The elements of engraving with the burin upon metal will be best understood by an example of a very simple kind, as in the engraving of letters. The capital letter B contains in itself the rudiments of an engraver’s education. As at first drawn, before the blacks are inserted, this letter consists of two perpendicular straight lines and four curves, all the curves differing from each other. Suppose, then, that the engraver has to make a B, he will scratch these lines, reversed, very lightly with a sharp point or style. The next thing is to cut out the blacks (not the whites, as in wood engraving), and this would be done with two different burins. The engraver would get his vertical black line by a powerful ploughing with the burin between his two preparatory first lines, and then take out some copper in the thickest parts of the two curves. This done, he would then take a finer burin and work out the gradation from the thick line in the midst of the curve to the thin extremities which touch the perpendicular. When there is much gradation in a line the darker parts of it are often gradually ploughed out by returning to it over and over again. The hollows so produced are afterwards filled with printing ink, just as the hollows in a niello were filled with black enamel; the surplus printing ink is wiped from the smooth surface of the copper, damped paper is laid upon it, and driven into the hollowed letter by the pressure of a revolving cylinder; it fetches the ink out, and you have your letter B in intense black upon a white ground.
When the surface of a metal plate is sufficiently polished to be used for engraving, the slightest scratch upon it will print as a black line, the degree of blackness being proportioned to the depth of the scratch. An engraved plate from which visiting cards are printed is a good example of some elementary principles of engraving. It contains thin lines and thick ones, and a considerable variety of curves. An elaborate line engraving, if it is a pure line engraving and nothing else, will contain only these simple elements in different combinations. The real line engraver is always engraving a line more or less broad and deep in one direction or another; he has no other business than this.
In the early Italian and early German prints, the line is used with such perfect simplicity of purpose that the methods of the artists are as obvious as if we saw them actually at work.
The student may soon understand the spirit and technical quality of the earliest Italian engraving by giving his attention to a few of the series which used erroneously to be called the “Playing Cards of Mantegna,” but which have been shown by Mr Sidney Colvin to represent “a kind of encyclopaedia of knowledge.”
The history of these engravings is obscure. They are supposed to be Florentine; they are certainly Italian; and their technical manner is called that of Baccio Baldini. But their style is as clear as a style can be, as clear as the artist’s conception of his art. In all these figures the outline is the main thing, and next to that the lines which mark the leading folds of the drapery; lines quite classical in purity of form and severity of selection, and especially characteristic in this, that they are always really engraver’s lines, such as may naturally be done with the burin, and they never imitate the freer line of the pencil or etching needle. Shading is used in the greatest moderation with thin straight strokes of the burin, that never overpower the stronger organic lines of the design. Of chiaroscuro, in any complete sense, there is none. The sky behind the figures is represented by white paper, and the foreground is sometimes occupied by flat decorative engraving, much nearer in feeling to calligraphy than to modern painting. Sometimes there is a cast shadow, but it is not studied, and is only used to give relief. In this early metal engraving the lines are often crossed in the shading, whereas in the earliest woodcuts they are not; the reason being that when lines are incised they can as easily be crossed as not, whereas, when they are reserved, the crossing involves much labour of a non-artistic kind. Here, then, we have pure line-engraving with the burin, that is, the engraving of the pure line patiently studied for its own beauty, and exhibited in an abstract manner, with care for natural form combined with inattention to the effects of nature. Even the forms are idealized, especially in the cast of draperies, for the express purpose of exhibiting the line to better advantage. Such are the characteristics of those very early Italian engravings which were attributed erroneously to Mantegna. When we come to Mantegna himself we find a style equally decided. Drawing and shading were for him two entirely distinct things. He did not draw and shade at the same time, as a modern chiaroscurist would, but he first got his outlines and the patterns on his dresses all very accurate, and then threw over them a veil of shading, a very peculiar kind of shading, all the lines being straight and all the shading diagonal. This is the primitive method, its peculiarities being due, not to a learned self-restraint, but to a combination of natural genius with technical inexperience, which made the early Italians at once desire and discover the simplest and easiest methods. Whilst the Italians were shading with straight lines the Germans had begun to use curves, and as soon as the Italians saw good German work they tried to give to their burins something of the German suppleness.
The characteristics of early metal engraving in Germany are seen to perfection in Martin Schongauer and Albert Dürer, who, though with striking differences, had many points in common. Schongauer died in 1488; whilst the date of Dürer’s death is 1528. Schongauer was therefore a whole generation before Dürer, yet not greatly inferior to him in the use of the burin, though Dürer has a much greater reputation, due in great measure to his singular imaginative powers. Schongauer is the first great German engraver known by name, but he was preceded by an unknown German master, called “the Master of 1466,” who had Gothic notions of art (in strong contrast to the classicism of Baccio Baldini), but used the burin skilfully, conceiving of line and shade as separate elements, yet shading with an evident desire to follow the form of the thing shaded, and with lines in various directions. Schongauer’s art is a great stride in advance, and we find in him an evident pleasure in the bold use of the burin. Outline and shade, in Schongauer, 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 Schongauer’s curved shading, with increasing manual delicacy and skill; and as he found himself able to perform feats with the burin which amused both himself and his buyers, he over-loaded his plates with quantities of living and inanimate objects, 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 had no conception of any necessity for subordinating one part of their work to another; they drew, like children, first one object and then another object, and so on until the plate was furnished from top to bottom and from the left side to the right. Here, of course, is an element of facility in primitive art which is denied to the modern artist. In Dürer all objects are on the same plane. In his “St Hubert” (otherwise known as “St Eustace”) of c. 1505, the stag is quietly standing on the horse’s back, with one hoof on the saddle, and the kneeling knight looks as if he were tapping the horse on the nose. Dürer seems to have perceived the mistake about the stag, for he put a tree between us and the animal to correct it, but the stag is on the horse’s back nevertheless. This ignorance of the laws of effect is least visible and obtrusive in plates which have no landscape distances, such as “The Coat of Arms with the Death’s Head” (1503) and “The Coat of Arms with the Cock” (c. 1512).
Dürer’s great manual skill and close observation made him a wonderful engraver of objects taken separately. He saw and rendered all objects; nothing escaped him; he applied the same intensity of study to everything. Though a thorough student of the nude—witness his Adam and Eve (1504) and other plates—he would pay just as much attention to the creases of a gaiter as to the development of a muscle; and though man was his main subject, he would study dogs with equal care (see the five dogs in the “St Hubert”), as well as pigs (see the “Prodigal Son,” c. 1495); and at a time when landscape painting was unknown he studied every clump of trees, every visible trunk and branch, nay, every foreground plant, and each leaf of it separately. In his buildings he saw every brick like a bricklayer, and every joint in the woodwork like a carpenter. The immense variety of the objects which he engraved was a training in suppleness of hand. His lines go in every direction, and are made to render both the undulations of surfaces (see the plane in the Melencolia, 1514) and their texture (see the granular texture of the stones in the same print).
From Dürer we come to Italy again, through Marcantonio, who copied Dürer, translating more than sixty of his woodcuts upon metal. It is one of the most remarkable things in the history of art, that a man who had trained himself by copying northern work, little removed from pure Gothicism, should have become soon afterwards the great engraver of Raphael, who was much pleased with his work and aided him by personal advice. Yet, although Raphael was a painter, and Marcantonio his interpreter, the reader is not to infer that engraving had as yet subordinated itself to painting. Raphael himself evidently considered engraving a distinct art, for he never once set Marcantonio to work from a picture, but always (much more judiciously) gave him drawings, which the engraver might interpret without going outside his own art; consequently Marcantonio’s works are always genuine engravings, and are never pictorial. Marcantonio was an engraver of remarkable power. In him the real pure art of line-engraving reached its maturity. 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. A school of engraving was thus founded by Raphael, through Marcantonio, which cast aside the minute details of the early schools for a broad, harmonious treatment.
The group known as the engravers of Rubens marked a new development. Rubens understood the importance of engraving as a means of increasing his fame and wealth, and directed Vorsterman and others. The theory of engraving at that time was that it ought not to render accurately the local colour of painting, which would appear wanting in harmony when dissociated from the hues of the picture; and it was one of the anxieties of Rubens so to direct his engravers that the result might be a fine plate independently of what he had painted. To this end he helped his engravers by drawings, in which he sometimes indicated what he thought the best direction for the lines. Rubens liked Vorsterman’s work, and scarcely corrected it, a plate he especially approved being “Susannah and the Elders,” which is a learned piece of work well modelled, and shaded everywhere on the figures and costumes with fine curved lines, the straight line being reserved for the masonry. Vorsterman quitted Rubens after executing fourteen important plates, and was succeeded by Paul Pontius, then a youth of twenty, who went on engraving from Rubens with increasing skill until the painter’s death. Boetius a Bolswert engraved from Rubens towards the close of his life, and his brother Schelte a Bolswert engraved more than sixty compositions of Rubens, of the most varied character, including hunting scenes and landscapes. This brings us to the engraving of landscape as a separate study. Rubens treated landscape in a broad comprehensive manner, and Schelte’s way of engraving it was also broad and comprehensive. The lines are long and often undulating, the cross-hatchings bold and rather obtrusive, for they often substitute unpleasant reticulations for the refinement and mystery of nature, but it was a beginning, and a vigorous beginning. The technical developments of engraving under the influence of Rubens may be summed up briefly as follows: (1) The Italian outline had been discarded as the chief subject of attention, and modelling had been substituted for it; (2) broad masses had been substituted for the minutely finished detail of the northern schools; (3) a system of light and dark had been adopted which was not pictorial, but belonged especially to engraving, which it rendered (in the opinion of Rubens) more harmonious.
The history of line-engraving, from the time of Rubens to the beginning of the 19th century, is rather that of the vigorous and energetic application of principles already accepted than any new development. From the two sources already indicated, the school of Raphael and the school of Rubens, a double tradition flowed to England and France, where it mingled and directed English and French practice. The first influence on English line-engraving was Flemish, and came from Rubens through Vandyck, Vorsterman, and others; but the English engravers soon underwent French and Italian influences, for although Payne learned from a Fleming, Faithorne studied in France under Philippe de Champagne the painter and Robert Nanteuil the engraver. Sir Robert Strange studied in France under Philippe Lebas, and then five years in Italy, where he saturated his mind with Italian art. French engravers came to England as they went to Italy, so that the art of engraving became in the 18th century cosmopolitan. In figure-engraving the outline was less and less insisted upon. Strange made it his study to soften and lose the outline. Meanwhile, the great classical Renaissance school, with Gérard Audran at its head, had carried forward the art of modelling with the burin, and had arrived at great perfection of a sober and dignified kind. Audran was very productive in the latter half of the 17th century, and died in 1703, after a life of severe self-direction in labour, the best external influence he underwent being that of the painter Nicolas Poussin. He made his work more rapid by the use of etching, but kept it entirely subordinate to the work of the burin. One of the finest of his large plates is “St John Baptizing,” from Poussin, with groups of dignified figures in the foreground and a background of grand classical landscape, all executed with the most thorough knowledge according to the ideas of that time. The influence of Claude Lorrain on the engraving of landscape was exercised less through his etchings than his pictures, which compelled the engravers to study delicate distinctions in the values of light and dark. Through Woollett and Vivarès, Claude exercised an influence on landscape engraving almost equal to that of Raphael and Rubens on the engraving of the figure, though he did not direct his engravers personally.