The nielli—those things wrought so minutely by the early goldsmiths, Maso da Finiguerra and the rest—which are the very foundations of Engraving, are, to begin with, introuvable. To the practical collector then, it cannot be pretended that they appeal, though they may engage the attention of the student. Then again, in fine condition, not spoilt by the re-touching—nay, re-working—of the plate, or the wear of the particular impression through its long life of more than three hundred years, the somewhat maturer work of the great Primitives, or of those who, like Mantegna himself, stands, a link upon a borderland, is scarcely within the region of practical commerce. The finer work of the line-engravers upon copper, of the earlier Renaissance in Italy, does not, save on the rarest occasions, appear in Sotheby’s auction-room. Perhaps its very scarcity, its gradual absorption during more than one generation, into such great private collections as are not likely to be dispersed, and, yet more, into national, or university, or municipal collections, into which everything entering takes at once, and with no period of novitiate, the black veil—perhaps this very scarcity is accountable for the lack of vivid interest in such work on the part of the collector of modern mind. After all, even masterpieces have their day: much more those things of which it must be said, that though endowed with a great vigour of conception and executed often in trenchant, if not persuasive, form, they do not in execution reach the standards set up for us—and passing now almost into the position of “precedents”—by the later technique.
If, of the work of the greatest master of the German Renaissance—of the greatest, most original, most comprehensive mind in the whole of German Art—it is possible to speak as that very fair and penetrating critic, Mr P. G. Hamerton speaks, in his general essay on Engraving, which appears in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” what is to be said of the earlier Italians? Why, in the very passage in which Mr Hamerton—far too intelligent, of course, to deny the greatness of his qualities—devotes to Dürer, they, by something more than implication, are to take their share of the dispraise. After telling us that Martin Schöngauer’s art is a stride in advance of that of “The Master of 1466,” Mr Hamerton adds, “Outline and shade, in Schöngauer, are not nearly so much separated as in Baccio Baldini, and the shading, generally in curved lines, is far more masterly than the straight shading of Mantegna. Dürer continued Schöngauer’s curved shading with increasing manual dexterity and skill; and as he found himself able to perform feats with the burin which amused both himself and his buyers, he overloaded his plates,”—“some” of his plates, would here have been a reasonable qualification—“with details, each of which he finished with as much care as if it were the most important thing in the composition.” “The engravers of those days”—it is said further—“had no conception of any necessity for subordinating one part of their work to another. In Dürer, all objects are on the same plane.” Here Mr Hamerton generalises far too much; but a strong, exaggerated statement on the matter directs at all events our attention to it.
A like criticism could be passed on some, though, it must needs be said, on less, of the Italian work of the earlier time. As a rule, when the pure Primitives had passed, Italian work was less complicated. In Mantegna himself, an immense energy in the figure—the completeness with which the artist was charged with the need of expressing action, and, it may be, the sentiment besides, in which the action had its source—restrained him, stayed his hand, diverted his attention from inappropriate or superfluous detail. And there were other Italian artists of the burin in whom a rising feeling for large and decorative grace had something of the same effect. And when we come to Marc Antonio himself—trained though he was as a copyist of Northern Schools—we see him able, when addressing himself to render the compositions of Raphael, to subordinate everything to the attainment of noble and elegant contour. The finest Marc Antonios—the Saint Cecilia and the Lucretia, to name but two of them (respectively £25 and £170 in a great Sale three years ago)—were wrought under Raphael’s immediate influence; were sculpturesque and simple, never elaborately pictorial—the result, no doubt, in part, of the circumstance that Raphael as well as his engraver recognised that if designs (drawings, not pictures) were the objects of copy, they could be interpreted without going outside the proper art of the engraver. Whatever be the fashions of the moment—and Marc Antonio’s prices, notwithstanding an exceptional sum for an exceptional print, are, in the main, low—it must be remembered that, even with his limitations, it was in him and in his School that real pure line-engraving reached maturity. “He retained,” says Mr Hamerton, summarising well enough the situation in a sentence—“he retained much of the early Italian manner in his backgrounds, where its simplicity gives a desirable sobriety; but his figures are boldly modelled in curved lines, crossing each other in the darker shades, but left single in the passages from dark to light, and breaking away in fine dots as they approach the light itself, which is of pure white paper.” As general description, this is excellent; but if the new collector, taking to Marc Antonio, and buying him at a time when, if I may adopt the phraseology of Capel Court, his stock is quoted below par, wishes the opportunity of guidance in the study of the development of his art, let him take up almost the latest book that deals with the subject with minuteness and suggestiveness, if it may not be invariably accurate or systematically arranged—I mean the “Early History of Engraving in North Italy,” by the late Richard Fisher, whose name as a collector and connoisseur I do not mention now for the first time. Very interesting too is all that Mr Fisher has to say about “the Master of the Caduceus,” Dürer’s friend and instructor, Jacopo de’ Barbarj, who, known as Jacob Walsh, was supposed to be German, although practising much at Venice. Passavant, who admits some thirty pieces by him, considers him of German birth—a thing allowed neither by Fisher nor Duplessis. “In single figures”—writes Mr Fisher—“we have the best illustration of his talent—Judith with the head of Holofernes and a young woman looking at herself in a mirror.” At the British Museum a bust portrait of a young woman, catalogued by Bartsch as amongst the anonymous Italians, has been given to Barbarj. M. Galichon considers him eminently Pagan in sentiment. Nor is this incompatible with Richard Fisher’s statement that in style his Holy Families are completely Italian.
“La Gravure en Italie avant Marc Antoine”—a substantial work by Delaborde—is a book that will not pass unnoticed by those whose choice is for the earlier members of the Italian School. Campagnola, it may be—whose chief piece, the Assumption, fetched more than £50 at the Durazzo Sale, and whose Dance of Cupids reach £50 at the Marochetti—he will find adequately treated there; and there too are made in compact form certain instructive comparisons between Mantegna’s work and that of Zoan Andrea and Antonio da Brescia whose labours have their likeness to Mantegna’s own. In the rare, splendid Dance of Damsels—“Dance of Four Women,” it ought rather to be, for in one of its little-draped figures the gravity and fadedness of middle age is well contrasted with the firm and fresh contour and gay alacrity of youth—Zoan Andrea, whose prints are “généralement préférables” to those of Da Brescia, shows finely not only Mantegna’s design, but that something of his own which the great Mantuan’s design did not give him.
Mantegna’s Dance of Damsels.
Many people have written well on Mantegna; he provokes people, he stimulates them; and Mr Sidney Colvin, on the so-called “Mantegna Playing-Cards,” has written learnedly as an investigator, giving to designs misnamed and misunderstood their right significance. But it is from Delaborde that I will allow myself to quote one brief passage, which is full at least of personal conviction. What more especially characterises—so he puts it—Andrea Mantegna’s engraved work, is that it is “un mélange singulier d’ardeur et de patience, de sentiment spontané et d’intentions systèmatiques: c’est enfin dans l’exécution matérielle, le calme d’une volonté sûre d’elle-même et l’inquiétude d’une main irrité par sa lutte avec le moyen.” Zoan Andrea’s prints do not present these contrasts. “Tout y résulte d’un travail poursuivi avec une parfaite égalité d’humeur; tout y respire la même confiance tranquille dans l’autorité des enseignements reçus, le même besoin de s’en tenir aux conquêtes déjà faites et aux traditions déjà consacrées.” By Mantegna, about twenty-five accepted plates have reached our time. By Zoan Andrea, a larger number have at least been catalogued, and it is argued by some that the least authentic, as well as the least creditable, are sometimes those which bear his signature.
Did I desire to manufacture “padding,” nothing would be easier than for me to extend to a long chapter this summary assemblage of brief and almost incidental notes on the Italian Line-Engraving of the remote Past. But as the subject itself is one to which I have never yet been fortunate enough to devote such a measure of study as might entitle me to claim to be heard when speaking of it, and as the literature of the subject exists in such abundance for the curious, I can afford to be short. It may, however, be of some little interest to the collector, if, before passing on to the discussion of another branch of Print-Collecting in which I have ventured to take my own line, and am willing on all occasions to back my own opinion, we look a little into such records of the Sale-room as throw light upon the changing money values of the engravings by Italian masters.
Marc Antonio: St Cecilia. After Raphael.
(From the Collection of A. B. Bach, Esq., Edinburgh.)