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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apart from Mantegna, Leonardo and Bramante are the two great names which have been connected with engravings of the period. But I incline to doubt whether either of them engraved the plates which have been attributed to them. The large Interior of a Ruined Church, splendid in design and reminiscent of the architect’s work in the sacristy of S. Satiro, Milan, might equally well have been engraved by a Nicoletto da Modena, with whose earlier style it has much in common. Of the prints attributed to Leonardo, the fascinating Profile Bust of a Young Woman (p. 252), unique impression in the British Museum, stands out from the rest for the sensitive quality of its outline, but even here I would be more ready to see the hand of an engraver like Zoan Andrea, who after leaving Mantua seems to have settled in Milan and done work in a finer manner influenced by the style of the Milanese miniaturists (such as the Master of the Sforza Book of Hours in the British Museum).
In Venice Giovanni Bellini’s style is reflected in the dignified engravings of Girolamo Mocetto, and in the region of Bologna or Modena one meets the anonymous master “I B (with the Bird),” whose few engraved idyls are among the most alluring prints of the lesser masters of north Italy.
More individual than Mocetto and far less dependent on any other contemporary painter is Jacopo de’ Barbari, who 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 his particular interest in the study of a Canon of Human Proportions was aroused by some figure-drawings which Barbari had shown him. Dürer 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; it is redolent of the study, while the latter has the charm of an open Italian landscape. There is a distinct femininity about Barbari; perhaps this very feature and the languorous grace of his treatment of line and the sinuous folds of drapery give his prints their special allure.
I would close this article with some reference to two other engravers of great individuality of style—Giulio and Domenico Campagnola, of Padua.
Domenico’s activity as a painter continued until after 1563, but the probable period of his line-engravings (about 1517-18), and his close connection with Giulio Campagnola (though the exact nature of the relationship is unexplained), justify his treatment among the precursors rather than in the wake of Marcantonio.
Giulio Campagnola, like Giorgione, whose style he so well interpreted, was a short-lived genius. He was a young prodigy, famous at the tender age of thirteen as a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, besides being accomplished as a musician and in the arts of sculpture, miniature, and engraving. Little wonder that he did not long survive his thirtieth year. Probably his practice as an illuminator as well as his particular aim of rendering the atmosphere of Giorgione’s paintings led him to the method of using dots, or rather short flicks, in his engraving, which is in a sense an anticipation of the stipple process of the eighteenth century, though of course without the use of etching. Most of his prints are known in the two states—in pure line, and after the dotted work had been added.
One of the most splendid of his plates is the St. John the Baptist, with a dignity of design whose origin may probably be traced back to some drawing by Mantegna, though the landscape is of course thoroughly Paduan or Venetian in its character. More completely characteristic, and the most purely Giorgionesque of all his prints, is the Christ and the Woman of Samaria, one of the most wonderfully beautiful of all the engravings of this period.
It is Giorgione again whom we see reflected in the Shepherds in a Landscape, a plate which seems to have been left unfinished by Giulio and completed by Domenico Campagnola. There is a drawing in the Louvre for the right half of the print, and there is every reason to think that this drawing as well as the engraving of that portion of the landscape is by Giulio. But the group of figures and trees on the left is entirely characteristic of the looser technical manner of Domenico. The existence of a copy of the right-hand portion of the plate alone points to the existence of an unfinished state of the original, though no such impressions have been found. In any case it distinctly supports the theory that the other part of the original print was a later addition.
We may have to admit in conclusion that there is nothing in Italian engraving before Marcantonio quite on a level with the achievement of Albrecht Dürer, but the indefinable allure that characterizes so much of the work of the minor Italian artists of the earlier Renaissance is more than enough compensation for any lack of technical efficiency. With Marcantonio we find this efficiency in its full development, joined to a remarkable individuality in the interpretation of sketches by Raphael and other painters. Yet 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.