Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

In the Low Countries, on the other hand, the regeneration of art preceded mechanical improvement. Even when the latter was in full progress, nay, even when a grand discovery had revealed all the capabilities and fixed the limits of printing, engraving was by no means subordinated, as in Germany, to the advance of the new process, but, on the contrary, had long since acquired a clearness and certainty of execution which was still lacking in the works of the printers. The "Speculum," as we have said, bears testimony to that sort of anomaly between the mechanical imperfection of the Dutch printed texts of the fifteenth century and the merit of the plates by which they were accompanied. Other examples might be mentioned, but it is useless to multiply evidence, and to insist on details. We shall have accomplished enough if we have succeeded in accentuating some of the principal features, and in summing up the essential characteristics of engraving, at the time of the Incunabuli.

CHAPTER II.
PLAYING CARDS. THE DOT MANNER

In our endeavour to prove the relative antiquity of wood engraving in the Low Countries, we have intentionally rather deferred the purely archæological question, and have sought the first signs of talent instead of the bold beginnings of the art. The origin of wood engraving, materially considered, cannot be said to be confined to the time and country of the pupils of Van Eyck. It was certainly in their hands that it first began to show signs of being a real art, and give promise for the future; but we have still to inquire how many years it had been practised in Europe, through what phases it had already passed, and to what uses it had been applied, before it took this start and received this consecration.

We treat this question of origin with some reserve, and must repeat as our excuse that savants have pushed their researches so far, and unhappily with such conflicting results, and have found, or have thought they found, in the accounts of travellers, or in ancient official or historical documents, so many proofs and arguments in support of different systems, that it becomes equally difficult to accept or to finally reject their various conclusions. The prevailing opinion, however, attributes to the makers of playing cards, if not the discovery of wood engraving, at least its first practical application in Europe. Many writers agree on the general principle, but agreement ends when it comes to be question of the date and place of the earliest attempts. Some pronounce in favour of the fourteenth century and Germany; others plead for France, where they say cards were in use from the beginning of the reign of Philip of Valois. Others again, to support the claims of Italy, arm themselves with a passage quoted by Tiraboschi from the "Trattato del Governo della Famiglia," a work written, according to them, in 1299; and they suppose, besides, that the commercial relations of Japan and China with Venice would have introduced into that town before any other the use of cards and the art of making them.

Emeric David, one of the most recent authorities, carries things with a still higher hand. He begins by setting aside all the claimants – Germany with the Low Countries, France as well as Italy.¹¹ Where playing cards were first used, or whether any particular xylographic collection belongs or not to the first years of the fifteenth century, are matters of extremely small importance in his eyes. In the documents brought forward by competent experts as the most ancient remains of wood engraving, he finds instead a testimony to the uninterrupted practice of the art in Europe. For the real origin the author of the "Discours sur la Gravure" does not hesitate to go boldly back beyond the Christian era. Nor does he stop there; but sees in the practice of the Greeks under the successors of Alexander a mere continuance of the traditions of those Asiatic peoples who were accustomed from time immemorial to print on textile fabrics by means of wooden moulds.

It would be too troublesome to discuss his facts or his conclusions; so many examples borrowed from the poets, from the historians of antiquity, and the Fathers of the Church, appear to sustain his perhaps too comprehensive theory. The best and the shortest plan will be to take it upon trust, and to admit on the authority of Homer, Herodotus, Ezekiel, and St. Clement of Alexandria, that from the heroic ages till the early days of Christianity, there has been no break in the practice of printing upon various materials from wooden blocks. Still less need we grudge the Middle Ages the possession of a secret already the common property of so many centuries.

But the printing of textiles does not imply the knowledge and practice of engraving properly so called; and many centuries may have passed without any attempt to use this merely industrial process for finer ends, or to apply it to the purposes of art. Seals with letters cut in relief were smeared with colour and impressed on vellum or paper long before the invention of printing. The small stamps or patterns with which the scribes and illuminators transferred the outlines of capital letters to their manuscripts, might well have suggested the last advance. And yet how many years and experiments were required to bring it to perfection! Why may we not suppose that the art of engraving, like the art of printing, in spite of early, partial, and analogous discoveries, may have waited long for its hour of birth? And when block printing was once brought from Asia into Europe, why may it not have suffered the same fate as other inventions equally ingenious in principle and equally limited in their earlier applications? Glass, for instance, was well known by the nations of antiquity; but how long a time elapsed before it was applied to windows?

We have said that according to a generally received opinion we must look upon playing cards as the oldest remains of xylography. But the evidence on which this opinion is based has only a negative authority. Because the old books in which cards are mentioned say nothing of any other productions of wood engraving, it has been inferred that such productions did not yet exist; but is it not allowable to ask if the silence of writers in such a case absolutely establishes such a negative? Might not this silence be explained by the nature of the work, and of the subject treated, which was generally literary or philosophical, and quite independent of questions of art? When speaking of cards, whether to formally forbid or only to restrain their use, the chroniclers and the moralists of the fourteenth century, or of the beginning of the fifteenth, probably thought but little of the way they were made. Their intention was to denounce a vice rather than to describe an industrial process. Why, then should they have troubled about other works in which this process was employed, not only without danger to religion and morality, but with a view of honouring both? Pious pictures cut in wood by the hands of monks or artisans might have been well known at this time, although contemporary authors may have chosen to mention only cards; and, without pushing conjecture too far, we may take the liberty of supposing that engravers first drew their inspiration from the same source as illuminators, painters on glass, and sculptors. Besides, we know well that art was then only the naïve expression of religion and the emblem of Christian thought. Why should the cutters of xylographic figures have been an exception to the general rule? and what strange freak would have led them to choose as the subject of their first efforts a species of work so contrary to the manners and traditions of all the schools?

Setting aside written testimony, and consulting the engravings themselves which have been handed down to us from former centuries, we are entitled to say that the very oldest playing cards are, at the most, contemporaneous with the "St. Christopher" of 1423 and the oldest known wood-cuts, inasmuch as the engraving of these cards certainly does not date back beyond the reign of Charles VII. That the Italian, German, or French tarocchi (ornamented chequers or cards) were in use before that time is possible; but as none of these early tarocchi have survived, it cannot be known to what extent they represent the progress of the art, and how far they may have served as models for other xylographic works: even though it be true that relief engraving, and not merely drawing with the pen, was the means first employed for the making of the tarocchi mentioned here and there in the chronicles.

Such French cards as have come down to us would lead us to believe, in any case, that the progress was slow enough, for they still reveal an extraordinary want of experience both as to shape and effect, and have all the timidity of an art still in its infancy. This must also be said of works of the same kind executed in Germany in the fifteenth century; except the cards, attributed to a contemporary of the Master of 1466, and these are engraved on metal. In Italy alone, cards, or rather the symbolical pieces known rightly or wrongly by the name of tarocchi, possessed, from an artistic point of view, real importance from the time when engraving on metal had begun to take the place of wood-cutting. The artists initiated by Finiguerra into the secrets of the new method displayed good taste, knowledge, and skill; and in such less important work, as well as in that of a higher order, their talent at last inaugurated an era of real progress and of fruitful enterprise.

It is of no consequence, for the matter of that, whether wood engraving was first applied to the making of pious pictures or to the manufacture of cards. In any case the process is generally looked upon as the oldest method of engraving, and as the first to give types to be multiplied in proofs by printing.

M. Léon de Laborde, one of the clearest and best informed writers on the origins of engraving and typography, considers, on the other hand, that engraving in relief on metal, rather than the xylographic process, was the proximate cause of the discovery of printing. In a work published in 1839, which unfortunately has yet to receive the amplifications promised by the author¹² M. de Laborde declares that the first printed engravings must have been dotted ones: that is, prints produced in the peculiar mode already touched upon, and in which the black parts come out sprinkled with white dots. According to him, engraving, or, to speak more exactly, the printing of engraved work, must have been invented by goldsmiths rather than by draughtsmen or illuminators. The former, by the nature of their craft, possessed the tools and the necessary materials, and were therefore in a better position than any one else to stumble upon the discovery of the process, if not deliberately to invent it. As matter of fact, many of those who worked in the Low Countries, or in the Rhenish provinces, during the first years of the fifteenth century, printed works in the early dot manner: in other words, engraved in relief on metal. And those xylographic specimens which are usually looked upon as the oldest examples of engraving, are in reality only the outcome of a reformation, and the product of an art already modified.

The opinion expressed some time ago by M. Léon de Laborde has recently been supported by the discovery of two engravings, in the early dot manner, belonging, we think, to the year 1406, and on which we have ourselves published some remarks.¹³ But our argument being only founded on the similarity of certain external facts, so to speak, and on the probability of certain calculations, it is not really possible to attribute to these documents so secure a standing as to those whose age is established by dates, and set practically beyond question.

Now, the oldest of the dated engravings in relief on metal is the "St. Bernardino of Siena," wrongly called the "St. Bernard," belonging to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This engraving in the dot manner bears the date 1454. It is, therefore, later than the "St. Christopher" engraved on wood, and later even, as we shall presently see, than the first engraving in incised line, the "Pax," by Finiguerra, whose date of printing is certain. Remembering these facts, the separation of the oldest dotted prints from the first specimens of true engraving is only permissible on the ground that they are works executed by a special process. Considered from a purely artistic point of view, they offer little interest. Their drawing, still ruder than that of the German wood-cuts, exhibits an almost hieroglyphic unreality. Their general effect is purely conventional; and, owing to the uniform depth of the blacks, their insignificant modelling expresses neither the relief nor the comparative depression of the forms.

In short, we find in these early dotted prints nothing but perfect falseness to nature, and all the mendacity inherent in feebleness of taste and slavish conformity to system.

How comes it that this sorry child's-play has appeared to deserve in our day attention which is not always conceded to more serious work? This might be better excused had these prints been investigated in order to demonstrate the principles of the method followed afterwards by the engravers of illustrations for books. The charming borders, for instance, which adorn the "Books of Hours," printed in France at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, would naturally suggest comparisons between the way in which many parts are stippled, and the process of the early dotted engraving. But we may surely term excessive the efforts of certain scholars to fix on these defective attempts in a particular method of work the attention of a public naturally attracted elsewhere. The fact is, however, that in this matter, as well as in questions relating to the origin of wood engraving and printing, national self-respect was at stake, and writers sought in the narrow field of archæology a victory over rival claims which they might less easily have achieved on other grounds.

Between the authors of the Low Countries and of Germany, long accustomed to skirmishes of the kind, this new conflict might have begun and continued without awaking much interest in other nations; but, contrary to custom, these counterclaims originated neither in Germany nor in the Low Countries. For the first time the name of France was heard of in a dispute as to the origin of engraving; and though there was but scant honour to be gained, the unforeseen rivalry did not fail to give additional interest to the struggle, and, in France at least, to meet with a measure of favour.

The words "Bernhardinus Milnet," deciphered, or supposed to be deciphered, at the bottom of an old dotted engraving, representing "The Virgin and the Infant Jesus," were taken for the signature of a French engraver, and the discovery was turned to further profit by the assumption that the said "Bernard or Bernardin Milnet" engraved all the prints of this particular class; although, even supposing these to belong to a single school, they manifestly could not all belong to a single epoch. The invention and monopoly of dotted engraving once attributed to a single country, or rather to a single man, these assertions continued to gain ground for some time, and were even repeated in literary and historical works. A day, however, came when they began to lose credit; and as doubts entered even the minds of his countrymen, the supposed Bernard Milnet is now deprived of his name and title, and is very properly regarded as an imaginary being.

Does it follow from this, as M. Passavant¹⁴ would have it, that all these prints, naturalised for a little while in France, ought to be restored to Germany? Their contradictory character with regard to workmanship and style might cause one, with the most honest intentions, to hesitate, though their intrinsic value is not such as to cause the former country any great loss.

Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of anything less interesting, except with regard to the particular nature of the process. The outlines of the figures have none of that drawing, firm even to stiffness, nor has the flow of the draperies that taste for abrupt forms, which distinguished the productions of the German school from its beginnings. The least feeble of these specimens, such as the "Saint Barbara," in the Brussels Library, or the "St. George on Horseback," preserved in the Print Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, do indeed occasionally suggest some similarity of origin or manner with the school of Van Eyck. But it is unnecessary to debate the point at greater length. Whether produced in France, in the Low Countries, or in Germany, the dotted engravings of the fifteenth century add so little lustre to the land which gave them birth, that no scepticism as to their origin need lie very heavily on the conscience. In the general history of the documents on the origin of engraving, the dotted prints form a series distinguished by the method of their execution from any other earlier or contemporary specimens of work; the date mark 1454, borne by one among the number, gives us authentic information as to the time of these strange experiments, these curiosities of handicraft rather than of art. This is as much as we need to bear in mind upon the subject, and quite enough to complete the history of the elementary attempts which preceded or which co-existed for a few years with the beginning of engraving by incised line in Italy.

We have now arrived at that decisive moment when engraving, endowed with fresh resources, was practised for the first time by real masters. Up to the present, the trifling ability and skill possessed by certain wood-cutters and the peculiar methods of dotted engraving have been the only means by which we could measure the efforts expended in the search for new technical methods, or in their use when discovered. We have now done with such hesitating and halting progress. The art of printing from plates cut in intaglio had no sooner been discovered by, or at least dignified by the practice of, a Florentine goldsmith, than upon every side fresh talent was evoked. In Italy and Germany it was a question of who should profit most and quickest by the advance. A spirit of rivalry at once arose between the two schools; and fifteen years had not elapsed since Italian art had given its note in the works of the goldsmith engravers of the school of Finiguerra, before German art had found an equally definite expression in the works of the Master of 1466. But, before examining this simultaneous progress, we shall have to say a few words on the historical part of the question, and to return to the origin of the process of intaglio engraving, as we have already done with the origin of engraving in relief. This part of our subject must be briefly and finally disposed of; we may then altogether abandon the uncertain ground of archæological hypothesis.

CHAPTER III.
FIRST ATTEMPTS AT INTAGLIO ENGRAVING. THE NIELLI OF THE FLORENTINE GOLDSMITHS. PRINTS BY THE ITALIAN AND GERMAN PAINTER-ENGRAVERS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

We have seen that Gutenberg's permanent improvements in the method of printing resulted in the substitution, so far as written speech was concerned, of a mode of reproduction almost infinitely fruitful, and even rapid when compared to the slowness and the limited resources of the xylographic method. Typography was destined to abolish the use of block printing, and more particularly of caligraphy, which, till then, had occupied so many pious and patient hands both in monasteries and in schools. The art of printing from engravings worked similar mischief to the illuminator's craft. Such were, before long, the natural consequences of the progress made; and, we may add, such had been from the first the chief object of these innovations.

Perhaps this double revolution, so potent in its general effect and in its influence on modern civilisation, may have appeared to those engaged in it no more important than a purely industrial improvement. Surely, for instance, we do no injustice to Gutenberg if we accept with some reserve the vast political and philosophical ideas, and the purposes of universal enfranchisement, with which he has been sometimes credited? Probably the views of the inventor of printing reached neither so far nor so high. He did not intend to figure as an apostle, nor did he regard himself as devoted to a philanthropic mission, as we should put it in the present day. He considered himself no more than a workman with a happy thought, when he proposed to replace the lengthy and costly labours of the copyist by a process so much cheaper and so much more expeditious.

A somewhat similar idea had already occurred to the xylographic printers. Even the title of one of the first books published by them, the "Biblia Pauperum," or "Bible for the Poor," proved their wish to place within the reach of the masses an equivalent to those illuminated manuscript copies which were only obtainable by the rich. One glance at the ancient xylographic collections is enough to disclose the spirit in which such work was undertaken, and the design with which it was conceived. The new industry imitated in every particular the appearance of those earlier works due to the pen of the scribe or to the brush of the illuminator; and, perhaps, the printers themselves, speculating on the want of discernment in the purchasing public, thought less of exposing the secret of their method than of maintaining an illusion.

In most of the xylographic books, indeed, the first page is quite without ornamentation. There are neither chapter-headings nor ornamental capitals; the blank space seems to await the hand of the illuminator, who should step in to finish the work of the printer, and complete the resemblance between the printed books and the manuscript. Gutenberg followed; and even he, although less closely an imitator of caligraphy, did not himself disdain at first to practise some deception as to the nature of his method. It is said that the Bible he printed at Mayence was sold as manuscript; and the letterpress is certainly not accompanied by any technical explanation, or by any note of the printer's name or the mode of fabrication. Not till somewhat later, when he published the "Catholicon," did Gutenberg avow that he had printed this book "without the help of reed, quill, or stylus, but by means of a marvellous array of moulds and punches." Even in this specimen of a process already settled and finally disclosed to the public, the capital letters were left blank in the printing, and were afterwards filled in with brush or pen. It was a farewell salutation to the past, and the latest appearance of that old art which was now doomed to pass away before the new, and to leave the field to the products of the press.

Did the inventor of the art of printing from plates cut in intaglio, like the inventor of the art of typography, only wish at first to extend to a larger public what had hitherto been reserved for the favoured few? Was early engraving but a weapon turned against the monopoly of the miniature painter? We might be tempted to think so, from the number of manuscripts belonging to the second half of the fifteenth century, in which coloured prints, surrounded by borders also coloured, are set opposite a printed text, apparently in order to imitate as nearly as possible the familiar aspect of illuminated books. Next in turn came printed books with illustrations, and loose sheets published separately for every-day use. The Italian engravers, even before they began to adorn with the burin those works which have been the most frequently illustrated – such, for instance, as the religious handbooks and the poem of Dante – employed the new process from as early as 1465, to assure their calendars a wider publicity. But let us return to the time when engraving was yet in its early stages, and when – by chance, by force of original genius, or by the mere completion of what had been begun by other hands – a Florentine goldsmith, one Maso Finiguerra, succeeded in fixing on paper the impression of a silver plate on which lines had been engraved in intaglio and filled with black.

Finiguerra's great glory does not, however, lie in the solution of the practical difficulty. Amongst the Italians none before him had ever thought of trying to print from a work engraved in incised line or intaglio on metal; and therefore, at least, in his own country, he deserved the honours of priority. But the invention of the process – that is, in the absolute and literal sense of its name, the notion of reproducing burin work by printing – was certainly not peculiar to Finiguerra. Unconscious of what was passing elsewhere, he may have been the first in Florence to attempt this revolution in art; but beyond the frontiers of Italy, many had already employed for the necessities of trade that method which it was his to turn into a powerful instrument of art. His true glory consists in the unexpected authority with which he inaugurated the movement. Although it may be true that there are prints a few years older than any Florentine niello – the German specimens of 1446, discovered but the other day by M. Renouvier¹⁵ or the "Virgin" of 1451 described by M. Passavant¹⁶– it cannot change the real date of the invention of engraving; that date has been written by the hand of a man of talent, the first engraver worthy of the name of artist.

That Finiguerra was really the inventor of engraving, because he dignified the new process by the striking ability with which he used it, and proved his power where his contemporaries had only exhibited their weakness, must be distinctly laid down, even at the risk of scandalising some of the learned. He has the same right to celebrity as Gutenberg, who, like him, was but the discoverer of a decisive advance; the same right also as Nicolò Pisano and Giotto, the real founders of the race of the Great Masters, and, truly speaking, the first painter and the first sculptor who appeared in Italy, although neither sculpture nor painting were even novelties at the moment of their birth. As a mere question of date, the "Pax" of Florence may not be the earliest example of engraving; be it so. But in which of these earlier attempts, now so much acclaimed as arguments against the accepted tradition, can we glean even the faintest promise of the merits which distinguish that illustrious engraving? He who wrought it is no usurper; his fame is a legitimate conquest.

It is a singular coincidence that the discovery of printing and that of the art of taking proofs on paper from a plate engraved in intaglio, or, to speak more exactly, that the final improvements of both these processes, should have sprung up almost simultaneously, one in Italy and the other in Germany. There is only an interval of two years between the time when Finiguerra printed his first engraving in 1452, and the time when Gutenberg exhibited his first attempts at printing in 1454. Till then, copies drawn, painted, or written by hand had been the only efficient means of reproduction. None, even amongst those most capable of original thought or action, considered it beneath them to set forth the thought of others. Boccaccio and Petrarch exchanged whole books of Livy or of Cicero which they had patiently transcribed, and monkish or professional artists copied on the vellum of missals the paintings which covered the walls or adorned the altars of their churches. Such subjects as were engraved on wood were only designed to stimulate the devotion of the pious. Both by their inadequate execution, and the special use for which they were intended, they must rank as industrial products rather than as works of art.

Besides illumination and wood engraving, there was a process sometimes used to copy certain originals, portraits or fancy subjects, but more frequently employed by goldsmiths in the decoration of chalices, reliquaries, and altar canons. This process was nothing but a special application and combination of the resources belonging to the long known arts of enamelling and chalcography, which last simply means engraving on metal. The incised lines made by the graver in a plate of silver, or of silver and gold combined, were filled with a mixture of lead, silver, and copper, made more easily fusible by the addition of a certain quantity of borax and sulphur. This blackish-coloured mixture (nigellum, whence niello, niellare) left the unengraved parts exposed, and, in cooling, became encrusted in the furrows where it had been introduced. After this, the plate, when carefully polished, presented to the eye the contrast of a design in dull black enamel traced upon a field of shining metal.

Towards the middle of the fifteenth century this kind of engraving was much practised in Italy, especially in Florence, where the best niellatori were to be found. One of them, Tomaso, or for short, Maso Finiguerra, was, like many goldsmiths of his time, at once an engraver, a designer, and a sculptor. The drawings attributed to him, his nielli, and the bas-reliefs partly by him and partly by Antonio Pollajuolo, would not, perhaps, have been enough to have preserved his memory: it is his invention – in the degree we mentioned – of the art of printing intaglio engravings, or rather of the art of engraving itself, that has made him immortal.

What, however, can seem more simple than this discovery? It is even difficult to understand why it was not made before, when we remember not only that the printing of blocks engraved in relief had been practised since the beginning of the fifteenth century, but that the niellatori themselves were in the habit of taking, first in clay and then in sulphur, an impression and a counter-impression of their work before applying the enamel. What should seem more simple than to have taken a direct proof on a thin elastic body such as paper? But it is always easy to criticise after the event, and to point out the road of progress when the end has been attained. Who knows if to-day there is not lying at our very hand some discovery which yet we never think of grasping, and if our present blindness will not be the cause of similar wonder to our successors?