The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker (review)

The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker. By Evelyn Lincoln. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. viii+207. $65.

Engraving and wood-block printing is an understudied area of Renaissance art production, in part because prints do not conform to modern notions of original art. They are often unsigned. It was common for a print to reproduce an image made by another artist in another medium. The creator of the image and the artisan who cut the copper plate or wood block often were two different people, with different training and skills. Yet, as Evelyn Lincoln shows in this fine book, a detailed study of prints can convey a new understanding of the production of visual images. Such scrutiny leads not to fine art in the modern sense, but to an understanding of art production and its uses in the changing visual culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Lincoln focuses primarily on three individuals: Andrea Mantegna (1420s-1506), the renowned court painter employed by the Gonzaga family in Mantua; Domenico Beccafumi (1484-1551), a leading Sienese painter who created images for the famous marble floor of the cathedral at Siena, as well as paintings and prints; and Diana Mantuana (1547/48-1612), a professional engraver who was trained by her father, a little-known Mantuan artist, and who moved with her husband to Rome, where she made substantial contributions to the family business of art production through her well-known signed engravings. Lincoln skillfully connects these three by a detailed investigation of particular influences and shared artistic contexts.

Andrea Mantegna trained as a painter in Padua and then became a court artist employed by the Gonzaga. He took full advantage of his move from the workshop and guild environment to the court of Mantua to elevate his own status. Yet being a court artist also had its disadvantages. His work was displayed mostly in private settings, and he was not permitted to work elsewhere. In response to these restrictions, he developed the copper engraving as a vehicle for spreading his inventions and his artistic reputation throughout Italy. He transformed engraving from a craft that produced playing cards and such to a medium for the display of the most innovative northern Italian Renaissance style. Trained as a painter, Mantegna would not have incised his own plates. His prints, produced on plates cut by others, displayed images that represented idealized drawings created by him.

Lincoln describes the technology of Renaissance engraving in welcome detail. The engraver hammered and polished the copper plate to make the surface hard, necessary for clear lines. He or she then used a burin to cut channels in the metal. Moving the burin slowly across the plate, the engraver produced lines of greater or lesser depth by alternating the angle of the shaft. Engraving was a practice radically different from drawing; the line was slowly driven rather than drawn. To make the line curve, the engraver turned the plate itself.

Domenico Beccafumi worked in a variety of media, including engraving and wood-block printing. He developed the chiaroscuro technique, involving the arrangement of light and dark picture elements, in highly individualistic ways. Wood-block cutting is in some ways the opposite of engraving: the cutaway area becomes blank space on the print. Beccafumi's wood-block prints involved the use of multiple blocks in succession to print different tones of the same color. The paper and the ink could neither be too wet nor too dry. The chiaroscuro print emphasized color, not line. Paper color and inks on the successive blocks could all be changed. Beccafumi's renowned chiaroscuro wood-block prints represented a specifically Sienese style, a matter of cultural importance during a time when Siena struggled against Florentine aggression. His many experiments included the first attempt to combine engraving and wood-block printing to make a single image.

The only professional engraver Lincoln treats is Diana Mantuana. Taught by her father, a craftsman...