Engraving: Its Origin, Processes, and History

by comte Henri Delaborde

Fig. 56.—LUCAS VAN LEYDEN.

Portrait of the Emperor Maximilian I.

In representing, for example, "David Calming the Fury of Saul," with what simple good faith he makes use of the first type he comes across—a stout clodhopper whom he has picked up in the street or at the tavern! No more is wanted save a harp under his arm and a slashed doublet on his body; just as in picturing the most tragical scenes of the "Passion"—the "Ecce Homo," or the "Crucifixion"—he thinks it enough to surround his Christ with the Jew peddlers or the home-keeping citizens of his native town, without altering in any way their appearance or their dress. What could be more contrary to the traditions of Italian art and the principles which have governed it, from Giotto down to Raphael? What less unusual in the history of Dutch art? Later on Rembrandt himself was to work in the same way; but with what mighty powers of invention! What a startling expression of the inner meaning, the philosophy of a subject, is united in his fashion of treatment with the realistic ideals of the national genius! In truth, it is not merely the peculiar characteristic of an individual—the indifference to, or aversion from, conventional beauty of form which is apparent in this great master, so far-reaching in moral vision, so pre-eminently sagacious and profound among painters of the soul; it sums up and reveals the innate disposition and æsthetic temperament of a whole race.

In his brief career Lucas van Leyden had the happiness to see his efforts rewarded and his credit universally established, and of this authority and influence he ever made the noblest use. Looked upon as a leader by the painters of his country; in friendly relations with the German engravers, who, like Albert Dürer, sent him their works, or came themselves to ask advice; possessing greater wealth than usually fell to the share of the artists of his time; he never employed his riches or his influence except in the interest of art, or of the men who practised it. He refused no solicitant of merit, however slight. The worthy master was careful to disguise his aid under pretext of some advantage to himself: he was always requiring drawings of some building or some artistic object, and thus he spared the self-respect of the person whom he wished to help, and whom he entrusted with the commission. More than once he went journeying through the Low Countries to visit engravers and painters far inferior to himself, whom he yet modestly called his rivals. He complimented them with words of praise and encouragement; gave entertainments in their honour; and did not leave them without exchanging his works for theirs, which were thus paid for a hundred times over.

It was in one of these journeys, that to Flushing, that Lucas van Leyden was attacked with the disease which was destined to carry him to the grave. Some people have attributed to poison the suddenness of the attack; but of this there is no proof. Once back in his native town, he lingered on some time, worn out and sinking, yet refusing to condemn himself to idleness. Too feeble to rise, he yet continued to draw and engrave in bed, remaining faithful till the end to the noble passion of his life, to the art he had dignified, and to that nature which he had questioned more closely, and, in certain respects, perhaps better understood than any of his predecessors. It is said that a few hours before his death he desired to be taken up to a terrace of his house, that he might once more admire the setting sun; and there, absorbed in silent contemplation, surrounded by friends and pupils, he for the last time gazed on the place of his birth, and on that heaven from which the light was fading, even as life was ebbing from his bosom. It was a proper conclusion to so pure a life—to one, indeed, of the most irreproachable careers in the history of art. Lucas van Leyden died at thirty-eight, an age fatal to more than one great artist, and which was scarcely attained by three men with whom he seems linked by a similarity of genius, at least as regards early fertility and sincerity of inspiration: Raphael, Lesueur, and Mozart.

The impetus given by Lucas van Leyden to the art of engraving was seconded, even during his life, by several Dutch artists who imitated his method more or less successfully. Amongst others, Alart Claessen, an anonymous engraver called the "Maître à l'Écrevisse," and Dirck Star, or Van Staren, generally called the "Maître à l'Étoile." The movement did not slacken after the death of the leader of the school. The engravers of the Low Countries, accentuating more and more the qualities aimed at from the beginning, soon surpassed their German rivals, and seemed alone to be gifted with the knack of dealing with light. Cornelius Cort, who engraved several of Titian's works in Venice in the great painter's studio, and the pupils he educated on his return to Holland, began to exhibit a boldness of touch not to be so clearly discovered in their predecessors; but this progress, real in some respects, was not accomplished without injury to truthful study and the exact interpretation of form, and certainly not without a deplorable exaggeration in the use of means.

The workmanship of Hendrik Goltzius, for instance, and still more that of his pupil, Jan Müller, is strained and feeble owing to their affectation of ease. The constant use of bent and parallel lines unreasonably prolonged imparts to the plates of these two engravers an appearance at once dull and florid; they present something of the same aspect as those caligraphical specimens of the present day, in which the faces of Henri IV. or of Napoleon are drawn entirely with the curves of a single stroke. Still, in spite of this extremely affected workmanship, the prints of Goltzius, of Müller, and even of Saenredam, are characterised by a comparative intensity of tone, as well as by singular skill in cutting the copper. This abuse of method, however, had not yet become general in the schools of the Low Countries. Side by side with the intemperate or daring craftsmen we have mentioned, there were certain Flemish and Dutch engravers who imparted to their work a delicacy and a reticence of expression better suited to the traditions and the models bequeathed by Lucas van Leyden. These were Nicolas van Bruyn at Antwerp, the brothers Wierix at Amsterdam, and some few others, all of them disciples more or less faithful to the old teaching, and apparently more or less hostile to the effort at emancipation going on around them. When, however, Rubens took the reins, individual resistance and impulse ceased, and all controversy was at an end. Principles, method, and aim became the same for every one. Both Dutch and Flemish engravers openly set themselves to represent with the graver the infinite gradations of a painted canvas, the delicacy and the daring, the nicest punctilio and the most summary smearing, of the painter's brush.

Never was the influence of a painter on engraving so direct or so potent as that of Rubens. The great master had shown by his drawings that it was possible to be as rich a colourist with black and white alone as with all the resources of the palette. He made choice amongst his pupils of those whom he believed to be capable of following his example in this matter; he obliged them to lay aside the brush, almost ordered them to become engravers, and so penetrated them with the secret of his method, that he seems to have animated them with his own inspiration. He assembled them in the vast house which he had built at Antwerp, and which he turned into a college of artists of all sorts. He made them sometimes labour beneath his eye; he carefully corrected their work;[28] and in this way he taught them that comprehension of effect which was specially his, and his own incomparable knowledge of the right tones with which to lay in, or to support, a mass of light or shadow.

To recall the success of these efforts is to recall the names of Vorsterman, Bolswert, Paul Pontius, and Soutman: men boldly scientific in their art, who, at the first rush, carried to perfection that style of engraving which renders before all the relative richness and varied value of tones in a picture, and whose effects are identical in some sort with those of the painting itself. It is obvious that, in spite of its prodigious merits, this painting is not of so elevated a nature as that of Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael; but is it therefore less true that it is completely summed up, and its living image reflected, in contemporary engraving? Actuated by an idea of colour and effect analogous to that of Marc Antonio with regard to drawing, the Flemish engravers resolutely subordinated accessories to the importance and splendour of essentials; and in this way they succeeded in dissembling, by means of the breadth of the whole, the execution of details and even the laboriousness of the process. It would seem from the sparkling look and brilliant handiwork of these plates, that the engravers had thrown them off in a few hours of inspiration, so completely does their dash banish all idea of the time spent upon them, all sense of patience and toil. And yet these lights and shades, the sweep of the flesh, the sheen and shimmer of the fabrics, are all the result of lines laboriously ploughed; perhaps a thousand strokes have been needed to imitate an effect due to a single glaze, or given by two touches of the brush.