Fig. 17.—ITALIAN NIELLO.
(Fifteenth Century.)
Fig. 18.
ITALIAN NIELLO. (Fifteenth Century.)
The rare merits which distinguish Finiguerra's "Coronation" are to be seen, though much less conspicuously, in a certain number of works attributed to the same origin. Other pieces engraved at the same time, and printed under the same conditions by unknown Florentine workmen, prove that the example given in 1452 had at once created imitators. It must be remarked, however, that amongst such works, whether attributed to Finiguerra or to other goldsmiths of the same time and country, none belong to the class of engravings properly so called. In other words they are only what we have agreed to call nielli: that is, proofs on paper of plates designed to be afterwards enamelled, and not impressions of plates specially and finally intended to be used for printing. It would almost appear that the master and his first followers failed to foresee all the results and benefits of this discovery; that they looked upon it only as a surer test of work than clay or sulphur casts, as a test process suitable to certain stages of the labours of the goldsmith. In one word, from the time when he made his first success till the end of his life, Finiguerra probably only used the new process to forward his work as a niellatore, without its ever occurring to him to employ it for its own sake, and in the spirit of a real engraver.
Fig. 19.—ITALIAN NIELLO.
(Fifteenth Century.)
Florentine engravings of the fifteenth century, other than in niello, or those at least whose origin and date are certain, are not only later than Finiguerra's working days, but are even later than the year of his death (1470). In Germany, from the very beginning, so to speak, of the period of initiation, the Master of 1466 and his disciples were multiplying impressions of their works, and profiting by the full resources of the new process. In Florence, on the contrary, there passed about twenty years during which the art seems to have remained stationary and confined to the same narrow field of practice as at first. You may visit the richest public or private collections without meeting (with the exception of works in niello) any authentic and official specimen of Florentine engraving of the time of which we speak.[18] You may open books and catalogues, and find no mention of any engraved subject that can be called a print earlier than those attributed to Baccio Baldini, or to Botticelli, which only appeared in the last quarter of the century. Yet it is impossible to find any explanation of this sterility—of this extraordinary absence of a school of engravers, in the exact acceptation of the word, outside of the group of the niellatori.