It may be said that if Dürer and his contemporaries did not cut their own blocks, the woodcuts are not original prints by the masters themselves. It must be conceded that they are not original prints quite in the same sense as engravings and etchings, in which the whole work was carried out upon the plate by the masters’ own hand, but it would be a mistake to describe them as examples of reproductive engraving. Such a thing as a reproductive engraving was, in fact, unknown in the Germany of Dürer’s time. A design originally projected in one medium might be reproduced in another in a case where an engraving by Schongauer, or Meckenen, or Dürer himself, was copied by some inferior woodcutter, as an act of piracy, for a bookseller who was too stingy to pay an artist to draw him a new Virgin or Saint for his purpose. But it would never have occurred to any one to reproduce an engraving or woodcut, a picture or drawing, done for its own sake, as a separate and complete work of art. Reproductions of pictures scarcely exist in German art of the sixteenth century; they are commoner in the Venetian School, among the woodcutters influenced by Titian, and Rubens established the practice once for all by his encouragement of engraving from his pictures, a century after Dürer’s time. But when woodcutting was taken up by the German painters, with Dürer as their leader, for the purpose of circulating their compositions at a cheaper price than they could charge for engravings of their own, they always had a strictly legitimate object according to the canons of graphic art. Rarely working even from sketches, never from a work already finished in another medium, they drew the subjects intended for printing directly upon the block in a technique adapted for the purpose, avoiding such combinations of lines as the most skilful craftsmen would be unable to cut. Their actual handiwork was preserved upon the surface of the block, much as in the modern original lithograph the artist’s actual work survives upon the surface of the stone; if it was in any way disfigured, as often, no doubt, it was, that must be set down to failure on the cutter’s part. Anything original that the cutter puts in, any swerving that accident or clumsiness permits him to make from the line fixed by the painter’s pen for him to follow, is a blemish, and the best woodcuts of Dürer, Holbein, Baldung, Cranach, Burgkmair and the rest of their generation have no such blemishes. They are strictly autographic: the lines that the artist’s pen has traced remain and are immortalized by the printing-press; the white spaces, also limited by his controlling will and purpose, result from the mere mechanical cutting away of blank wood that any neat-handed workman can perform. So when we speak of the woodcuts of Millais, Rossetti, Whistler, Walker, Pinwell, Sandys and the rest of the “Men of the Sixties,” we know that the blocks were cut by Dalziel or Swain, but every good print is none the less what the designer meant it to be, and what none but himself could have made it.
Dürer. The Annunciation to Joachim
From “The Life of the Virgin”
Size of the original woodcut, 11⅝ × 8³/₁₆ inches
Dürer. The Annunciation
From “The Life of the Virgin”
Size of the original woodcut, 11⅝ × 8¼ inches
Of Dürer’s woodcutters, unluckily, we know nothing till the comparatively late period when he had been enlisted in the service of the Emperor Maximilian, whose imposing, but somewhat ponderous and pedantic, Triumphal Arch was cut from the designs of Dürer and his school by Hieronymus Andreä. There is much more information about the Augsburg cutters than about those of Nuremberg, and there is no single artist in the latter city whose work is so strongly marked out by its excellence from that of his contemporaries as was Lützelburger’s, who cut Holbein’s “Dance of Death.”
To understand Dürer’s woodcuts aright, it is necessary to get to know them in their chronological sequence. In conservative collections, where they are arranged by order of subject, on the system of Bartsch, the student is continually confused by the juxtaposition of quite incongruous pieces, placed together merely because “Jérôme,” for instance, comes in alphabetical order next after “Jean.” The British Museum collection has been arranged for more than ten years past in chronological order, which, in Dürer’s case, is unusually easy to determine with approximate accuracy, because his methodical turn of mind caused him to be fond of dates, while the undated pieces can be fitted in without much difficulty by the evidence of style. The justification of the system became all the more apparent when the woodcuts were exhibited for a few months in 1909, and fell naturally into consistent and coherent groups upon the screens, while separated, as a matter of practical convenience, from the engravings. Since then two even more interesting experiments have been made, in exhibitions held at Liverpool and Bremen, toward a reconstruction of Dürer’s entire life-work in its chronological sequence, his pictures, drawings, engravings and woodcuts—represented mainly, of course, by reproductions—being merged in a single series. That is a timely warning against the risks of excessive concentration upon one single side of his many activities, but here we will not digress further from the woodcuts, which are at present our theme.
