plate. It is, therefore, the most laborious and the most studied in its effects of all forms of engraving.
As in the case of etching in its early years it was employed by men who were painters as well as engravers. These early masters did not copy their own painted works, but simply produced their drawings on the copper, which, when printed on paper, could be multiplied and widely circulated. Later it came to be the translation by the most careful, finished, and accomplished method of the great masterpieces of the painter's art. The great Italian school, who succeeded the goldsmiths who discovered the process, possessed the highest qualities of truth and beauty. From the middle of the fifteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century men whose names are renowned as painters worked with the graver. These original conceptions of genius have something peculiar in quality, indefinable by verbal description, from even the highest achievements of the greatest master-interpreters.
In Italy there was the school of Florence with Botticelli and Baldini, Fra Lippi and Robetta. At Padua there was Andrea Mantegna. Bologna and Modena and Venice vied with each other, and Rome boasted of Marc Antonio Raimondi, who reproduced the designs of Raphael under the master's supervision. At Bologna, Marc Antonio had wrought in the sweet school of Francesco Francia, at Venice he had executed his famous series of imitations after Albert Dürer. He was at Florence from 1510 to 1512, but it was the school of Rome which claimed him as her own. In his wonderful plates—The Three Doctors,
