Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

by comte Henri Delaborde

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

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

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

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

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

M. Léon de Laborde, one of the clearest and best informed writers on the origins of engraving and typography, considers, on the other hand, that engraving in relief on metal, rather than the xylographic process, was the proximate cause of the discovery of printing. In a work published in 1839, which unfortunately has yet to receive the amplifications promised by the author[12] M. de Laborde declares that the first printed engravings must have been dotted ones: that is, prints produced in the peculiar mode already touched upon, and in which the black parts come out sprinkled with white dots. According to him, engraving, or, to speak more exactly, the printing of engraved work, must have been invented by goldsmiths rather than by draughtsmen or illuminators. The former, by the nature of their craft, possessed the tools and the necessary materials, and were therefore in a better position than any one else to stumble upon the discovery of the process, if not deliberately to invent it. As matter of fact, many of those who worked in the Low Countries, or in the Rhenish provinces, during the first years of the fifteenth century, printed works in the early dot manner: in other words, engraved in relief on metal. And those xylographic specimens which are usually looked upon as the oldest examples of engraving, are in reality only the outcome of a reformation, and the product of an art already modified.

Fig. 9.—JESUS CHRIST CARRYING THE CROSS.

Engraving in the Dot Manner (1406).