Alberto Duro also tried his hand at engraving, and with much greater success than Martino. He too was not satisfied with the results of his work in niello, and so determined to do engravings, and this he did so well that no one can hold a candle to him. He too was a goldsmith, nor was he satisfied with niello only, he resorted in addition to his engraving, and did extraordinarily well in that line.
Andrea Mantegni, our great Italian painter, tried it too, but couldn’t do it, so the less said about it the better.
Antonio Pollajuolo, the same happened with him, and because both these men could make nothing of it, I’ll say naught but that Mantegni was an excellent painter, and Pollajuolo an excellent draughtsman.
Antonio da Bologna[13] & Marco da Ravenna must also be counted among the goldsmiths. Antonio was the first who began to engrave in the manner of Alberto Duro. He studied closely the work of the great painter Raphael of Urbino. He engraved beautifully, could design in the right good Italian manner, and studied closely the style and methods of those old Greeks, who always know how to do things better than other folk. Many others pursued this branch of engraving, but because none of them came up to the great Alberto Duro, & even also a long way behind our Italian Antonio of Bologna, I’ll not mention them; more especially as to do so would be to go beyond the limits of our inquiry, which is to consider the lovely art of niello and all its many difficulties.
Now you must know that when I first was a goldsmith’s apprentice in the 15th year of the century, which was my 15th year too, the art of engraving in niello had quite fallen into disuse. It was only because a few old men still living did nothing else but talk of the beauty of the art and of the great masters who had wrought in it, & above all of Finiguerra, that I was seized with a mighty desire to learn it; so I set to diligently to master it, & with the examples of Finiguerra before me, made many good pieces.
My difficulty, however, was how to find out after I had engraved the intaglio how the niello that was to fill it ought to be made. So I went on trying ever so hard until I not only mastered the difficulties of making the material, but the whole art became a mere child’s play to me. Here, then, is the way in which niello work is done.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Cellini had of course never heard of Theophilus, the monk of the 11th century, and his great treatise ‘Diversarum Artium Schedula.’
[9] Baccio Bandinelli, the sculptor, one of Cellini’s bitterest enemies.
[10] Grosseria. Cellini uses this term for all large ware as distinguished from ‘minuteria’ or small ware.