entombment_, and the _Risen Christ_, already mentioned.

“Of all the early Italian engravers, Andrea Mantegna is by far the most powerful, though scarcely the most human. Like many of the Florentines, he was an ardent lover of antiquity, but his spirit was far more impassive than theirs, and far more like the antique marble itself. His art has a monumental dignity which the Florentines never possessed, but it lacks the freshness and inexpressible charm that pervade Tuscan art. His was a genius that would have made one of the noblest sculptors: the engraving of the _Risen Christ_ shows what he might have achieved in the field.” Arthur M. Hind.

Size of the original engraving, 15⁷⁄₁₆ × 12¹¹⁄₁₆ inches]

This engraving, based on a study by Mantegna for a group in the Louvre picture of _Parnassus_, is one of the most beautiful prints of the school of Mantegna. It is most probably by Zoan Andrea.

Size of the original engraving, 8⅞ × 13 inches]

Nearest in quality to these comes the _Triumph of Caesar: the Elephants_, after some study for the series of cartoons now preserved at Hampton Court. But it lacks Mantegna’s distinction in drawing, and Zoan Andrea, who is probably the author of one of the anonymous engravings of _Four Women Dancing_ (based on a study for a group in the Louvre picture of _Parnassus_), one of the most beautiful prints of the school, was certainly capable of this achievement. Even Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, who did work of a very third-rate order after migrating to Rome, produced under Mantegna’s inspiration so excellent a plate as the _Holy Family_.

Other prints attributed to Mantegna, such as the _Descent into Hell_ and the _Scourging of Christ_, possess all Mantegna’s vigor of design, and reflect the master’s work in the manner of the Eremitani frescos, but we can hardly believe that they were engraved by the same hand as the “seven,” even supposing a considerably earlier date for their production.

Each of Mantegna’s known followers (Zoan Andrea and G. A. da Brescia) entirely changed his manner of engraving after leaving the master; in fact, except in his immediate entourage, Mantegna’s style was continued by few of the Italian engravers. For all its dignified simplicity, it is more the manner of the draughtsman transferred to copper, than of the engraver brought up in the conventional use of the burin. We see Mantegna’s open linear style reflected in the earlier works of Nicoletto da Modena, and the Vicentine, Benedetto Montagna, but each of these engravers tended more and more in their later works to imitate the more professional style of the German engravers, and of Dürer in particular. Dürer was constantly copied by the Italian engravers of the early sixteenth century, and details from his plates (chiefly in the landscape background) were even more consistently plagiarized.

In the example of Nicoletto da Modena, the _Adoration of the Shepherds_, which we reproduce, it is Dürer’s immediate predecessor, Martin Schongauer, from whom the chief elements in the subject are copied. But in this example the background, with its vista of lake with ships and a town, suggested no doubt by one of the subalpine Italian lakes, is thoroughly characteristic of the South, while Schongauer’s Gothic architecture is embellished with classical details. Isolated figures of saints or heathen deities against a piece of classical architecture, set in an open landscape, became the most frequent type of Nicoletto’s later prints, which are practically all of small dimensions.

Like Nicoletto da Modena, Benedetto Montagna gradually developed throughout his life a more delicate style of engraving, entirely giving up the large dimensions and broad style of his _Sacrifice of Abraham_ for a series of finished compositions which from their smaller compass would have been well adapted for book illustration. Several of these, such as the _Apollo and Pan_, illustrate incidents in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” but there is no evidence for, and there is even probability against, their having ever been used in books. Several of the subjects are treated very similarly in the woodcuts of the 1497 Venice edition of Ovid in the vernacular. When engravings and woodcuts thus repeat each other, the woodcutter is generally the copyist, but in this case the reverse is almost certainly the case, as the Ovid plates belong to Montagna’s later period, and could hardly have preceded 1500.

“In the _Adoration of the Shepherds_ it is Dürer’s immediate predecessor. Martin Schongauer, from whom the chief elements in the subject are copied. But in this example the background, with its vista of lake with ships and a town, suggested no doubt by one of the subalpine Italian lakes, is thoroughly characteristic of the South, while Schongauer’s Gothic architecture is embellished with classical details.” Arthur M. Hind.

Size of the original engraving, 9⅞ × 7¼ inches]

“Jacopo de’ Barbari is of peculiar interest as a link between the styles of Germany and the South. Whether of Northern extraction or not is uncertain, but the earlier part of his life was passed in Venice. Dürer was apparently much impressed by his art on his first visit to Venice between 1495 and 1497, and ... even seems to have taken an immediate suggestion for a composition from Barbari, i.e. for his _Apollo and Diana_. Dürer’s version shows a far greater virility and concentration of design, but for all its power it lacks the breezier atmosphere of Barbari’s print.” Arthur M. Hind.

Size of the original engraving, 6¼ × 3⅞ inches]