Chiaroscuro WoodcutsAuthor(s): Winslow AmesSource: Parnassus, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Feb., 1937), pp. 4-8Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/771489Accessed: 14/05/2009 16:07

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Collection Winslow Ames

UGO DA CARPI XVI c.

CHIAROSCURO WOODCUTS BY WINSLOW AMES

Lyman Allen Museum

Except when some of them have been considered as passing experiments of great masters whose principal per- formances were in other fields, chiaroscuro woodcuts in general have been neglected. For this there were several reasons, none of them very good: that in its inception the chiaroscuro was more frankly reproductive than most other sorts of prints; that it was not in pure black-and- white, and that being an object with the colors of a paint- ing, and yet not a painting, it was little better than wall- paper; that consequently it was not hohe Kunst. Bartsch segregated these prints in his Volume XII; Passavant, Kristeller, and Kolloff have further noticed them; Reich- el's book upon them is a luxurious and magnificently il- lustrated if incomplete publication; and we may now look forward to a great new catalogue raisonnee by Mr. W. G. Russell Allen of Boston. Mr. Allen and Mr. Horace M. Swope of St. Louis have been the chief private collectors in this country.

There has been endless argument over the purpose of the chiaroscuro: was it only a means of providing cheap wall decoration, or a means of multiplying drawings for the convenience of amateurs? The definitely imitative na- ture of most German work argues for the latter, the large scale, strength, and legibility of most Italian prints for the former. There must originally have been quite as many examples produced as there were of all the other familiar types of prints, but not nearly so many have survived. Mr. Fitzroy Carrington has suggested that they were more probably fixed to walls than framed or put into books, and that many that were not worn out were plastered over and so lost. It is easy enough now to tell by comparative condition whether a given print was one of the lucky ones that may have been preserved between covers.

The first hint of the process, which appears in some of the engravings of Mair of Landshut (Nativity of 1499, British Museum), is a combination of print and drawing, the engraving on tinted prepared paper being heightened with white by hand. It is unnecessary here to quote documents or to say more than that Lucas Cranach first appeared as a print-maker in chiaroscuro in 1506, and that Ugo da Carpi's petition to the Venetian Signoria for a monopoly on the process was presented in 1516. The ques- tion of purpose is in any case little more important than the same question as it applies to all classes of prints; it may have been raised only because scholars in this case could not fall back upon the explanation used for anony- mous fifteenth century woodcuts: that they were propa- ganda or souvenirs sold to pilgrims at shrines. If one could find a sound explanation for the origin of the chiaro- scuro, its later development could be described fairly plausibly as something like a busman's holiday. One cer- tainly cannot adduce any solemn and serious reason for the fact that many such prints occur in three or more differ- ent color schemes, a case of opportunistic and playful pleasure in color.

Whatever the purpose, the technical procedure of chiaro- scuro woodcutting was and is complex, being more difficult than any block-print work except perhaps the Japanese. For both the register and the color combinations must be controlled with extreme care, since the chiaroscuro deals not with adjacent areas of different colors, bounded by the black lines of a key-block which may often be trusted to take up (in the thickness of those outlines) the inac- curacies of register, but with networks of sometimes deli- cate lines or broken masses which overlap each other. Now, no matter how delicately scaled a given chiaroscuro may be, it is essentially baroque in spirit, a tour de force. For

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SATURN

Collection Boston Museumi of Fine Arts

HENDRIK GOLTZIUS 155 8-1617 HERCULES AND CACUS

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Collectnon Merropolitan lMuseum oJ Art

ALCON AND THE SERPENT HANS WACHTLIN 1460-1526

it is a combination of positive with negative: the key- block, from which light is subtracted to leave dark lines; the tone-block or blocks, from which dark is subtracted to produce light. When two or more tone-blocks are used, presumably in imitation of a wash drawing, the technical means (gradation of color at arbitrary intervals) is a com- promise (just as the interval scheme of piano notes is a compromise) and as such offers further scope for the display of the craftsman's subtlety. No matter how well integrated into a design, the superimposed blocks are sep- arate: their edges should be perfectly clear.

There are exceptions numerous enough to prove the rule, succinctly stated by Mr. William M. Ivins, Jr., that "German chiaroscuros were merely the ordinary small de- tailed black and white woodcuts complicated by the ad- dition of color," while Italian ones "were thought of as wall decorations, compositions of large contours and flat spaces, differentiated by slightly varying color." For ex- ample: although such tone-blocks as Cranach's do little more than add the charm of color to the impression from the key-block, and often indeed obscure the composition by throwing values out of balance, the works of Hans Baldung Grin have a dramatic bigness, solidity and power which are built up tremendously by the tone-block (in spite of the fact that his key-blocks when printed alone are perfectly legible). And the key-block, if so it may be called, of the de Negker portrait of Baumgartner after Burgkmair would be scarcely intelligible if printed alone. In Italy Ugo da Carpi worked both in the solid areas of

color which are so impressive in familiar sheets like the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, and in line, in which it must be confessed he was rather dull; witness his Hercules and the Nemaean Lion. Antonio da Trento, however, performed magnificently in line, often to the disadvantage of his contemporary Giuseppe Niccolo Vicentino whose work, when one compares prints by the two men after identical designs, is apt to look ungracious and lumpy; witness Augustus and the Tiburtine Sybil or Circe, both pairs after Parmigiano. There are also some deceptive instances, such as the Durer portrait of Varnbiiler to which a tone-block was not added until long after Diirer's death, when a subsequent publisher wished to disguise the worn-out state of the original block. The two versions of an Ecce Homo by Hans Weiditz have been diagnosed, from the always faulty register of the tone-block, as similar cases. And the highly decorative woodcuts of Boldrini after Titian occur more often in simple black- and-white than with color.

That the creators of chiaroscuros were virtuosi from the first is evident in some of the works of Hans Wacht- lin, probably the first German to use three blocks. In the crisp Alcon and the Serpent, the profile of the child is cut boldly out of the darker tone-block, while almost all the other outlines are defined by the key-block. The same device occurs in the smaller of Wachtlin's Crucifixions. And Baldung, in addition to the natural high lights, cut from his tone-blocks small patterns of flecks and cross- hatching, used chiefly to produce variety of texture, and often mixed with similar work in the key-block; see the grainy wood of the cross in the magnificent Crucifixion, the tricks played in the charming but strong and very German Adam and Eve, the modeling of flesh and of the tree-trunk in the Witches' Sabbath.

Baldung seems to stand above the other Germans: Cran- ach, or the man who cut his tone-blocks, had the faults mentioned above; the works of Wachtlin, with the ex- ceptions quoted, are often dry and inept or derivative (like the Orpheus Vates, which is yet agreeably naif); the Burgkmair-de Negker prints, though technically the most brilliant of all, suffer from a certain lack of focus caused by over-refinement of detail, and from rather anaemic color schemes which are not sufficiently theatri- cal for this showy art.

Among the Italians, who carried on long after the Ger- man school had played itself out in the fussiness of a minuscule scale, there is a curious unanimity in the choice for reproduction of designs by Raphael and his followers, by Parmigiano, Titian, and in later generations Guido Reni. Ugo da Carpi, the great originator, cut most of his fine many-figured compositions (as the Death of An- anias and the Massacre of the Innocents) after Raphael. In these, despite the necessary abbreviations of the tech- nique, there remains that mixture of boldness and placid- ity that characterized the painter. Many impressions use the general grey-and-black, tan-brown-black, or yellow- green-black color schemes that became standard practice; but the handsomest are those printed in violet. Ugo's most sightly sheets are the Diogenes and the Saturn (which might better be called Chronos) after Parmigiano. The Diogenes, a great swirling composition of Michelangel- esque character, is at once one of the largest in dimensions and one of the grandest in scale of the whole genre. Its very size has usually subjected it to mutilation and it sel- dom occurs in fine condition. The Saturn, less compli- cated, more linear, appears fairly often in its second edi- tion with Andrea Andreani's address. Fine enough in con- ventional colors, it is, when it is to be had in its first edi- tion and printed in two shades of red, a work of art to

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make anyone take notice. Somewhere between Ugo and Giuseppe Niccolo Vicen-

tino lies an anonymous man responsible for the favorite Bathing Nymphs after Parmigiano, another great piece of decoration unfortunately seldom found in the best condi- tion. The same anonym probably cut the version of Augustus and the Tiburtine Sybil usually credited, as above, to Giuseppe. We look to Mr. Allen to elucidate such mysteries as these and the identity of N D B and of the unknown who cut the Rest on the Flight into Egypt after Baroccio. Giuseppe Niccolo himself was not very prolific. His most familiar certain work, the Death of Ajax after Polidoro da Caravaggio, is a rather dull print commonly seen in Andrea Andreani's edition.

Antonio da Trento, said by Vasari to have learned his art under Parmigiano himself, from whom he stole copper- plates, woodblocks and drawings, excelled in small single figure prints of a brisk and summary nature, in which usually white lines lie parallel to white lines and black to black, the briskness being produced by an opposition of directions which hints at the crosshatching of one block by another without really arriving at it. One of his large pieces, the Martyrdom of SS. Peter and Paul, sometimes, like a few other chiaroscuros, appears with its two color- blocks printed over the black key: the effect is strangely smoky and ghost-like. Equally mysterious, though it is not printed in that fashion, is the print whose subject is so enigmatic that its title has simply to be a description, the Seated Man Seen from the Back, with a Bust of Athena. This work, whose key-block is quite a careful imitation of pen drawing, and which has but one color- block, is rare among Italian chiaroscuros as a successful example of the manner more commonly used in the six- teenth century in Germany. Bartsch, indeed, opined that Parmigiano had drawn directly on the block and that Antonio had then simply cut away the whites like any well-behaved Formschneider.

At the end of the sixteenth century, which had been dominated by Venetians and Bolognese, there appeared Andrea Andreani who, after having performed fairly well as a woodcut artist in Florence and Mantua, settled down as a publisher in the latter city. Thence, during the first ten years of the seventeenth century, he issued reprints of earlier chiaroscuros printed from the original blocks but with his own name or initials and his Mantuan ad- dress added, often as a substitute for the cancelled signa- ture of the true artist. Andreani was himself the creator of a number of woodcuts of uneven quality. His Young Woman Meditating and his S. Francis of Assisi, both after Alessandro Casolano, are cut with wiry sharpness and have beautiful integral inscriptions in italic. Some of his less good prints show an amusing use of white outline, now usually become illegible because he was stingy with ink or used too pale a color. Most of his reprints of other men's cuts, by the way, are in black and two shades of grey. A little color appears in his own big blocks after Giovanni da Bologna's Rape of the Sabines, and more (and better) in his series of the Triumphs of Caesar after Mantegna. This great set, in the execution of which its function as wall decoration was never forgotten, is pro- vided with paper pilasters to set between panels, and fur- ther with a title page of robust dignity. It occurs in several color schemes, predominantly grey, red or green, and is perhaps at its best in an impression with deep gauffrage. This, incidentally, is a device that might have been used more often; one finds it chiefly in certain single- figure blocks after Beccafumi and in the eighteenth cen- tury work of John Baptist Jackson.

In Italy the last important man of Baroque time was

Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art

PHAETON'S CHARIOT NICOLAS LE SUEUR 1691-1764

Bartolomeo Coriolano, presumably of German ancestry, a man who worked almost entirely after designs by Guido Reni. His tone-blocks are nearly impressionistic in the fashion of their cutting and in color they range from the extraordinary subtleties of his S. Jerome to the beautiful discords of his Herodiade. Even in his single-tone prints, where he could not manipulate color very much, he in- geniously took advantage of the stout but uneven surface of heavy seventeenth century paper in order to produce lively variations.

But of all who practiced this Baroque art, it was a northerner who got the most out of it. Although as an engraver he had the excessive faults of his virtues, Hen- drik Goltzius as a woodcutter in chiaroscuro was su- preme. Not only did he not reproduce other artists' de- signs but also he kept out of his work practically all imitative quality. In a few of his blocks there are reminis- cences of pen drawing but as a rule his woodcutting is essential woodcutting a la Plato. The lines and voids of his best key-blocks suggest always the woodcutting tool. His mastery of technique allowed him such bravura passages as the backgrounds of some of his oval series of minor classical deities, in which large areas are expressed in white line and two colors, the use of key-block out- lines being reserved for the foreground. Goltzius hatched key-block lines across tone-block lines, interrupted il- lusory modeling with arbitrary flat patterns, and gen- erally broke rules. His Baroque spirit is evident in the violence and the volute composition of Hercules and Cacus, the perhaps conventional ecstasies of S. John

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Baptist in the Desert and S. Mary Magdalen, in the grand scale and swagger of even such simple works as Mars and Baccnhs, which yet manage to be very Dutch.

A strain of Northern mysticism may be seen in the Sorcerer whose elaborate iconography is, I believe, yet to be deciphered, and of Northern homeliness in the series of four small landscapes. One of these, for instance, could be (as subject and composition at least) the work of one of the genre painters of the next generation in the Nether- lands. In the rest of these tiny pictures there are sug- gested the breadth and grandeur that one sees more ex- plicitly stated in the Arcadian Landscape, which might be called the very type of the pastoral-tragical. Although the key-block of this composition is perfectly legible when it is found printed alone (often on blue paper), yet when the print is complete in yellow-green, olive-green and black on white paper, it not only gains in legibility but becomes far more poetic, luminous, dramatic. Very much the same quality invests the charming and baffling piece called sometimes A Monk, sometimes S. Francis of Assisi, sometimes Elijah Fed by the Ravens. That it should have contradictory titles is explained by its mingling of majesty and intimacy with a trace of rather Quixotic humor.

In the Low Countries there were a few others at work in our medium, but none to compare with Goltzius. Jan Lievens did at least one very sound chiaroscuro, the Head of a Bald Man; Paulus Moreelse cut some stylish decora- tions with but one tone-block and usually with consider- able handsomely spaced letter-press; and Frederick Bloe- maert published a number of prints after drawings by his father Abraham in which, however, he used a copperplate intaglio for his lines in combination with one or two woodcut tone-blocks.

This latter process, which had been used in Parmigiano's own time to provide good color "spotting" for a large and rather inarticulate etching, was again seized upon in the eighteenth century in France and England. The craze (in many cases, of course, a genuine love) for collecting cabinets of drawings created a demand for facsimiles. The Comte de Caylus' publication of many fine drawings from Crozat's collection is a brilliant example of collabora- tion. The Comte himself made line etchings, largely after Raphael and Perino del Vaga, and, sous sa conduite, P. P. A. Robert and Nicolas Le Sueur cut tone-blocks in wood. But the finest works of that time and country are the few which Le Sueur executed alone in wood. Very much in the spirit of the painted architectural decorations then in vogue for overdoors and the like, they lighten the grandiose heaviness of the designs of Paolo Farinati (after which most of them are cut) by the use of blond color schemes and the abbreviation of linear detail. In this Le Sueur was far more successful than the Englishman, John Baptist Jackson, whose activity as a producer of wall-papers and as a writer on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaroscuro has recently been described by Miss Edna Donnell of the Metropolitan.

Jackson's series of enormous prints after paintings by the great Venetians, although published in 1742, tends to prove the facetious statement of an observant critic that most English art looks like the nineteenth century. The bold decorative quality of these objects, which are by no means bad translations of Tintoretto and Veronese and which are technically admirable, is almost smothered by the invincible dullness of the shades of brown in which they are printed. Yet Jackson could behave much better. His portrait of Algernon Sidney was certainly cut con anore: it combines extraordinary finesse in the use of gaziffrage and of layering of colors one above another with a taste for composition in the grand manner and a sensi-

tive use of a monumental inscription. Finally, his virtuoso pieces, romantic landscapes full of classical ruins and sub- tropical foliage, are brilliant performances in color print- ing. Perhaps they do not rank as true chiaroscuros for they do not fit the definitive French title, "en camaieu," and they are printed in a dozen colors, not the usual two or three; but they do redeem Jackson.

John Skippe is the only other British practitioner who deserves mention in so short an article. The work of Pond and Knapton, for instance, largely in the mixed etch- ing-and-woodcut technique, belongs more with that of the engravers who worked for Charles Rogers' Imitations of Drawings than with chiaroscuros. John Skippe, who had been anticipated by another member of the Skippe family some sixty years earlier, issued in 1781 a series of prints after the most approved Italian masters, including, however, at least one (one of the best) after Rubens. As a cutter of woodblocks Skippe was not among the most proficient, and for some of his color schemes and his trick of heraldically counterchanged backgrounds he was in- debted to Zanetti, mentioned below; but some of his translations of Raphael are very pretty and his title-page is a triumph: on a masonry wall hangs a richly rumpled sheet draped from an ox-skull; all this, expressed in three woodblocks, has superimposed upon it a Latin dedication printed from movable type. In its almost satirical cor- ruption of the grand manner, it suggests the death of the Baroque.

Psychologically, if not chronologically, the end came in Italy. In 1749 Antonio Maria, Count Zanetti, pub- lished in a limited edition of thirty sets his series of prints after Parmigiano and a few others, on which he had been at work for twenty-five years or more. He had previously issued a few proofs of single sheets; but despite his statement that he had printed this small edition and then destroyed the blocks to prevent inferior publication by others after his death, his artificial limitation of num- bers was in itself a symptom of preciosity, amateurism, and decadence. As a technician in woodcut Zanetti was only a little better than contemptible, but he understood the theory perfectly, he chose tried and true prototypes, and above all he had time, money, a larger repertory of inks than his predecessors, and an eye for color.

Zanetti often turned out examples of one print in sev- eral different combinations of color, in which his inven- tiveness was fertile and frantic: malachite and two shades of chocolate; poison green and two shades of violet; dull blue, carmine, and shrill pink. He commonly used three blocks none of which would be legible alone; his occa- sional prints from a black line-block with only one tone- block are not good: they reveal his inept cutting. He almost always used blank backgrounds in flat color against which the gracefulness of Parmigiano's figures counted well; he often darkened the background on the more strongly lighted side of the figure; and he was a master in the placing of inscriptions, which with him as with Jackson and Skippe almost invariably were Latin dedica- tions.

There is hardly such a thing as a lost art. Some of the beautiful colored woodcuts of Auguste Lepere might qualify as chiaroscuros; certain works of Shannon and Strang do so qualify; now there are Louis Jou and some- times Rudolph Ruzicka and very often Allen Lewis; and most recently the young surrealist Castellon has made watercolors which are like reversed chiaroscuros in which the key-block and the tone-blocks have changed places. If genuine and constructive revolutions come from within traditions, we shall perhaps have chiaroscuros with a dif- ference.

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