Size of the original engraving, 8⅝ × 6⅜ inches
In the Royal Print Room, Dresden
MASTER E. S. OF 1466. ECSTASY OF ST. MARY MAGDALEN
Size of the original engraving, 6½ × 5 inches
In the Royal Print Room, Dresden
His work shows unmistakably the influence of the Master of the Playing Cards, and we may safely place him in the region of the upper Rhine, probably in the vicinity of Freiburg or Breisach. In the Madonna and Child with Saints Marguerite and Catherine his peculiar qualities and limitations may clearly be seen. The plants and flowers, with which the ground is thickly carpeted, are engraved in firm, clear-cut lines, betokening the trained hand of the goldsmith. The figures and drapery are rendered with delicate single strokes; but in the shaded portions of the wall, back of the Madonna, cross-hatching is skilfully employed. As is the case in nearly all the works of the early German engravers, the laws of perspective are imperfectly understood, but none the less the composition has a charm all its own.
The Ecstasy of St. Mary Magdalen is of interest, not only technically and artistically, but because of its influence upon the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, who has twice treated the subject, and upon Albrecht Dürer, by whom we have a woodcut seemingly copied from this engraving. Martin Schongauer, likewise, may have profited by the feathered forms of the angels which reappear, somewhat modified, in his engraving of the Nativity. The birds and the isolated plants in the foreground still show the influence of the Master of the Playing Cards.
St. Matthew (whom we shall meet again in our consideration of Florentine engraving, transformed into the Tiburtine Sibyl, engraved in the Fine Manner of the Finiguerra School) and St. Paul (who likewise reappears as Amos in the series of Prophets and Sibyls) show an increasing command of technical resources. The draperies are beautifully disposed; and, in St. Paul, the system of cross-hatching upon the back of the chair, in the shaded portions beneath, and upon the mantle of the saint, is fully developed.
The Madonna of Einsiedeln, dated 1466, is usually accounted the engraver’s masterpiece. Beautiful though it is in composition and in execution, it suggests a translation, into black and white, of a painting, and on technical grounds, as well as for the beauty of its component parts, one may prefer the Design for a Paten, dating from the same year [1466]. Here the central scene, representing St. John the Baptist, owes not a little, both in composition and in technique, to the Master of St. John the Baptist. The four Evangelists, arranged in alternation with their appropriate symbols, around the central picture, are little masterpieces of characterization and of engraving, and there can be nothing but unmixed admiration for the way in which plant and bird forms are woven into a perfectly harmonious pattern.
MASTER E. S. OF 1466. DESIGN FOR A PATEN