THE GOLDEN AGE OF

ENGRAVING

Reprinted, by permission, from Harper's Magazine. Copyright, 1878, by Harper and Brothers

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LTHOUGH the engraving of ornamental designs upon metal can be traced back to remote antiquity, yet the valuable discovery that impressions from engraved plates could be taken upon paper was, like many valuable discoveries, accidental. This was the epoch as important to art as the discovery of printing was to knowledge, and both for the same reason, for now impressions from plates, like impressions from type, could be multiplied and diffused without limit. This important invention of printing from engraved plates is claimed for Tommaso Finiguerra, a Florentine goldsmith. Finiguerra practised the decoration of gold and silver plates by filling engraved lines with a black enamel, which was allowed to harden, and to obtain the effect of the design, it was his custom to rub soot and oil into the incisions before permanently filling them with enamel, or niello. One of his plates thus filled was by chance laid face downward upon a sheet of paper, and when it was taken up- behold! the first impression from an engraved plate was seen upon the white surface.

The hint thus given was quickly improved by the artists of that age; engraving upon metal plates began to take rank as a fine art, and the golden age of engraving dawned upon the world. To-day, four centuries after, the ray of light which prints its image upon the sensitive plate of the camera falls aslant upon the fading glory of the art. Raphael Morghen, one of the last of the great engravers, died in 1833, and in 1839 Daguerre announced to the world the discovery of photography.

The engraving, according to Charles Sumner, is not a copy or imitation of the original represented, but a translation into another language, where light and shade supply the place of color. It does not reproduce the original picture except in drawing and expression; but as Bryant's "Homer" and Longfellow's "Dante" are presentations of the great originals in another language, so the engraving is a presentation of the painting in another material, which is another language. And it is here, as the translator and multiplier of the masterpieces of painting, that engraving finds its true sphere; so that we may define its excellence thus: a great painting reproduced by a great engraver.

The latter part of the fifteenth century was prolific in artistic genius. Truly, "there were giants in those days." Albrecht Dürer, the father of the German school, was born in 1471; that sublime genius Michael Angelo in 1474; Titian, the great Venetian colorist, in 1477; Raphael,

"the prince of painters," in 1483. Rubens was born more than three hundred years ago; and Rembrandt "the inspired Dutchman," in 1606. Those great masters fully understood the value of that art which could multiply their designs. And so we find Raphael employing Marcantonio Raimondi to engrave for him; Titian had Cornelius Cort working in his own house; Rubens formed and educated a notable school of engravers, while Dürer and Rembrandt engraved their own designs in such a masterly manner that, though so unlike, they are the two greatest names in engraving.

A fine engraving is, perhaps more than any other work of fine art, a triumph. What the painter achieves by the use of a thousand tints, and the sculptor or architect by projecting his thought with the substantial attribute of form, the engraver presents with equal effect upon the plain surface of the paper with printer's-ink alone, nor can the reason persuade the sight that the scene before it is only a white plane lined and dotted with black.

These two methods of printing, however, so far from being identical, are the opposite of each other. Typography, wood-cuts, and lithographs are printed from the inked surface, while line engravings, mezzotints, and etchings print from the cut away parts of the plate; so that what comes out black in typography comes out white from engraved plates, and vice versa. And while the printing-press actually runs by steam, the printing