Earliest Italian Prints--They interest the Antiquary more than
the Collector--Nielli--Baccio Baldini--Mantegna and his restless
energy--The calm of Zoan Andrea--Campagnola--The Master of
the Caduceus--His “Pagan sentiment”--Marc Antonio--His first
practice--His art ripest when his prints interpret Raphael--Important
Sales of the Italian Prints.
As one of the chief reasons for the composition of the present volume
is that the collector, whether a beginner or more advanced, may have
ready access to a little book which supplements to some extent, but
does not attempt to supersede, any one amongst the labours of earlier
students--and which treats often with especial prominence themes which
it seems lay scarcely at all within the range of their inquiries--it
will hardly be expected that much shall be said here on the various
departments of Italian Engraving. Italian Engraving, from the _nielli_
of Florentine goldsmiths to the larger method and selected line of Marc
Antonio, has for generations occupied the leisure and been the subject
of the investigations of many studious men. Volumes have been written
about it: treatises, articles, catalogues, correspondence innumerable.
About Italian Engraving--in any one of its branches--it would be as
easy, or as difficult, to say something new, and at the same time to
the point, as it would be to write with freshness about the decorations
of the Sistine Chapel or such an accepted masterpiece as the _Madonna
di San Sisto_. The few words I shall write upon the subject will be
of a wholly rudimentary character. If the reader wishes to go into
this subject elaborately, I refer him at once to experts. No one is
less an expert upon it than I am; but partly that all sense of balance
shall not be wanting to this book, and partly that the beginner, even
with this book alone, shall not grope wholly in the dark, the place of
the Italians must be briefly recognised. In recognising it, I do not
claim to do more, of my own proper knowledge, than bring to bear upon
the question the results of some more general studies, and perhaps
the sidelights thrown from more particular investigations into other
branches of the engraver’s achievement.
The _nielli_--those things wrought so minutely by the early goldsmiths,
Maso da Finiguerra and the rest--which are the very foundations
of Engraving, are, to begin with, _introuvable_. To the practical
collector then, it cannot be pretended that they appeal, though
they may engage the attention of the student. Then again, in fine
condition, not spoilt by the re-touching--nay, re-working--of the
plate, or the wear of the particular impression through its long life
of more than three hundred years, the somewhat maturer work of the
great Primitives, or of those who, like Mantegna himself, stands, a
link upon a borderland, is scarcely within the region of practical
commerce. The finer work of the line-engravers upon copper, of the
earlier Renaissance in Italy, does not, save on the rarest occasions,
appear in Sotheby’s auction-room. Perhaps its very scarcity, its
gradual absorption during more than one generation, into such great
private collections as are not likely to be dispersed, and, yet more,
into national, or university, or municipal collections, into which
everything entering takes at once, and with no period of novitiate,
the black veil--perhaps this very scarcity is accountable for the
lack of vivid interest in such work on the part of the collector of
modern mind. After all, even masterpieces have their day: much more
those things of which it must be said, that though endowed with a
great vigour of conception and executed often in trenchant, if not
persuasive, form, they do not in execution reach the standards set up
for us--and passing now almost into the position of “precedents”--by
the later _technique_.
If, of the work of the greatest master of the German Renaissance--of
the greatest, most original, most comprehensive mind in the whole of
German Art--it is possible to speak as that very fair and penetrating
critic, Mr P. G. Hamerton speaks, in his general essay on Engraving,
which appears in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” what is to be said
of the earlier Italians? Why, in the very passage in which Mr
Hamerton--far too intelligent, of course, to deny the greatness of his
qualities--devotes to Dürer, they, by something more than implication,
are to take their share of the dispraise. After telling us that
Martin Schöngauer’s art is a stride in advance of that of “The Master
of 1466,” Mr Hamerton adds, “Outline and shade, in Schöngauer, 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 Schöngauer’s curved shading with
increasing manual dexterity and skill; and as he found himself able to
perform feats with the burin which amused both himself and his buyers,
he overloaded his plates,”--“some” of his plates, would here have been
a reasonable qualification--“with details, 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”--it is said further--“had
no conception of any necessity for subordinating one part of their
work to another. In Dürer, all objects are on the same plane.” Here Mr
Hamerton generalises far too much; but a strong, exaggerated statement
on the matter directs at all events our attention to it.
A like criticism could be passed on some, though, it must needs be
said, on less, of the Italian work of the earlier time. As a rule, when
the pure Primitives had passed, Italian work was less complicated. In
Mantegna himself, an immense energy in the figure--the completeness
with which the artist was charged with the need of expressing action,
and, it may be, the sentiment besides, in which the action had its
source--restrained him, stayed his hand, diverted his attention from
inappropriate or superfluous detail. And there were other Italian
artists of the burin in whom a rising feeling for large and decorative
grace had something of the same effect. And when we come to Marc
Antonio himself--trained though he was as a copyist of Northern
Schools--we see him able, when addressing himself to render the
compositions of Raphael, to subordinate everything to the attainment
of noble and elegant contour. The finest Marc Antonios--the _Saint
Cecilia_ and the _Lucretia_, to name but two of them (respectively £25
and £170 in a great Sale three years ago)--were wrought under Raphael’s
immediate influence; were sculpturesque and simple, never elaborately
pictorial--the result, no doubt, in part, of the circumstance that
Raphael as well as his engraver recognised that if designs (drawings,
not pictures) were the objects of copy, they could be interpreted
without going outside the proper art of the engraver. Whatever be the
fashions of the moment--and Marc Antonio’s prices, notwithstanding an
exceptional sum for an exceptional print, are, in the main, low--it
must be remembered that, even with his limitations, it was in him and
in his School that real pure line-engraving reached maturity. “He
retained,” says Mr Hamerton, summarising well enough the situation
in a sentence--“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.” As general description, this is excellent;
but if the new collector, taking to Marc Antonio, and buying him at a
time when, if I may adopt the phraseology of Capel Court, his stock
is quoted below par, wishes the opportunity of guidance in the study
of the development of his art, let him take up almost the latest book
that deals with the subject with minuteness and suggestiveness, if
it may not be invariably accurate or systematically arranged--I mean
the “Early History of Engraving in North Italy,” by the late Richard
Fisher, whose name as a collector and connoisseur I do not mention now
for the first time. Very interesting too is all that Mr Fisher has to
say about “the Master of the Caduceus,” Dürer’s friend and instructor,
Jacopo de’ Barbarj, who, known as Jacob Walsh, was supposed to be
German, although practising much at Venice. Passavant, who admits
some thirty pieces by him, considers him of German birth--a thing
allowed neither by Fisher nor Duplessis. “In single figures”--writes Mr
Fisher--“we have the best illustration of his talent--Judith with the
head of Holofernes and a young woman looking at herself in a mirror.”
At the British Museum a bust portrait of a young woman, catalogued by
Bartsch as amongst the anonymous Italians, has been given to Barbarj.
M. Galichon considers him eminently Pagan in sentiment. Nor is this
incompatible with Richard Fisher’s statement that in style his Holy
Families are completely Italian.
“La Gravure en Italie avant Marc Antoine”--a substantial work by
Delaborde--is a book that will not pass unnoticed by those whose
choice is for the earlier members of the Italian School. Campagnola,
it may be--whose chief piece, the _Assumption_, fetched more than £50
at the Durazzo Sale, and whose _Dance of Cupids_ reach £50 at the
Marochetti--he will find adequately treated there; and there too are
made in compact form certain instructive comparisons between Mantegna’s
work and that of Zoan Andrea and Antonio da Brescia whose labours
have their likeness to Mantegna’s own. In the rare, splendid _Dance
of Damsels_--“Dance of Four Women,” it ought rather to be, for in one
of its little-draped figures the gravity and fadedness of middle age
is well contrasted with the firm and fresh contour and gay alacrity
of youth--Zoan Andrea, whose prints are “généralement préférables”
to those of Da Brescia, shows finely not only Mantegna’s design, but
that something of his own which the great Mantuan’s design did not
give him. Many people have written well on Mantegna; he provokes
people, he stimulates them; and Mr Sidney Colvin, on the so-called
“Mantegna Playing-Cards,” has written learnedly as an investigator,
giving to designs misnamed and misunderstood their right significance.
But it is from Delaborde that I will allow myself to quote one brief
passage, which is full at least of personal conviction. What more
especially characterises--so he puts it--Andrea Mantegna’s engraved
work, is that it is “un mélange singulier d’ardeur et de patience,
de sentiment spontané et d’intentions systèmatiques: c’est enfin
dans l’exécution matérielle, le calme d’une volonté sûre d’elle-même
et l’inquiétude d’une main irrité par sa lutte avec le moyen.” Zoan
Andrea’s prints do not present these contrasts. “Tout y résulte d’un
travail poursuivi avec une parfaite égalité d’humeur; tout y respire la
même confiance tranquille dans l’autorité des enseignements reçus, le
même besoin de s’en tenir aux conquêtes déjà faites et aux traditions
déjà consacrées.” By Mantegna, about twenty-five accepted plates have
reached our time. By Zoan Andrea, a larger number have at least been
catalogued, and it is argued by some that the least authentic, as well
as the least creditable, are sometimes those which bear his signature.
[Illustration:
MANTEGNA’S _Dance of Damsels_.
]
Did I desire to manufacture “padding,” nothing would be easier than for
me to extend to a long chapter this summary assemblage of brief and
almost incidental notes on the Italian Line-Engraving of the remote
Past. But as the subject itself is one to which I have never yet been
fortunate enough to devote such a measure of study as might entitle
me to claim to be heard when speaking of it, and as the literature of
the subject exists in such abundance for the curious, I can afford
to be short. It may, however, be of some little interest to the
collector, if, before passing on to the discussion of another branch of
Print-Collecting in which I have ventured to take my own line, and am
willing on all occasions to back my own opinion, we look a little into
such records of the Sale-room as throw light upon the changing money
values of the engravings by Italian masters.
Mr Julian Marshall, now with us in his middle age, began collecting
when he was so young that his great sale occurred as long ago as 1864.
Values have changed since that day, very much. Of his four prints by
Mantegna, only one--_The Flagellation_--fetched more than £12. That
one reached £21--an early perfect state of _The Entombment_ going
for £11, 10s., and _Christ descending into Hell_ for £9. Domenico
Campagnola’s _Descent of the Holy Ghost_ then fetched £2, 2s. At the
Sykes Sale the same impression had fetched £3; at the Harford, £1,
15s. At the Marochetti Sale in 1868, not a single Mantegna, unless
_Christ risen from the Dead_, fetched a price of importance, and
this only ten guineas; but among the Marc Antonios the _Adam and Eve
in Paradise_ sold to Mr Colnaghi for £136, and _The Massacre of the
Innocents_ to Mr Holloway for £40. The _Two Fauns carrying a Child
in a Basket_--engraved by Marc Antonio, in his finest manner, after
an antique--realised £56, and the _Saint Cecilia_ £51. In the Bale
collection, in 1881, the _St Cecilia_ fetched £40, and Mariette’s
impression of the extraordinarily rare _Dance of Cupids_ £241.
That was borne off by M. Clément, who was then what M. Bouillon is
now--“marchand d’estampes de la Bibliothèque Nationale.” In the Holford
Sale, twelve years afterwards, Marc Antonio’s _Adam and Eve_ sold to
M. Danlos for £180; the _Massacre of the Innocents_ (from the Lely
Collection) to the same dealer for £190; and the _St Cecilia_ and
_Lucretia_ both to Mr Gutekunst--the first for £31; the second for £66.
The great price fetched by a Marc Antonio at this Sale was, however,
that paid for _The Plague_--a print which M. Danlos acquired for £370.
Taking note of such a sum, one could hardly believe perhaps that Marc
Antonios were not rising; but when a master falls, it is in the minor,
not the more eminent pieces--or, at least, in average, not exceptional
impressions--that we trace most certainly a decline of value. And,
taking the _St Cecilia_ alone--one of the most charming of the
subjects, as I have said before, though not one of the rarest--we find,
on the three occasions of its sale that I have cited, a high price,
one less high, and then again a lower. We find, indeed, comparing
the prices that were fetched by two impressions not presumably very
different--for both were in great Sales--that in 1893 a _St Cecilia_
brought little more than half of what it brought in 1868. The question
now for the collector’s judgment, as far as money is concerned, is,
Is it safe or unsafe for him to buy at just the present stage of a
“falling market”? Have Marc Antonios touched bottom? If he buys them
now, will he--in the phrase of sprightly ladies “fluttering” in “South
Africans”--will he be “getting in on the ground floor”?
[Illustration:
MARC ANTONIO: _St Cecilia_. After RAPHAEL
(From the Collection of A. B. BACH, Esq., Edinburgh.)
]
The collector has a right to ask himself these seemingly irreverent
questions. Nor will he love Art less, or have an eye less delicate,
because he is obliged to ask them. I do not know that the possessions
of a prudent collector should--taking things all round--bring him, if
he desires to sell, much less than he gave for them. It may be quite
enough that as long as he keeps and enjoys them, he shall lose the
interest of his money. If, in the interval, the value of his prints
happens to increase, so much the better for him--obviously. But he
enjoys the things themselves, and can scarcely exact that increase.