During the seventeenth century a lull occurred in the production of German books illustrated with woodcuts; but the art has always been popular in Germany, and it never quite died out.
The very decorative “Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian,” with large woodcuts, designed by Hans Burgkmeier of Augsburg in the early sixteenth century, was published in 1796. German wood engraving for books revived in the nineteenth century, and became of high excellence. German wood engravings have had a certain strength and vigour all their own from the time of the “Nuremberg Chronicle” until modern times.
Artists, moreover, have not been wanting; the quite delightful vignettes of A. Schrödter, L. Richter, G. Osterwald, R. Jordan and others, have received adequate and sympathetic treatment at the hands of engravers who are second to none. Nuzelmann, E. Kretschmar, A. Vogel, Beneworth, Joch, and the Leipzig firms of Allanson and Sears, Nicholls and Bosse, and Peupin, some of whom were foreigners.
Line engraving on a small scale plays an important part in book illustration. It is the simplest, and yet requires the most technical skill of all the methods of marking metal surfaces for the purpose of making prints. The engraver cuts out a thread of metal, producing a little track on the surface, and to do this properly requires the utmost skill.
It has been held for a long time that prints from engraved metal plates owe their existence to the proofs in sulphur which were taken from time to time from engravings intended to be filled with niello.
In the museum at Berlin there is a print on paper from an engraved metal plate, representing the Flagellation of Christ. It is German work and dated 1446. The lettering shows rightly on the print, so the engraving was made with the intent that prints should be made from it.
There is in the Bargello Museum at Florence a beautiful Pax with a nielloed plate attributed to Maso Finiguerra, the date of which is put at 1452. From this plate, before it was nielloed, prints on paper were taken, and one of them is at Paris. But the letterings on this engraving read rightly on the metal, so it was not engraved with the intent that prints should be made from it; indeed, they, as well as the impressions in sulphur, were only made to help in the working.
So that it is only safe to say that the possibility of making prints on paper from engraved metal plates was known about the middle of the fifteenth century both in Germany and in Italy.
To make a print from an engraved plate requires great pressure, as the paper has to be forced down into every mark, and the resulting mark on the paper is consequently always in relief.