Other prints attributed to Mantegna, such as the Descent into Hell and the Scourging of Christ, possess all Mantegna’s vigor of design, and reflect the master’s work in the manner of the Eremitani frescos, but we can hardly believe that they were engraved by the same hand as the “seven,” even supposing a considerably earlier date for their production.
Each of Mantegna’s known followers (Zoan Andrea and G. A. da Brescia) entirely changed his manner of engraving after leaving the master; in fact, except in his immediate entourage, Mantegna’s style was continued by few of the Italian engravers. For all its dignified simplicity, it is more the manner of the draughtsman transferred to copper, than of the engraver brought up in the conventional use of the burin. We see Mantegna’s open linear style reflected in the earlier works of Nicoletto da Modena, and the Vicentine, Benedetto Montagna, but each of these engravers tended more and more in their later works to imitate the more professional style of the German engravers, and of Dürer in particular. Dürer was constantly copied by the Italian engravers of the early sixteenth century, and details from his plates (chiefly in the landscape background) were even more consistently plagiarized.
In the example of Nicoletto da Modena, the Adoration of the Shepherds, which we reproduce, it is Dürer’s immediate predecessor, Martin Schongauer, from whom the chief elements in the subject are copied. But in this example the background, with its vista of lake with ships and a town, suggested no doubt by one of the subalpine Italian lakes, is thoroughly characteristic of the South, while Schongauer’s Gothic architecture is embellished with classical details. Isolated figures of saints or heathen deities against a piece of classical architecture, set in an open landscape, became the most frequent type of Nicoletto’s later prints, which are practically all of small dimensions.
Like Nicoletto da Modena, Benedetto Montagna gradually developed throughout his life a more delicate style of engraving, entirely giving up the large dimensions and broad style of his Sacrifice of Abraham for a series of finished compositions which from their smaller compass would have been well adapted for book illustration. Several of these, such as the Apollo and Pan, illustrate incidents in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” but there is no evidence for, and there is even probability against, their having ever been used in books. Several of the subjects are treated very similarly in the woodcuts of the 1497 Venice edition of Ovid in the vernacular. When engravings and woodcuts thus repeat each other, the woodcutter is generally the copyist, but in this case the reverse is almost certainly the case, as the Ovid plates belong to Montagna’s later period, and could hardly have preceded 1500.
Nicoletto da Modena. The Adoration of the Shepherds
“In the Adoration of the Shepherds it is Dürer’s immediate predecessor. Martin Schongauer, from whom the chief elements in the subject are copied. But in this example the background, with its vista of lake with ships and a town, suggested no doubt by one of the subalpine Italian lakes, is thoroughly characteristic of the South, while Schongauer’s Gothic architecture is embellished with classical details.” Arthur M. Hind.
Size of the original engraving, 9⅞ × 7¼ inches
Jacopo de’ Barbari. Apollo and Diana