Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [31]
Dürer took as his mission the enlightenment of his Northern colleagues about the discoveries of the South. He published treatises on perspective and ideal proportion. He also assumed the mantle of the artist as cultivated gentleman-scholar, raising the artist’s stature from mere craftsman to near prince. He was the first to be fascinated with his own image, leaving a series of self-portraits (the earliest done when he was 13). In his “Self-Portrait” of 1500, he painted himself in a Christ-like pose, indicating the exalted status of the artist, not to mention his high opinion of himself.
What assured Dürer’s reputation as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance was his graphic work. Before Dürer, woodcuts were primitive studies of black and white contrasts. He adapted the form-creating hatching of engraving to the woodcut, achieving a sliding scale of light and shade. Like an engraver, he used dense lines to render differences in texture and tone as subtle as any oil painting. Dürer was the first to use printmaking as a major medium for art.
MAKING PRINTS: THE INVENTION OF GRAPHIC ARTS
One of the most popular (and still affordable) forms of art collecting in recent years has been limited-edition prints, each signed by the artist who oversees the reproduction process. The art of printmaking first flowered during the Northern Renaissance.
WOODCUT
The oldest technique for making prints (long known in China) was the woodcut, which originated in Germany about 1400. In this method, a design was drawn on a smooth block of wood, then the parts to remain white (called “negative space”) were cut away, leaving the design standing up in relief. This was then inked and pressed against paper to produce thousands of copies sold for a few pennies each. For the first time, art was accessible to the masses and artists could learn from reproductions of each others’ work. Once printing with movable type was developed around the mid-fifteenth century, books illustrated with woodcuts became popular.
Woodcuts reached a peak with Dürer but were gradually replaced by the more flexible and refined method of engraving. In Japan, the colored woodcut was always very popular. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe, the woodcut enjoyed a revival, with Munch, Gauguin, and the German Expressionists adopting the medium for its jagged intensity.
ENGRAVING
Begun about 1430, engraving was a technique opposite to the woodcut’s raised relief. The method was one of several in printmaking known as intaglio (ink transferred from below the surface), where prints are made from lines or crevices in a plate. In engraving, grooves were cut into a metal (usually copper) plate with a steel tool called a burin. Ink was rubbed into the grooves, the surface of the plate wiped clean, and the plate put through a press to transfer the incised design to paper. Forms could be modeled with fine-hatched lines to suggest shading. This technique flowered in the early sixteenth century with Dürer, whose use of the burin was so sophisticated, he could approximate on a copper plate the effects of light and mass achieved by the Dutch in oil and Italians in fresco.
Graphic arts techniques that became popular in later centuries include DRYPOINT, ETCHING, LITHOGRAPHY, and SILKSCREENING (see p.109).
Dürer, “Saint Jerome,” 1514, engraving, MMA, NY. Through straight and curved hatching and crosshotching, Dürer depicted light streaming through bottle-glass windows, casting accurate shadows.
OTHERS IN THE GERMAN RENAISSANCE
Besides Dürer and Holbein, notable artists were Matthias Grünewald (c.1480-1528) and Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538). Grünewald’s masterpiece, “The Eisenheim Altarpiece,” shows the horror of the Crucifixion and glory of the Resurrection in a tableau of overwhelming power. Altdorfer, representative of the Danube Style, known for its moody landscapes, is credited with the first pure landscape painting in Western art.
MANNERISM AND THE LATE RENAISSANCE
Between the High Renaissance and the Baroque,