Size of the original engraving, 32⅝ × 22¼ inches
Botticelli was in early life under the immediate inspiration, if not in the very service, of the great goldsmith Pollaiuolo (witness his picture of Fortitude in Florence). One almost expects in consequence that he may at some period have tried his hand at engraving, but there is no proof that he did anything besides supplying the engravers with designs. His chief connection with the engravers was in the series of plates done for Landino’s edition of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” (Florence, 1481). Altogether nineteen plates (and a repetition of one subject) are known, but although spaces are left throughout the whole edition for an illustration to each canto, it is only in rare copies that more than two or three are found. Even the fine presentation copy to Lorenzo de’ Medici (now in the National Library, Florence) is without a single plate, showing perhaps the small regard that was paid to engraving for book decoration at that period. This lack of appreciation and the difficulties (or double labor) the printers experienced in combining copperplate impressions with type led soon after this and a few other experiments of the period to the use of woodcut as the regular mode of book illustration for well over a century. Apart from the plates to this edition, Botticelli’s devotion to Dante is shown in the beautiful series of pen drawings—in the most subtly expressive outline—preserved at Berlin and in the Vatican. It seems on the whole probable that they are later than the 1481 edition, so that we cannot point to the original drawings for the prints.
Most important of all the contemporary engravings after Botticelli is the Assumption of the Virgin, the largest of all the prints of the period (printed from two plates, and measuring altogether about 82.5 × 56 cm.). An original study by Botticelli for the figure of St. Thomas, who is receiving the girdle of the Virgin, is in Turin, and clinches the argument in favor of Botticelli’s authorship. The view of Rome, a record of Botticelli’s visit, is an interesting feature of the landscape.
This engraving is produced in what has been called the Broad Manner in contradistinction to the Fine Manner, e.g. of the Dante prints. In the Broad Manner the lines are laid chiefly in open parallels, and generally the shading is emphasized with a lighter return stroke laid at a small angle between the parallels. Its aim is essentially the imitation of pen drawing after the manner of such draughtsmen as Pollaiuolo and Mantegna. The Fine Manner on the other hand shows shading in close cross-hatching (somewhat patchy and cloudy in effect in most of the early Florentine prints), and gives the appearance of imitating a wash drawing.
The two manners may be well compared in the series of “Prophets and Sibyls,” which exists in two versions, the earlier being in the Fine, and the later in the Broad Manner. The first series shows a craftsman who drew largely from German sources (putting a St. John of the Master E. S. into the habit of the Libyan Sibyl). In the second we have an artist who discarded all the ugly and awkward features which originated in the German originals, and showed throughout a far truer feeling for beauty and a much finer power of draughtsmanship than the earlier engraver. Mr. Herbert Horne suspects, rightly I think, that Botticelli himself directly inspired this transformation of the “Prophets and Sibyls.”
Through our lack of knowledge of the engravers of this early period in Florence we are driven to a rather constant use of the somewhat unattractive distinctions of the Fine and Broad Manners. We may claim, however, to have advanced a little further in the elucidation of questions of authorship, though the great German authority on this period, Dr. Kristeller of Berlin, would still keep practically all the early Florentine engravings in an unassailable anonymity. This is of course better than classing all the engravings of the period and school, both in the Fine and Broad Manners, under the name of Baccio Baldini, which has long been the custom. A certain “Baccio, orafo” has been found in documents as buried in 1487, but there is practically nothing to connect his name with the substance of our prints. We would not on that account regard him as a myth, but are reduced at the moment to Vasari’s statement that “Baldini, the successor of Finiguerra in the Florentine school of engraving, having little invention, worked chiefly after designs by Botticelli.” Considering the fact that both Broad and Fine Manners (in all probability the output of two distinct workshops) show prints definitely after Botticelli, we are still in entire darkness as to the position of Baldini.
The Libyan Sibyl
From a series of the “Prophets and Sibyls,” engraved in the Fine
Manner of the Finiguerra School
Size of the original engraving, 7 × 4¼ inches