440 ENGRAVING accomplish this he is obliged to go through a great deal of simply manual practice in cutting lines. The beginner learns to cut straight lines and curves of various degrees of depth, and to cross them so that the interstices may form squares, lozenges, triangles, &c. These exercises, after long practice, give a degree of manual skill which has been often misemployed in ingenious trifling, to the detriment of true artistic quality, so that laborious men have wasted their time in cutting patterns like woven wire, and carefully inserting a dot in the middle of every lozenge or square. Whilst avoiding this error, which has been the bane of engraving, the student should train his hand and eye by copying portions of good prints directly on the metal, as a modern engraver cannot work in ignorance of the language of his art, though he may employ it in his own way afterwards. It is, however, unfortunately true that set methods, which may be called the business of engraving, have a tendency to become much more predominant than in the sister art of painting, so that real originality expresses itself much less frequently with the burin than with the brush. Elements The elements of engraving with the burin upon metal ofburiii win ) Q k es t understood by an example of a very simple
- rav- jjj n( j ag j n ^j ie engraving of letters. The capital letter B
incr on . * metal, contains in itself the rudiments of an engraver s education. As at first drawn, before the blacks are inserted, this letter consists of two perpendicular straight lines and four curves, all the curves differing from each other. Suppose, then, that the engraver has to make a B, he will scratch these lines very lightly -with a sharp point or style. The next thing is to cut out the blacks (not the whites, as in wood engraving), and this would be done with two different burins. The engraver would get his vertical black line by a powerful ploughing with the burin between his two preparatory first lines, and then take out some copper in the thickest parts of the two curves. This done he would then take a finer burin and work out the gradation from the thick line in the midst of the curve to the thin extremities which touch the perpendicular. When there is much gradation in a line the darker parts of it are often gradually ploughed out by returning to it over and over again. The hollows so produced are afterwards filled with printing ink, just as the hollows in a niello were filled with black enamel ; the printing ink is wiped from the smooth surface of the copper, damped paper is laid upon it, and driven into the hollowed letter by the pressure of a rolling cylinder ; it fetches the ink out, and you have your letter B in intense black upon a white ground. When the surface of a metal plate is sufficiently polished to be used for engraving, the slightest scratch upon it will print as a black line, the degree of blackness being propor tioned to the depth of the scratch. Most readers of these pages will possess an engraved plate from which visiting cards are printed. Such a plate is a good example of some elementary principles of engraving. It contains thin lines and thick ones, and a considerable variety of curves. An elaborate line engraving, if it is a pure line engraving and nothing else, will contain only these simple elements in different combinations, The real line engraver is always engraving a line more or less broad and deep in one direc tion or another ; he has no other business than this. We may now pass to the early Italian and early German prints, in which the line is used with such perfect simplicity of purpose that the methods of the artists are as legible as if we saw them actually at work. 1 1 It may be well to say something here about the accessibility of ex amples. Any one living in London can study engraving at its sources to the fullest extent in fine impressions belonging to that little-appre ciated treasure-house, the print-room of the British Museum, but the difficulty is for students who live in the provinces or in distant colonies. The student may soon understand the spirit and technical Ear quality of the earliest Italian engraving by giving his ^ attention to a few of the series which used erroneously to be called the Playing Cards of Mantegna. " The series," ^ says Professor Colvin, " consists of fifty pieces, divided into sets of ten each. Of these five sets, each is marked with an initial letter, A, B, C, D, E, and every print of the series carries besides an Arabic numeral, 1, 2, 3, up to 50. Only the numerical order, which shows how the series is meant to be arranged anil studied, reverses the alphabetical order which corresponds with the respective dignity of the subject ; .thus Nos. 1-10 are lettered as class E, Nos. 11-20 as class D, and so on. This number, fifty, and this plan of subdivision by tens, are quite inconsistent with the supposed destination of the series as playing-cards ; and so also are the subjects of the series. They represent a kind of encyclopedia of knowledge, proceeding upwards from earthly to transcendental things, first, the various orders and conditions of men ; second, the nine muses and Apollo ; third, the seven liberal arts, with poetry, theology, and philosophy added to complete the group of ten ; fourth, the four cardinal and three theological virtues, with three singular personifications or geniuses added to complete ten a genius of time, a genius of the sun, and a genius of cosmos, the world ; fifth, the planets, in their mythological, astrological, and astronomical signification, with the three outer spheres added to make up the ten viz., the eighth, or sphere of the fixed stars, the Primum Mobile, or inclosing sphere, which by its rotation imparts rotation to the rest within, and the Prima Causa, or empyrean sphere, the nnrevolving abiding place of Deity. The series is, therefore, This difficulty has been overcome of late years by the perfection to which M. Aniand Purancl has brought the art of photographic engraving originally invented by Niepce, and now called heliogravure. By means of this- a new plate can be produced from an impression of an old engraving without touching the print, and so perfect that the impres sions yielded by the new plate can only be distinguished from old prints by an expert, and not always with certainty by him, so that they have to be marked on the back to prevent fraud. M. Amaml Durand has made it his principal business to reproduce engravings by the old masters ; so that the provincial or colonial student may now possess in his own cabinet a selection of the best examples. One thing only it is necessary for him to bear in mind. There are two sorts of heliorjrarure, that which prints like a copper-plate and that which prints like a woodcut. Both are used for book illustration, and indiscriminately, so that the student will often meet with a plate- engraving which has been reproduced to print like a woodcut, and whenever he does so he ought not to pay the slightest attention to it, for no plate-engraving can ever be reproduced as a woodcut without the loss of its finest technical qualities. A plate so reproduced will no doubt retain its composition and expression, though even the ex pression may often lose a little from the greater coarseness of the lines ; but all its quality as workmanship, all the delicacy of the manual art, is sacrificed, merely that it may be printed more cheaply. The student should therefore resolutely turn awny from all typographic heliogravures after engraved plates, and confine his attention to those which are printed as the original plates were printed, a matter which he can easily ascertain for himself by seeing that there is a plate mark, the colourless mark produced by the edges of the plate upon the paper. M. Amand Durand has published many copies from engravings by dif ferent old masters, including complete sets from the original works of Vandyke, Paul Potter, Claude, and Albert Diirer. Such reproductions as these are really available for purposes of study, but the quantity of different photographic processes invented of late years has inundated the market with the most various kinds of more or less defective re productions, which the student ought carefully to avoid. And how ever perfect the process may be, all reproductions on a reduced scale should be rejected at once by students, for the manner of working adopted by a true master depends always upon the scale of his en graving. Diirer will put more into a large plate than into a little one ; and when a large plate by Diirer is reduced by a photographic process, the reduction, by its microscopic abundance of detail, conveys a false idea of Diirer s practice as an artist. The reductions of old engravings which are now so frequently used for book-illustrations arc more injurious than helpful to any right appreciation of engraving Reduction is good only when the artist worked with a view to it, as is now often done in drawings intended to be reproduced photographically
with & foreseen diminution of scale.