Albrecht Dürer, his engravings and woodcuts / [Albrecht Dürer].

  • Albrecht Dürer
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Albrecht Dürer, his engravings and woodcuts / [Albrecht Dürer]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tone accounts for many of the supreme pieces of .bravoure of the century that followed Dttrer, but sounds at the same time an ill- omened note to the truly artistic limits and conventions of line- engraving. If Dttrer comes near the border-line, it is in some of the plates of his middle period (e.g. the Virgin seated by a Town Wall., PI. xxvn), where the rendering of surface texture is carried so far ; and if he ever elaborates too much and overloads with detail, it is in such pieces as the St. Jerome in his Study (xxiv) of the same period. But in his latest work in engraving, as in woodcut, he comes back to a simplicity of treatment that makes a print like the St. Christopher (xxxii) so absolute a masterpiece and so perfect a model of what line-engraving technically should be. The less experienced amateur may be helped to a clearer apprecia- tion of Dttrer’s place in art, if we take this opportunity of interpolating a short survey of the development of engraving, and some description of the various processes. There is no evidence to show that impressions were ever taken on paper from cut or engraved blocks or plates before the late four- teenth century, and very little probability of any general practice of engraving for the sake of taking prints before the fifteenth. Wood- blocks were cut and used for impressing patterns on textiles at an earlier period, and it is the craft of these pattern-block cutters that was the cradle of the art of woodcut. In woodcut the printing is from the surface, and little pressure is needed to transfer the ink ; in fact, in the earlier stages of the art, hand pressure directly applied to the back of the block laid face downwards on the paper, or the method of rubbing the back of the paper laid on the face of the block with a flat piece of wood, or leather ball, sufficed to give a clear enough result. The process of cutting necessitates the removal by the knife of the white parts of the design, leaving the lines standing in relief, a process more oi less laborious according to the amount of close work or crossing of lines (cross-hatching). It is only at a later period when greater use was made of a white line on a black ground that the graver (or buiin), the original tool of the line-engraver, was also used to any extent on wood. In line-engraving, on the other hand, the lines to print black aie the furrows ploughed up by pushing the graver before the hand through the surface of the copper. I he graver is a short steel lod of square or lozenge section, with cutting-point and edges obtainec by sharpening the head in an oblique section. The furrows aie filled with ink, the surface of the plate wiped clean, and damp papei
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