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Early Engravings and the concept of invention

Lothar Schmitt

Renaissance Society of America, Conference, Venice, 8-10 April 2010

fig. 1

If you want to get informed about the early history of engraving, you shouldn’t ask me. Pick up a good book instead. Some are shown here (fig. 1) but whether you choose one of these or any other study on the subject, you will experience a strange coincidence because all of them tell two different stories about the invention of engraving, and they tell them side by side (fig. 2).

fig. 2

The first story is centred on the Master of the Playing Cards and prints of the Upper Rhine region (fig. 3 right). The second one is situated in Florence. It deals with the

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goldsmith Maso Finiguerra and followers such as Baccio Baldini (fig. 3 left). The first story, so it is said, roughly starts in 1430, the second one in 1450.

fig. 3

That there are two different stories does not depend on the engravings themselves. None of them is signed or dated. But it can be said that a close interrelation existed between early engravings produced north and south of the Alps. Italian prints were copied and collected in Germany. A Florentine engraving from the library of Hartmann Schedel is one such example. Schedel probably bought it while he studied law in Padua at around 1465 and brought it back to Nuremberg (fig. 4).

fig. 4

German prints, on the other hand, were collected and copied in Italy. Cristofano Robetta for example relied on a number of engravings by Martin Schongauer like in his Nativity shown here, that was produced around 1500 (fig. 5 right).

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fig. 5

While prints like these underline an intense cross-cultural dialogue, the conflicting accounts of the invention of engraving amplify the gap between these cultures. The two stories are deeply rooted in the tradition of art historical literature reaching all the way back to Giorgio Vasari. The relevant passages are to be found in the second edition of his “Vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori” that was published in 1568. Since its author lived in Florence, the book was printed in Florence and it was dedicated to the duke of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, it will be no surprise to hear that Vasari tells the Florentine version of the invention of engraving and that Maso Finiguerra is his hero.

But the “Vite” were not only intended for a local audience. They were a great success and found readers all over Europe. Some of them scrutinized the text as can be deduced from the marginal cross-references that Basilius Amerbach noted in his copy of the book. Amerbach, a contemporary of Vasari, is a special case because he seems to have used the “Vite” as a handbook in order to gather and arrange large numbers of prints (fig. 6 left). They are still preserved as core of the Kunstsammlung Basel, one of oldest public museums, founded in 1661.

Not all readers were content with what Vasari had to tell. Amerbach’s compatriot Johann Fischart from Strasburg was among the first to write a fierce reaction. This text is a dedication to the bishop of Basle and was intended as an introduction to a German translation of Onuphrio Panvinio’s “Accuratae effigies pontificum maximorum” published by the Strasburg printer Bernhard Jobin in 1573. This means that Fischart wrote for a German audience and, more specifically, for Upper Rhenish clients. Small wonder that he wanted to tell a different story and to emphasize the contribution of his own region.

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fig. 6

Fischart is an able author who counters Vasari with eloquence. Unfortunately, we have no time to outline how he argues but have to limit ourselves to what he sets against the Florentine claim to superiority. First he modifies Vasari’s chronology by referring not to Finiguerra but to one of his followers, Gherardo del Fora, who died in 1470. Fischart picks up this date in order to imply that Vasari said the art of engraving was invented in 1470. This distortion of facts is of great importance because it allows Fischart to introduce his protagonist, Martin Schongauer, whose career started around that time and who worked near Fischarts hometown in Colmar. Schongauer was the most prominent engraver of the 15th century. His prints were sold all over Europe and they were even prized in Italy, as Vasari himself admits.

In order to predate the art of engraving and to prove its German origin, Fischart purports to know Schongauer’s teacher as well, a certain Luprecht Rüst, who is said to have puzzled out the technique in 1430. Since no artist of that name is documented, we can only guess if he really existed or if Fischart himself invented this inventor.

Fischart’s critique is valuable because it lays stress on the discrepancies of Vasari’s story. Vasari tells his tale with a number of peculiarities: It is dispersed to different parts of his book, and he does not say expressly that Finiguerra invented the technique but seems to have stumbled upon it by accident. More important, though, is the fact that in several instances in which Vasari writes about early engravers he underlines that Italy was flooded by German prints. And he concedes that Italian engravers strived to copy works of Schongauer and Dürer.

Schongauer provided Fischart with a further advantage. He was the only northern engraver mentioned in earlier publications written by esteemed humanists like Jakob Wimpfeling, Christoph Scheurl, and Beatus Rhenanus, and he was named

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together with the most important northern artist of the Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer, because some authors said that Schongauer was Dürer’s teacher.

These texts are highly important as early references to an engraver because no 15th century author reported on the invention of the technique. But they wrote about another invention that began to spread at about the same time: the printing with movable type. This does not mean that engravings went unnoticed. But it were printed books, not printed images, that lay at the heart of authors. Books had advocates willing to praise the new craft while engravings and woodcuts had not.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to take a look at how contemporaries wrote about the new way of producing books because the modes of narrating the story are comparable. The first volume for example printed in France in 1470 was made by Germans who learned their craft from Gutenberg and his associates. In this case it was Ulrich Gering who, together with Michael Friburger, and Martin Crantz founded the first press in Paris. The book includes a poem probably written by Guillaume Fichet who already uses an important line of thought: The heavenly art of printing, so he says, was invented in Germany and is now transplanted to bear fruit on French soil. Here, we already find the seeds for a national antagonism that was recounted time and again. Northern humanists like Konrad Celtis, Sebastian Brant, or Heinrich Bebel picked up this idea and shaped it into a weapon directed against their allegedly high-brow Italian colleagues. They said that Italian humanists might have started to revive antique learning, but they had to rely on the German invention of printing books to disseminate it.

This short digression shows that decades before Vasari and Fischart wrote their texts, it was already common practice to write history in terms of national rivalry. And the symptom has a special relevance when it comes to the history of inventions.

It is important to keep in mind that Renaissance authors who wrote about the history of art were heavily dependent on an antique model – Pliny’s “Naturalis historia”. Pliny comprehends the term “history” in a different way than we are accustomed to. He does not mean telling stories about bygone times but perceives history as a mode of “visual and sensual cognition” (ocularis et sensata cognitio). It is a counterpart to all areas of science that are grasped by the intellect while history relies on experience. Science means thinking whereas history means observing. This is how Rudolf Agricola for example understood the concept of “historia” in his “De inventione dialectica”, written in 1479.

Based on Pliny, it was Polidoro Vergilio, an Italian author living most of his live in England, who wrote a history of inventions “De inventoribus rerum” that was published in Venice in 1499 (fig. 6 right). Here, we find the key to understand why inventions are such an important part of historiography. To report on inventions lends credibility to what is written. History is based on our senses and hence prone to subjective impressions. Since these impressions distort the reliability of an account, inventions are important checkpoints: “I aim ... to see that no one is

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cheated of his glory since discovery is being first, before all others” (orsus, ... ut nemo sua laude, invenire enim primum praecipuum est ... fraudetur).

This for example is why Vergilio recounts all the old stories about the origin of painting taken from Pliny and other authors. But in those cases where there are different opinions he mentions these alternatives. Thus he says that “Gyges (...) was the first to invent painting in Egypt but in Greece it was Pyrrhus (or) Polygnotus”. And this is also why Vergilio devotes his last chapter to those inventions whose authors are unknown, “for the greater surprise is that there are many new inventions whose inventors are unrecorded (...) Thus, if we have not mentioned certain inventions, new or old, this certainly was our reason: that I would rather pass on reliable information in few words than use many to pursue uncertainties.”

Although we can easily understand Vergilio’s aims, he creates a strange kind of history – a sequence of individuals striving to outdo each other or, better still, to invent something in order to achieve what no one ever thought of. And historiography has the duty to register these achievements. Under these circumstances history can be compared with athletic competition – think of the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger” – and historiography to the “Guinness Book of Records”. Strange though it may seem, this concept of history affected early modern historiography and it is part of the tradition of our own profession. We are the descendants of Pliny, Vergilio, Vasari, and Fischart.

fig. 7

A hundred years ago, Max Lehrs tried to get rid of this tradition (fig. 7 left). He spent his whole life writing his “Geschichte und Kritischer Katalog des deutschen, niederländischen und französischen Kupferstichs im 15. Jahrhundert” – the “History and critical catalogue of German, Netherlandish and French Engravings of the 15th century”, published between 1908 and 1934. In the introduction to the first of its nine volumes Lehrs hopes that now all patriotic fairy tales about the invention of engraving, written in the 16th and 17th centuries, have become obsolete. Lehrs, who grew up in an era of positivism, thought that an objective description and evaluation of every single print would finally replace traditional beliefs. But he was wrong. As was Arthur Mayger Hind who learned the job from Lehrs and wrote a seven volume history of “Early Italian Engraving”, published between 1938 and 1948

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(fig. 7 right). Right in the first sentence of his introduction he says that “Vasari’s story (...) has been long since discounted”.

Lehrs and Hind together cover the whole range of 15th century engravings and their catalogues are still the most important reference books. But their scope is different and they have intensified the split between northern and southern prints. They both open a door to early engravings: one leads to the Master of the Playing Cards the other to Baccio Baldini. The problem is to decide which door to choose.

It takes some effort to understand the early history of engraving as a European development that was not limited to national boundaries. A key factor in this effort is to assure ourselves of our own traditions, to appreciate what Vasari, Fischart, and other authors had to say because they are part of an ongoing development. To be aware of that, means learning from history.