MASTER L Cz. CHRIST ENTERING JERUSALEM

Size of the original engraving, 8⅞ × 7 inches
In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

ITALIAN ENGRAVING:
THE FLORENTINES

ENGRAVING in Italy differs, in many essentials, from the art as practised in Germany. Germany may claim priority in point of time, but it is doubtful whether the Florentines—for in Florence, and among the goldsmiths, the art took its rise in Italy—in the beginning were influenced by, or even acquainted with, the work of their northern contemporaries. In Germany the designer and the engraver were one, and some of the greatest masters embodied their finest conceptions in their prints. We may truly say that the world-wide reputation which Dürer and Schongauer have enjoyed for four centuries and more, rests almost entirely upon their engraved, rather than upon their painted, work.

In Italy it was otherwise. There, with a few signal exceptions, engraving was used merely as a convenient method of multiplying an existing design. It may be that we owe to this fact both the color of the ink used in these early Florentine prints, and the method of taking impressions. This would seem, in many cases, to be by rubbing rather than by the use of the roller press, which appears to have been known and used in the North substantially from the very beginning. The Florentine, aiming to duplicate a drawing in silver-point or wash, would naturally endeavor to approximate the color of his original. Consequently we do not find the lustrous black impressions, strongly printed, which are the prize of the collector of early German engravings.

Vasari’s story of the invention of engraving by Maso Finiguerra (1426-1464) was long ago disproved, and for a time it seemed as though Finiguerra and his work were likely to be consigned to that limbo of the legendary from which Baldini—at one time accredited with many prints—is only just now emerging. Yet Finiguerra, although not the “inventor” of the art, is, beyond peradventure, the most important influence in early Italian engraving, not only on account of his own work on copper, but still more through the Picture-Chronicle, which served as an inspiration to the artists working in his School and continuing his tradition after his death. So that Vasari’s tale, though not accurate in the matter of fact, was veracious in the larger sense.

ANONYMOUS FLORENTINE, XV CENTURY. PROFILE
PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Size of the original engraving, 8⅞ × 5⅝ inches
In the Royal Print Room, Berlin