Prints and their makers: essays on engravers and etchers old and modern

by Unknown

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.

Albrecht Dürer Conterfeyt in seinem alter
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

Dürer. The Four Riders of the Apocalypse

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.

Dürer. The Whore of Babylon, Seated upon the Beast with Seven
Heads and Ten Horns

From “The Apocalypse”
Size of the original woodcut, 15¼ × 11 inches

Dürer. Christ Bearing His Cross

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.

Dürer. The Resurrection

From “The Great Passion”
Size of the original woodcut, 15⅜ × 10⅞ inches

Dürer. Samson and the Lion

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.

Dürer. The Annunciation to Joachim

From “The Life of the Virgin”
Size of the original woodcut, 11⅝ × 8³/₁₆ inches

Dürer. The Annunciation

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.

Dürer. The Flight into Egypt

From “The Life of the Virgin”
Size of the original woodcut, 11⅝ × 8¼ inches

Dürer. The Assumption and Crowning of the Virgin

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.

Dürer. St. Jerome in his Cell

Size of the original woodcut, 9¼ × 6¼ inches

Dürer. The Holy Family

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.

Dürer. Saint Christopher

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

Dürer. The Virgin with the many Angels

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.

Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne

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

The Assumption of the Virgin

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.

The Libyan Sibyl

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

The Libyan Sibyl

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.

The Planet Mercury

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 Young Man and Woman Each Holding An Apple

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.

Antonio Pollaiuolo. Battle of Naked Men

“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. The Adoration of the Magi

“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.

Andrea Mantegna. The Risen Christ between
St. Andrew and St. Longinus

“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

Zoan Andrea(?). Four Women Dancing

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.

Nicoletto da Modena. The Adoration of the Shepherds

“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. Apollo and Diana

“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

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.

Giulio Campagnola. St. John the Baptist

“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.” Arthur M. Hind.

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

Size of the original engraving. 13⅝ × 9⁵⁄₁₆ inches

Giulio and Domenico Campagnola. Shepherds in a Landscape

“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.” Arthur M. Hind.

Size of the original engraving, 5⅜ × 10⅛ inches

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.

A PRINCE OF PRINT-COLLECTORS:
MICHEL DE MAROLLES,
ABBÉ DE VILLELOIN
(1600-1681)

By LOUIS R. METCALFE

THE French make a fine distinction between three varieties of that very special individual to whom we refer in a general way as “a collector.” They have always been authorities on that subject and one of them has said: “On est amateur par goût, connaisseur par éducation, curieux par vanité.” While another adds: “Ou par spéculation.” By “collector” we simply mean a person who has formed the habit of acquiring the things in which he is particularly interested, and these in as many varieties as possible. It implies neither an artistic pursuit nor a deep knowledge of the subject. By curieux, however, is meant, as a rule, an amateur, a man of taste who collects things which pertain to art exclusively; he is in most cases a connaisseur, and always an enthusiast.

Paris, the home of taste, has never been that of the curieux more so than at the present day, when, it seems, every one who can afford a rent of over four thousand francs has a hobby of some sort and is a mad collector. A general history of the weakness for things either beautiful or odd or rare, or merely fashionable, would be both voluminous and chaotic, if a distinction were not made between that which pertained to art and that which did not. A complete description of the latter, a hopelessly heterogeneous mass, would make an amusing volume, for there is no end to the variety of things in which vanity and folly have caused human beings to become interested to the point of collecting in large numbers.

George IV collected saddles; the Princess Charlotte and many others, shells. Tulips were so madly sought after in Holland that one root was exchanged for 460 florins, together with a new carriage, a pair of horses, and a set of harness. Shop-bills and posters have been the specialty of many, while thousands of persons have collected postage-stamps and coins. A Mr. Morris had so many snuff-boxes that it was said he never took two pinches of snuff out of the same box. A Mr. Urquhart collected the halters with which criminals had been hanged; and another enthusiast, the masks of their faces. Suett, a comedian, collected wigs, and another specialist owned as many as fifteen hundred skulls, Anglo-Saxon and Roman. If there have been men who have shown a propensity to collect wives, Evelyn tells us in his diary:

“In 1641 there was a lady in Haarlem who had been married to her twenty-fifth husband, and, having been left a widow, was prohibited from marrying in future; yet it could not be proved that she had ever made any of her husbands away, though the suspicion had brought her divers times to trouble.”

Although we much regret that such an intensely interesting work as a Comprehensive History of Collecting has never been written, we realize that a mere description of rare and beautiful objects would be unsatisfactory as long as we did not know their history and the way in which they had been gathered together. It is the soul of the collector which we should like to see laid bare. Was his work a labor of vanity or one of love? Were his possessions mere playthings, speculation, to him, or did they represent treasures of happiness greater than all the gold in Golconda?

Without a doubt, it is one thing to collect what is highly prized on all sides, with large means at one’s disposal, and the constant advice of experts, and quite another to search patiently oneself for things which the general public has not yet discovered, and then to acquire them with difficulty.

Who shall know with what admirable zeal some collectors have made themselves authorities on the things which they loved? with what untiring energy they have sifted for years masses of trash in the hope of finding the hidden pearl? Who can tell the inner history of the auction-room, the heart-beats of those who were after the jewel which no one else seemed to have noticed, the sacrifices which many with a slender purse have made in order to secure the precious “find,” and lastly the enjoyment which they ever afterward derived from its possession? Many of the great French collections of the last century were made in this spirit: they were begun with a modest outlay and devoted to things which, at that time, no one else wanted. I know of one of the first collectors of Eastern Art in the nineteenth century, who at one time had greatly to reduce his household in order to satisfy his passion for Japanese vases; and of another wealthy enthusiast who would travel third-class to London to secure an old Roman bronze. The history of such collections becomes that of human beings for whom life is nothing without beauty, and it is too personal to be recorded. The collector will seldom believe that his enthusiasm can be understood by others besides himself: maybe, also, he would be unwilling to reveal the more or less innocent subterfuges to which he had recourse in order to acquire more than one of his treasures.

The American chapter of such a history is the most recent one, and the world is now watching its development with bated breath. The art of the Old World is being imported by the ship-load; fortunes are paid for single paintings, while the paneled wainscots of French châteaux, the ceilings of Italian palaces, the colonnades of their gardens, and the tapestries of the Low Countries, not to mention a hundred varieties of objets d’art, are constantly wending their way to the treasure-houses—still in course of construction—of the New World. All this is taking place to the indignation of Europeans and the æsthetes who consider such a radical change of background a desecration, and do not stop to think that this transplantation is hardly more unnatural than the sight of the Elgin marbles in foggy London, or the winged bulls of Ecbatana in the halls of the Louvre.

So long as we as a nation will learn a much-needed lesson and thereby greatly improve our taste, let all honor and glory be given to those who have been responsible for such valuable acquisitions. Our American collections already contain many “gems of purest ray serene,” and who will dare say that they are not destined to become in time worthy successors of the famous ones which have preceded them?

From the writings of Pliny and other classic historians, and from several catalogues and rare documents which have come down to us from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we have abundant proof that there never was a time when works of art were not treasured. Cicero, Atticus, and Varro collected writings, and the libraries of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and that of Epaphroditus of Chæronea, which contained thirty-two thousand manuscripts, were famous. Hannibal was a lover of bronzes: it was he who owned the little Hercules of Lysippus which the master himself had presented to Alexander the Great and which afterward became the property of Sulla.

Both Pompey and Julius Cæsar possessed splendid masterpieces of that Greek art which was so highly prized in Italy. The Venus of the Hermitage comes from Cæsar’s gallery, and the Jupiter of the Louvre from that of Antony; while the Faun with the Child, and the Borghese vase, now treasured in the Louvre, were once among the possessions of Sallust in his palace on the Quirinal. Not only sculpture was collected in those times, for we also hear of the tapestries of Saurus, valued at twenty millions in the currency of the day; the jewelry of Verres, reputed the finest in existence; the priceless crystals of Pollio; and the two thousand vases of precious stone owned by Mithridates, King of Pontus.

Throughout the Middle Ages the trésor of the kings and the most powerful nobles was in reality their collection. That of Dagobert was the result of four Italian conquests. The inventory of the jewels of the Duc d’Anjou, son of John the Good, contains 796 numbers, while his brother, the Duc de Berry, had a passion for reliquaries, old church ornaments, and rare manuscripts which he caused to be mounted like jewels. The library of Charles V and his trésor were valued at twenty millions of francs, and the collection of curiosities of Ysabeau de Bavière had not its equal. It contained, among other things, an ivory box in which was kept the cane with which Saint Louis used to flagellate himself. The Dukes of Burgundy for centuries were the greatest collectors of richly inlaid armor. And what of the treasures of Jacques Cœur, the great banker of Charles VII? With his fleet of trading-vessels and his many banking-houses he secured the pick of the market. We know that his silverware was piled up to the ceiling in the vaults of his palace at Bourges.

In the Gazette des Beaux-Arts for the year 1869 we read a description of the home of Jacques Duchié, a famous art collector who flourished during the first half of the fifteenth century. In the courtyard were peacocks and a variety of rare birds. In the first room was a collection of paintings and decorated signs; in the second, all kinds of musical instruments—harps, organs, viols, guitars, and psalterions. In the third was a great number of games, cards and chessmen; and in the adjoining chapel, rare missals on elaborately carved stands. In the fourth room the walls were covered with precious stones and sweet-smelling spices, while on those of the next was hung a great variety of furs. From these rooms one proceeded to halls filled with rich furniture, carved tables, and decorated armor.

Portrait of Michael de Marolles, Abbé de Villeloin

Engraved by Claude Mellan, from his own design from life, in 1648

Illustrissimi Viri L. H. Haberti Monmory libellorum
Supplicum Magistri, EPIGRAMMA in Effigiem

MICHAELIS DE MAROLLES Abbatis de Villeloin.

Nobilitas, Virtus, Pietas, Doctrina MAROLLI
Debuerant Sacrà cingere fronde comam.
Nantüeil ad viuum faciebat 1657

The Renaissance was the Golden Age of Collectors. What could have withstood the influence of that tremendous movement? The art of Italy and the magnificence of the nobility and the princes of the Church shed, like the Augustan Age, a golden glamour over civilization.

The Médicis set the example, and they were closely followed by the Sforzas, the Farneses, and the Gonzagas. The patronage of the Fine Arts was on such a scale, and the rivalry among the collectors so keen, that in 1515 there were in Rome thirty-nine cardinals who had veritable museums for palaces. It was for Agostino Chigi that Raphael decorated that Farnesina Villa in which such treasures were stored, and for whom, later, he designed those plates on which parrots’ tongues were served to Leo X.

What a rage for beauty there was when Baldassarre Castiglione advised all the sons of noble families to study painting, in order that they might become better judges of architecture, sculpture, vases, medals, intaglios, and cameos. What a madness for antiques, when Cardinal San Giorgio sent back to Michelangelo his “Amorino” because he considered it too modern. Would that we could follow the vicissitudes through which went the great collections of the day—the drawings of Vasari, the books of Aldus and Pico della Mirandola, the armor of Cellini, the portraits of Paolo Giovio and the medals of Giulio Romano!

Certain is it that many of their treasures eventually crossed the Alps. It was after Charles VIII had shown to the élite of his nation “the remnants of antiquity gilded by the sun of Naples and of Rome” that the French Renaissance, already well on its way, received new inspiration, and that the French collectors renewed their activity. Judging by the fabulous accounts given by the country-folk, the contents of many a turreted castle on the Loire must have been wonderful, indeed. Following the lead of Francis I, who had his library, his pavillon d’armes, and his cabinet de curiosités, and the example of Catherine de Médicis, who had brought from Italy many of her family’s treasures, the leading nobles, like Georges d’Amboise in his Château de Gaillon, collected beautiful things with admirable catholicity. It was not only books in sumptuous bindings which were sought after by Louis XII and the Valois, Diane de Poitiers, Queen Margot, Amyot, and de Thou, but art in every form. In the case of Grolier himself, are we not told by Jacques Strada, in his “Epithome du Thrésor des Curiositez,” that “great was the number of objects of gold, silver, and copper in perfect condition, and remarkable the variety of statues in bronze and marble, which his agents were collecting for him all over the world”?

Most significant is the inventory of the collection of Florimond Robertet, the able treasurer of the royal finances under Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, which was made in 1532 by Michelle de Longjumeau, his widow. Never was a catalogue such a labor of love as this one. It is a detailed description of the entire contents of a museum on which a great financier spent his entire fortune; it is full of significant touches concerning the customs of the time and the origin and use of the objects described; and it bears witness to the great enjoyment which both husband and wife derived from their treasures throughout their lifetime. There were many jewels and some pear-shaped pearls of great size, silver andirons, thirty sets of silks and tapestries, bronzes and ivories. Among the paintings and sculpture were a canvas and a statue by Michelangelo. The porcelain was the first brought to France from China, and there was much pottery from Turkish lands and Flanders, French faïence, Italian majolica, church ornaments, precious books, and four hundred pieces of Venetian glass, “gentillisez des plus jolies gayetez que les verriers sauraient inventer.”

It was the religious wars of the end of the century which brought French collecting to a stop. Constant strife and persecution discouraged the last artists of the Renaissance, ruined many a noble family, and scattered the contents of their palaces. Not until years afterward, during the seventeenth century, was it taken up again; then it was to reach great brilliancy during the reign of Louis XIV. The leading families of France began to rebuild their collections when Henry IV and his favorite, Gabrielle d’Estrées, indulged their fondness for medals, cameos, and intaglios, and Marie de Médicis had brought from Tuscany those paintings which she considered such an indispensable luxury. In after years Louis XIII collected armor; Anne of Austria, delicate bindings; and Richelieu, finely chased silverware. And when Louis XIV began to reign, Paris was the proud center of the collecting world. From this time on we have full records of the treasures amassed by many people of taste and culture and we are able to follow them into the following century, no matter how often they change hands—this, thanks to specialists like Felibien and Germain Brice and the thousand references to art in the memoirs of the time. In 1673 there were in Paris eighty-five important art collectors who owned among them seventy-three libraries, and twenty years later this number had increased to one hundred and thirty-four, a remarkable development for such a short space of time.

The greatest example was set by Cardinal Mazarin and Fabri du Peiresc. The wily Italian who had succeeded Richelieu gave as much time to his collections as to the ship of state, and his fellow-grafter, Nicolas Fouquet, treasurer of the kingdom, was allowed to make himself the most powerful man in France just as long as he was able to supply his Eminence with the millions he was so constantly in need of for the army and his gold-threaded tapestries and busts of Roman emperors. Just before his death. Mazarin had himself carried through a gallery lined with 400 marbles, nearly 500 canvases (among them seven Raphaels), and 50,000 volumes, while he kept weeping and exclaiming: “Faudra-t-il quitter tout cela?” In the south of France, Fabri du Peiresc, great savant and collector, had agents in constant quest of rarities. It is related that “no ship entered a port in France without bringing for his collections some rare example of the fauna and flora of a distant country, some antique marble, a Coptic, Arab, Chinese, Greek, or Hebrew manuscript, or some fragment excavated from Asia or Greece.”

Nanteuil. Jules, Cardinal Mazarin

Engraved in 1655 when Mazarin was fifty-three years of age
Size of the original engraving, 12⅝ × 9½ inches

Nanteuil. Louis XIV

Engraved in 1664, from Nanteuil’s own drawing from life
Louis was twenty-six years of age when this
portrait was engraved

Size of the original engraving, 15⅜ × 12 inches

By this time there was a new fine art to be collected seriously—that of Engraving. To the masterpieces of Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, and Marcantonio, now over a century old, had succeeded the spirited etchings of Callot. It was he who first popularized the art in France and paved the way for the enthusiastic appreciation of Morin, Mellan, and Nanteuil. The school of engravers established by Colbert at the Gobelins made their art rank in importance with Painting and Sculpture, and their work won such popular favor that many engravers became publishers, and did a great business selling their prints and those of their pupils to the leading collectors. The first man of taste to make a serious collection of engravings was Claude Maugis, Abbé de Saint Ambroise, almoner to the Queen, Marie de Médicis. He spent forty years making a collection which at his death was sold to Charles Delorme, that physician-in-ordinary to Henry IV and Louis XIII of whom Callot has made such an interesting little portrait. It was when the first part of the Delorme Collection and that of a Sieur de Kervel had been added to his own possessions by the Abbé de Marolles that there was begun the greatest collection of prints and drawings ever assembled.

Michel de Marolles, Abbé de Villeloin, was one of the most picturesque figures of the seventeenth century. He was born in Touraine in 1600, and died in 1681, the son of the gallant Claude de Marolles, maréchal de camp in the army of Louis XIII, who had won a famous duel fought in the presence of two armies in the War of the Ligue. His life was indeed a peaceful one. At the age of twenty-six, after having pursued a complete course of studies, he was presented by Richelieu with the abbey of Villeloin in Touraine, and for the remainder of his days he drew its income, cultivated the most interesting people in France, translated the classics, wrote his memoirs, and collected prints as no one ever did before him, or after. Truly, an ideal existence!

Although he tells us that at the age of nine he decorated the walls of his bedroom with prints given him by a Carthusian monk, we know that for the first half of his life the Abbé de Villeloin did little more than collect friends. This must have given him little trouble, for his rank gained him admission to the entire nobility, and his appreciation of literature and the fine arts enabled him to carry on a friendly intercourse with the best-known artists and connoisseurs. During this intercourse there was a constant exchange of gifts; in fact, to receive presents seemed to have been the Abbé’s object in life. In his “Memoirs” there are one hundred and fifty pages devoted to a complete enumeration of all the persons who have presented him with a gift, or “honored him extraordinarily by their civility,” and the list includes the best-known personages of the day.

What did de Marolles give them in return, besides the pleasure of his company and the charm of his appreciation? A mass of bad translations of the classics: that was the great weakness of the Abbé de Villeloin. Chapelain, the poet, complained of it in a curious letter to Heinsius, saying:

“That fellow has vowed to translate all the classic authors, and has almost reached the end of his labors, having spared neither Plautus nor Lucretius nor Horace nor Virgil nor Juvenal nor Martial, nor many others. Your Ovid and Seneca have as yet fought him off, but I do not consider them saved, and all the mercy they can expect is that of the Cyclops to Ulysses—to be devoured last.” That Chapelain was not the only one who did not appreciate the literary talent of the Abbé, and that he often found difficulty in finding publishers for his translations, is admitted by de Marolles himself when, in his poem on “The City of Paris,” he says:

“J’ai perdu des amis par un rare caprice

Quand je leur ai donné des livres que j’ai faits

Comme gens offensés, sans pardonner jamais

Bien qu’on n’ait point blessé leur méchant artifice.”

But it is not as a man of letters that de Marolles interests us: it is as a great lover of the art of Engraving and the greatest collector of prints in history. Not until he had reached the age of forty-four did he begin to collect them systematically. Then he purchased the first part of the Delorme Collection for one thousand louis d’or, the prints owned by Kervel, and those of several other small collectors. His activity was so great that nine years later, in his memoirs, he was able to refer to this collection as follows:

“God has given me grace to devote myself to pictures without superstition, and I have been able to acquire a collection numbering more than 70,000 engravings of all subjects. I began it in 1644, and have continued it with so much zeal, and with such an expense for one not wealthy, that I can claim to possess some of the work of all the known masters, painters as well as engravers, who number more than 400.”

He further adds:

“I have found that collecting such things was more suited to my purse than collecting paintings, and more serviceable to the building up of a library. Had we in France a dozen such collectors among the nobility, there would not be enough prints to satisfy them all, and the works of Dürer, Lucas, and Marcantonio, for which we now pay four and five hundred écus when in perfect condition, would be worth three times that amount.... It seems to me that princes and noblemen who are collecting libraries should not neglect works of this kind, as long as they contain so much information on beautiful subjects; but I know of no one who has undertaken to do this except for medals, flowers, architecture, machines, and mathematics.”

The collection of the Abbé de Marolles had become so famous by 1666, that Colbert, after having had it examined and appraised by Felibien and Pierre Mignard, advised Louis XIV to purchase it for the royal library. The deed was signed in 1667, and in the following year the Abbé de Villeloin received from the royal treasury the sum of twenty-six thousand livres ($25,000) for what was described in a seal-colored document as “un grand nombre d’estampes des plus grands maîtres de l’antiquité.” Let us see what this meant.

De Marolles tells us himself, in his catalogue of 1666, that his collection consisted of 123,400 original drawings and prints, the work of over 6000 artists, and that it was contained in 400 large and 141 small volumes. As to the variety of subjects represented, it had no end: it included, for instance, landscapes, views of cities, architecture, fountains, vases, statues, flowers, gardens, jewelry, lacework, machines, grotesques, animals, costumes, decoration, anatomy, dances, comedies, jousts, heraldry, games, heroic fables, religious subjects, massacres, tortures, and over 10,000 portraits.

In describing his collection to Colbert, the Abbé made especial note of his greatest treasures as follows:

“Leonardo da Vinci. His work is in 5 pieces.

“Anthony van Dyck. There are 210 plates after his work, of which 14 are etched by his own hand.

“Marcantonio from Bologna, that excellent engraver who has done such beautiful work after Dürer, Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo, is the greatest of all engravers, and the one whose works are the most sought after. I own 570 of them, in two volumes.

“Andrea and Benedetto Mantegna. The work of the former is in 104 pieces, that of the latter in 74, all rare, making 178 pieces in all, some of which are engraved by Marcantonio.

“Lucas van Leyden, excellent painter and engraver, of whom I have collected in one volume all the works engraved both on copper and on wood, besides 25 drawings in pen and pencil from his own hand, all very singular. I have 180 of these engravings, many in duplicate, all of great beauty, among them the portrait of Eulenspiegel, unique in France, the other having been sold more than twelve years ago for 16 louis d’or. Among the woodcuts, the Kings of Israel are here done in chiaroscuro, and unique in this state.

“Albert Dürer. One folio volume, bound in vellum, contains 12 portraits of the artist by various masters; 15 drawings by his own hand, which are singular and priceless; his three plates on brass [sic], his six etched plates, and all his copper engravings in duplicate, with three impressions of Maximilian’s sword-hilt, all having been collected by the Abbé de Saint Ambroise, almoner of Queen Marie de Médicis....

“Rhinbrand [sic]. The work of this Dutch painter and etcher consists of many prints, of which I have collected 224, among which are portraits and fancy subjects most curious.”

He further adds that he possesses 192 original crayon portraits by Lagneau, a successor of the Clouets, and 50 by Dumonstier, and that the prints of the old masters of Italy, Germany, and Flanders are contained in 19 folio volumes.

After this enormous collection had passed into the hands of the King, the Abbé de Marolles was engaged to catalogue and classify it, and also to superintend the binding of its 541 volumes. For this he received on two occasions a payment of 1200 livres. The binding was done in full levant morocco, decorated with the royal arms, Louis’s monogram, and richly tooled borders; for this purpose 500 green and 1200 crimson skins had been specially imported from the East.

Our indefatigable collector had hardly parted with the result of the labor of twenty-two years when he began the formation of a second collection. To the second part of the Delorme Collection which he then purchased were added the prints of MM. Odespunck and la Reynie, the collection of M. Petau, who had made a specialty of portraits, and that of the Sieur de la Noue, which contained a great number of original drawings. We know very little about this second collection of the Abbé de Marolles, except that when it was catalogued in 1672 it was contained in 237 folios. What became of it has never been ascertained; in all probability it found its way into the print-cabinets of the many amateurs of the end of the century. It is evident that he wished to dispose of it, probably for the purpose of starting a third collection, for we have a letter on the subject addressed to M. Brisacier, secrétaire des commandements de la Reine, of whom Masson made that famous engraved plate known as “The Gray-haired Man.” In it de Marolles describes his second collection as being hardly less important than the one he had previously sold to the King, and as containing a great number of masterpieces which were unique.

Not satisfied with such extensive researches in the realm of art, the Abbé de Villeloin decided to record all his information on the subject, and in the spring of 1666 announced the title of a colossal work on which he was engaged as: “Une histoire très ample des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, architectes, ingenieurs, maîtres-écrivains, orfèvres, menuisiers, brodeurs, jardiniers et autres artisans industrieux, où il est fait mention de plus de dix mille personnes, aussi bien que d’un très grand nombre d’ouvrages considérables, avec une description exacte et naīve des plus belles estampes ou de celles qui peuvent servir à donner beaucoup de connaissances qui seraient ignorées sans cela.” This work was, unfortunately, never published, and its manuscript has never been found; it would have been a wonderful compendium of French art during the seventeenth century, and would have given us much precious information concerning a number of prominent engravers of whom so little is known to-day.

All that remains of it is the summary, written in bad verse and published under the title of “Le livre des peintres et des graveurs.” It is a curious little book, containing little more than the names of thousands of artists who were obscure in their day and who are now completely forgotten. To many of them, however, and particularly to the most prominent, are affixed such descriptive little touches, that what would otherwise have been a monotonous pattern becomes an original piece of historical ornament.

As to the “Memoirs” of the Abbé de Marolles, they possess the same defect as many other autobiographies of the time: they were published too soon, and they prove how anxious the author was to witness the sensation he thought he would make. In this case they were published in 1653, fourteen years before the Abbé had sold his first collection, and they tell us little more than that he possessed a very extended circle of acquaintances who thought the world of him on account of his patronage of the fine arts and his literary talent. It is evident that he included himself among his most sincere admirers, and that he regarded the friendship of such a charming woman as Louise-Marie de Gonzague, who later became Queen of Poland, and the incense which all the engravers in France ostentatiously scattered before him, as both natural and deserved. Claude Mellan, Poilly, and Robert Nanteuil were on particularly friendly terms with him, each in turn engraving his portrait from life, the last with such delicacy and finish that that plate ranks among his most successful portraits. Mellan, furthermore, engraved the portraits of his parents, Claude de Marolles and Agatha Castiglione.

Agatha Castiglione

Wife of Claude de Marolles and mother of Michel de Marolles,
Abbé de Villeloin
Engraved by Claude Mellan from his own design

Size of the original engraving, 6¼ × 5 inches

Claude de Marolles

Father of Michel de Marolles, Abbé de Villeloin
Engraved by Claude Mellan from his own design

Size of the original engraving, 9¼ × 7⅜ inches

The tastes and the mania for collecting of the Abbé de Villeloin were so well known that it is not impossible that it was he of whom La Bruyère was thinking when, in his famous “Caractères,” he gives the following description of a collector:

“‘You wish to see my prints,’ says Democenes, and he forthwith brings them out and sets them before you. You see one which is neither dark nor clear nor completely drawn, and better fit to decorate on a holiday the walls of the Petit Pont or the Rue Neuve than to be treasured in a famous collection. He admits that it is engraved badly and drawn worse, but hastens to inform you that it is the work of an Italian artist who produced very little, and that the plate had hardly any printing; that, moreover, it is the only one of its kind in France; that he paid much for it, and would not exchange it for something far better. ‘I am,’ he adds, ‘in such a serious trouble that it will prevent any further collecting. I have all of Callot but one print, which is not only not one of his best plates, but actually one of his worst; nevertheless, it would complete my Callot. I have been looking for it for twenty years, and, despairing of success, I find life very hard, indeed.’”

This is admirably descriptive of a born collector; and what would have been a ridiculous mania in a philistine became a natural attitude on the part of such a connaisseur as the Abbé de Marolles. In our eyes his weaknesses were insignificant, and we forgive him his bad translations, his unpublished history of Art, and the rather monotonous self-sufficiency of his Memoirs, for the encouragement which his honest enthusiasm and indomitable collecting gave to the artists who made the Golden Age of Engraving—for having been the Prince of Print-collectors.