DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51584#0172
168
EAKLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
With these an angel, Michael, styled divine,
In ■whom the sculptor and the painter join :
Sebastian, Titian, Raphael, three that grace
Cadora, Venice, and Urbino’s race:
Each genius that can past events recall
In living figures on the storied wall.”
The Invention of Engraving on Wood and
Copper: 1423—1452.
Andrea Mantegna was not only eminent as a
painter; he owed much of his celebrity and his in-
fluence over the artists of that age to the multipli-
cation and diffusion of his designs by copper-plate
engraving, an art unknown till his time: he was
one of the first who practised it; certainly the first
painter who engraved his own designs.
In these days, when we cannot -walk through the
streets even of a third-rate town without passing
shops with their windows filled with engravings
and prints, when not our books only but the news-
papers that lie on our tables are illustrated ; when
the ‘ Penny Magazine’ can place a little print after
Mantegna at once before the eyes of fifty thousand
readers; when every beautiful work of art as it
appears is multiplied and diffused by hundreds and
thousands of copies—when the talk is rife of won-
drous inventions by which such copies shall repro-
duce themselves to infinitude, without change or
deterioration, we find it difficult to throw our ima-
gination back to a time when such things were not.
EAKLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
With these an angel, Michael, styled divine,
In ■whom the sculptor and the painter join :
Sebastian, Titian, Raphael, three that grace
Cadora, Venice, and Urbino’s race:
Each genius that can past events recall
In living figures on the storied wall.”
The Invention of Engraving on Wood and
Copper: 1423—1452.
Andrea Mantegna was not only eminent as a
painter; he owed much of his celebrity and his in-
fluence over the artists of that age to the multipli-
cation and diffusion of his designs by copper-plate
engraving, an art unknown till his time: he was
one of the first who practised it; certainly the first
painter who engraved his own designs.
In these days, when we cannot -walk through the
streets even of a third-rate town without passing
shops with their windows filled with engravings
and prints, when not our books only but the news-
papers that lie on our tables are illustrated ; when
the ‘ Penny Magazine’ can place a little print after
Mantegna at once before the eyes of fifty thousand
readers; when every beautiful work of art as it
appears is multiplied and diffused by hundreds and
thousands of copies—when the talk is rife of won-
drous inventions by which such copies shall repro-
duce themselves to infinitude, without change or
deterioration, we find it difficult to throw our ima-
gination back to a time when such things were not.