About engraving history. Deep engraving on metal
One of the most famous works, where a unique metal carving method is used - Albrecht Dürer's "Melancholy". She is most often associated with his name, as, for example, "La Gioconda" is inextricably linked with Leonardo da Vinci.
Magnificent craftsmanship
But first of all, it is worth dwelling on the very graphics of Dürer, the content of his engravings and the technique of craftsmanship. Because when you look at his engravings, in the works that are called incisive engravings on copper, the incredible technical perfection of the creator surprises. It is incredibly unique, complex and time-consuming.
It was Dürer who created this technique of carved copper engraving. He took a chisel, put his hand on a special pillow so that he could hold it in a certain position for a long time. And during the work on his masterpieces, he did not drive along the copper plate with a chisel, but moved the board itself at hand. Subsequently, the etching process began.
It is necessary to pay attention to his wonderful works "Rhinoceros", "Melancholy", "Knight, Devil and Death". Looking at them, it is impossible to believe that it is possible to do this in this way. What a huge number of lines! And today no one uses the engravings on copper with etching, which was created by Albrecht Dürer. She came with this extraordinary master and left with him.
Three parts of the most magnificent creation of a skilled craftsman
Albrecht Dürer's most famous engraving is Melancholia. It was created in the year one thousand five hundred and fourteen. If you look at it very carefully, you will notice that this engraving is horizontal lines is divided into three levels.
Each of them represents certain stages of knowledge. The artist in this work carefully designates all these levels with certain attributes. If you look closely enough at the items that are depicted in the lower tier, you can see a very interesting set there.
Craft tools or a high level of masterpiece creation
Each tool from Dürer's "Melancholy" engraving, located at this level, refers to craft items: a planer, tongs, a square, a hammer and nails. And the most impressive thing is the perfectly shaped ball. It is he who is a sign of very high skill.
In the era of Albrecht, various teachings, technical skills, the ability to make something with my own hands, knowledge of the anatomy that the animal curled up in the left corner of the engraving represents, all required the highest levels of education.
At the heart of all this lay the possession of a rather painstaking technical skill. And any tool from the engraving "Melancholy" by Durer emphasized the presence of each of these knowledge. And if the master could create such a sphere, then he has the opportunity to move to the next level of training.
Albrecht Durer. "Melancholy". High quality craft or the next level of intelligence
At the middle level, a wide variety of attributes are visible. And they, at first glance, have no connection with each other. Cute little angel is busy reading a book. At the same time, he sits on the top of the millstone. In all likelihood, this cute boy with small wings represents the area of some kind of intellectual development.
At the belt of the character's robe, which is located to the right of the angel, a purse is fastened. But he lies at her feet. Because money is an appropriate remuneration only for specific work done. And it is possible if you use any tool from the engraving "Melancholy" by Dürer, which is located at the bottom of the picture, related to craftsmanship. But it is impossible to evaluate, it does not have an appropriate payment, so the wallet is also on the lower tier.
A huge crystal located at the middle level of the product
But the main place in the second part of the picture is occupied by a huge crystal. This is the image of what is the goal for any alchemist. In the days of Albrecht's life, in the era of the late Middle Ages, the skill of an artisan was judged by the art of creating a ball, and the highest degree of intellectual knowledge or an absolutely learned person belonged to someone who knew the theorem of the scientist Ibn Sina about the sum of the angles of a polygon.
Albrecht Dürer himself was familiar with this law. "Melancholia" shows the viewer a crystal. He is the polygonal figure representing the famous scientist's theorem. And nearby lies a geologist's tool, showing that such a stone can be obtained not by alchemical means, but more naturally. And one more tool from the engraving "Melancholia" by Durer is the alchemist's crucible, where the process of transmutation takes place, located a little further - behind the crystal.
The work that plunged the whole world into amazement
And finally, the third belt is something incredible. On the right side you can see a very large tower that goes up and never ends. As well as the ladder attached to it and going into the sky. On the building itself, you can see two remarkable items.
it hourglass, expressing the image of time, and Dürer's magic table, where both vertically and horizontally the figure thirty-two is obtained. Above the table is the alarm, and the rope from it goes beyond the outline of the picture created by Albrecht Dürer.
"Melancholia" presents the viewer with this tower as a symbol of the fact that it is impossible to study absolutely all truths. There are things that are limitless for the knowledge of the human mind. And they include not only the skill of an artisan and intellectual education, but also magical teachings.
In Germany, in the gallery "Kunsthalle" is the engraving "Melancholy" by Dürer. In high resolution, the images presented here, of course, do not allow you to feel all the perfection of the work of the author of the work, which plunged the whole world into amazement. But, nevertheless, they help to study this masterpiece and make an analysis of it.
Part of the work relating to earthly existence
The work, which Albrecht Dürer created using the technique of carving on copper, is the painting "Melancholy", which also represents the earthly landscape, located in the upper left corner of the engraving. Infinitely bright shining rays from a distant star. There is a legend that it is depicted here that swept across the sky at that time.
But the main character is a bat, which refers to the symbol of melancholy. She in her paws over the star, rainbow, water and the whole landscape carries a map of this mental illness of all geniuses. Great knowledge breeds sorrow. The more a person knows, the deeper he sees and sinks into black melancholy.
The image of genius or black melancholy
The last figure shown by Dürer is melancholy. The photo presented here shows the image of genius or black melancholy created by the artist. She has huge wings of unusual scope. Like very large angel wings. And in her hands she holds a compass.
With this, Albrecht Dürer wanted to make it clear that any infinity of knowledge must be proven, measured and verified. Everything must be under control. And on the head of the figure is a blooming thorn, which has not yet flown around and does not crash into the forehead with its spikes.
And, perhaps, it is this image of melancholy, which the artist showed, with such a sad look and uniting so much in itself, is one of his self-portraits, only in the image.
Albrecht Dürer is the only one among the world's artists who has an incredible number of self-portraits. He drew the first one when he was just a boy. And then a series of endless images of himself begins, until the very last, where he stands, pointing to the pancreas. It's like he's diagnosing himself.
And this famous engraving "Melancholy" by Albrecht Dürer expresses, first of all, the theme of fate. And all the knowledge presented on it, the three levels of knowledge of sciences and skill, according to the author, ultimately give rise to melancholy. You have to pay a very high spiritual price for everything. So the greatest creator conveyed his state of mind in this picture.
The emergence of engraving turned out to be a link in the evolution of the fine arts: woodcut engraving originates from boards for the manufacture of printed fabrics, engraving engraving adjoins jewelry art, and etching has something in common with the craft of gunsmiths. The quality of engraving that distinguishes it from other forms of art is that it is an impression on paper. That is why the birthplace of engraving is the birthplace of paper - China.
Woodcut engraving originated in China no later than the 6th century, at least from that time there are references to woodcut books made in this way. So there would have been many assumptions if it were not for the discovery in 1900 in Donghuang (Western China) in the cave of the Thousand Buddhas of the famous "Diamond Sutra", which is now stored in the British Library. It is dated 868 and indicates that the master Wang Chi cut the boards and printed the book "for the sake of commemoration of his deceased parents." That is why even in the dictionary of V.I. Dahl's xylography is called the "Chinese way of printing".
So now the first date in the history of engraving coincides with the first date in the history of printing. However, the penetration of engraving into Europe only slightly outpaced the invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg.
The first samples of Western European engraving, made in the technique of edged woodcuts, appeared at the turn of the 14th-15th centuries. They were of religious content, which predetermined the spread of this "craft": at first it was Bavaria, Alsace, the provinces of the Holy Roman Empire; then satirical leaflets, calendars and alphabets began to appear. The first dated woodcut is called "St. Christopher", made in 1423. Around 1430, the so-called. block books, where text and illustration were printed on one board, and from 1461 woodcuts began to be used as illustrations for printed books.
The woodcut technique is quite simple: a pattern is applied to the polished surface of a board about 2.5 cm thick, after which the lines of this pattern are cut off on both sides with a sharp knife, and the background is selected with a special tool to a depth of 2-5 mm. After that, the board can be rolled with paint and printed on paper.
If before it was about the so-called edged engraving (performed along wood fibers), then in the 1780s, the remarkable English artist and engraver Thomas Bewick invented the method of end engraving on wood (on a cross section of a hardwood trunk). He himself created many masterpieces of this genre - illustrations for the General History of the Quadrupeds and the two-volume History of the Birds of Britain. It was in this technique that in the 19th century a lot of book illustrations were created, which, with the addition of a second tone board, were called polytypes. The largest representatives of this technique in Russia were Lavrenty Seryakov and Vladimir Mate.
The art of oriental woodcuts stands apart. If earlier she transmitted only religious hieroglyphic texts, then in the 17th century, illustrated books appeared in Japan, and from the 1660s, engravings of a secular content. The heyday of Japanese woodcut printing dates back to the 18th century, when Okumura Masanobu introduced two- and three-color printing. The greatest master of the late 18th century is the creator of the ideal female portrait Kitagawa Utamaro, and in the first half of the 19th century the creators of wonderful landscapes Katsushika Hokusai and Ando Hiroshige.
Cutting engraving on metal appeared in the middle of the 15th century. For a long time it was believed that the inventor of this technique was the Florentine jeweler Mazo Finiguerra, whose first engraving dates from 1458; but this theory has been refuted by earlier specimens. The Flagellation of Christ, made by an unknown German master in 1446, is considered to be the oldest engraving on copper. And the first, albeit anonymous, most notable master of engraving is "Master playing cards”, who worked in Basel and on the upper Rhine.
In this case, the master took an evenly forged and carefully polished metal board, on which he applied a drawing using a jewelry punch, which was then passed through with a more solid tool - a cutter or engraver. After that, paint was rubbed into the board, its excess was removed, and the sheet could be printed.
The most remarkable master of the 15th century is the German engraver Martin Schongauer, who worked in Colmar and Breisach. His work, which combines late Gothic and early Renaissance, had a significant influence on German masters, including Albrecht Dürer. Among the masters of the first half of the 16th century, it is worth noting, in addition to the mentioned A. Dürer, the remarkable Luke of Leiden.
Of the Italian masters of the 15th century, Andrea Mantegna and Antonio del Pollaiolo are the most significant. In the same Italy in the 16th century, a direction arose that predetermined an important milestone in the development of European engraving - this was the reproduction of paintings.
The emergence of reproduction engraving is associated with the name of Marcantonio Raimondi, who, working until the end of the first third of the 16th century, created several hundred reproductions by means of a cutter from the works of Dürer, Raphael, Giulio Romano and others.
In the 17th century, reproduction engraving was extremely common in many countries - in Flanders, where many paintings were reproduced, especially those of Rubens. In France at this time, Claude Mellan, Gerard Edelink, Robert Nanteuil and others contributed to the flourishing of reproduction engraved portraits.
Since both wood engraving and copper engraving were exclusively in the hands of outstanding masters, they were complete, excellent works, full of artistic expressiveness and picturesqueness, then in early XVI century, another type of engraving on metal appears, which has become a favorite genre for many great artists - this is etching.
Its main advantage is ease of manufacture, which cannot be said about either engraving or woodcuts. The fact is that if in the two named techniques you need to manually cut lines on wood or metal, then in etching all this most difficult work is done by acid. A metal board (in the 16th century more often iron, in the 17th-18th century copper, later zinc), used for ordinary engraving, is covered with a special acid-resistant primer. On the board, by means of a sharp steel needle, penetrating through soft soil, a pattern is applied. After that, the board is placed in nitric acid (copper - in a solution of ferric chloride), and the pattern applied with a needle is etched to the desired depth. After that, the primer is washed off the board, the paint is rubbed in and an impression is made. In Russia, earlier engraving by etching was called strong vodka engraving.
Especially famous were the etchings by the French master of the first third of the 17th century, Jacques Callot, reproducing various, often eloquent, scenes. modern life. The Flemish school gave the art of an excellent engraver - Anthony van Dyck, whose portraits are excellent examples of the iconography of the 17th century.
But undoubtedly, the most valuable and integral is the Dutch school of etching, which in this case competes with painting and is in no way inferior to it. This school is represented by Adrian Van Ostade, Paul Potter, Hercules Segers... But the leading master here is Rembrandt, who completely independently, without outside help, comprehended the art of etching and overcame all the difficulties of this capricious technique. Rembrandt left over three hundred etchings in many conditions.
Approximately from the middle of the 18th century, as happened earlier with engraving, a separate direction of reproduction etching appeared. Practically all ugly and book illustrations of the middle-second half of the 18th century were made in this technique.
But if the reproduction etching was a kind of mass production for the 18th century, then the original etching continued to exist and was an "outlet" for many painters. The works of Francisco Goya, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Canaletto, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and many others are well known. Of particular note is the work of the architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who was, perhaps, the most outstanding engraver of this century, who left many volumes of vorazh with views of Rome, Roman antiquities, and even dungeons.
If in the 19th century, under the influence of new printing techniques, the art of etching fades away, then by the end of the century it flourishes with renewed vigor, and it no longer has the character of “illustration”, but is perceived by contemporaries as an integral piece of art. Almost all famous French painters turn to etching, starting with the Barbizon painters (Camille Corot, Charles-Francois Daubigny and others) and ending with the Impressionists (especially Edouard Manet). Also, many of the countries bring famous masters to the art of etching: Anders Zorn in Sweden, Adolf Menzel in Germany, James Whistler in the USA, Ivan Shishkin and Valentin Serov in Russia.
In addition to etching as such, this type of print acquires several more varieties in the 18th century, and sometimes in one work we can observe a combination of several etching techniques at the same time.
The most common of these is aquatint - when the board is etched through the applied rosin or asphalt dust. Such etching creates the effect of a tone pattern during printing, most of all with a single-color printing resembling grisaille. The addition of aquatint to a clear, even sometimes sharp, clean etching gives the engraving a picturesque look and resembles a drawing or watercolor. Among the first who began to use aquatint was the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Leprince - the creator of the famous "Russian types", as well as Francisco Goya, who used it in his Caprichos.
It was Leprince who invented another additional etching technique - lavis. In this case, the image is applied with a brush dipped in acid directly onto the board. When printed, the etching fragments executed by lavis are, as it were, an interval between a pure etching and an aquatint.
Another etching technique that we will pay attention to is soft varnish. When using it, the etching primer is mixed with fat (because of this, it lags behind the board more easily), after which grainy paper is applied to it, on which the artist applies his drawing with a pencil of sufficient hardness. Because the pencil creates some pressure, the ground along the line of the drawing sticks to the paper, and then it is removed along with it. The resulting board, with the lines of the design removed in this way, is subjected to the usual etching etching, and then printed. This method was known back in the 17th century, but more as a curiosity, and it found application only in the 19th and, especially, the 20th century. An engraving done in this way most of all resembles a drawing with charcoal or sauce. The most famous masters of soft varnish are Vladimir Falileev, Elizaveta Kruglikova, and of course Kathe Kollwitz.
If the soft varnish technique is rather sharp and sometimes even rough, then the so-called pencil style was used to reproduce drawings in the 18th century. Here, on the prepared etching board, the drawing is applied with special tape measures, and the resulting print can often be confused with a sanguine or pastel drawing. The largest number of pencil engravings were made in France in the middle of the 18th century and mostly reproduce the drawings of Francois Boucher. The inventor of this technique is Jean Charles François, which was then perfected by Gilles Demarteau.
Dotted lines are often found in engravings by various etching techniques. Meanwhile, this is one of the ancient engraving techniques, known both in German and in Italian lands since the end of the 15th century. The image is applied to the engraving board by means of a hammer and various steel tools - punches. Dotted engraving flourished in the 18th century, and one of the most talented masters is Francesco Bartolozzi, who worked a lot in England and taught the first Russian dotted engraver Gavriil Skorodumov. As for the etching dotted line, these are, in fact, just not lines, but dots made with an etching needle.
Before proceeding to the story of color engravings, we must talk about one more engraving technique. We are talking about the so-called black manner, called mezzotint. The black manner has a fundamental feature: the image is applied and, accordingly, printed not from white to black (when the ink fills the grooves from the cutter or etched pattern), but from black to white. The board is first processed with a special tool (cutter), and if it is printed in this form, a black velvety print will come out. The engraver, on the other hand, smoothes the areas he needs, where the paint will not stick, and where the print will result in bright spots. As often happens, the heyday of the black manner did not occur where it was invented.
Its inventor is the Dutchman Ludwig von Singen, who completed his first engraving in this technique in 1642. Mezzotint in German and Dutch lands developed until the middle of the 18th century; around the same time, it became known in England, where it received its brilliant distribution in the middle of the 18th and early 19th centuries, as a result of which it is sometimes even called the English manner. Of several of the largest names of masters of this technique in Russia, James Walker became famous - the author of many excellent portraits.
Now we will talk about color engravings. They, like classical engravings, can be made both on wood and on metal. They are printed from several boards, which actually gives rise to a color image.
Colored woodcuts originated at the very beginning of the 16th century. For quite a long time, the northern Italian engraver Ugo da Carpi was considered its inventor: since then it was possible to patent his invention in the Republic of Venice, he announced this in 1516, calling the printing technique Chiaroscuro. Although this technique was used in Europe before: since 1506, color engravings from several boards were printed by Lucas Cranach, and then by Hans Burgkmair and other artists.
And although Italy cannot defend the right to invent colored woodcuts, it can rightfully be proud of the best examples of this art. It was Ugo da Carpi who created excellent compositions from the originals of Raphael, as well as other Italian artists: Giulio Romano, Caravrgio, Parmigianino and others. So the 16th century gave us the best masters of chiaroscuro; in the 17th century, this technique in Italy began to fade, and practically degenerated by the 18th century.
The revival of colored woodcuts began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here we can note such masters as the Swiss Felix Vallotton, as well as Russians - Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Vladimir Falileev and Ivan Pavlov.
As for color engraving on metal, back in the 16th century we note its timid attempts, even more correct to say experiments. It was precisely the printing of a colored sheet from several boards around 1710 that a resident of Holland, Jacques Christophe Leblon, took up. Initially, he was an engraver in a black manner, and, remaining a supporter of three-color printing, he used three mezzotint boards with different colors for it.
But all experiments with color engraving based on mezzotint turned out to be of little success. And only in France, with the use of etching boards made in aquatint and lavis, color engraving begins to fully exist. Jean-Baptiste Leprince, a true devotee and tester of the etching board, also worked in this field. But the invention of colored lavis engraving belonged to François Jeanine, and it reaches its highest perfection in the hands of Louis Philibert Debucourt, who from 1785 devoted himself entirely to color engraving. The number of boards in his color engravings reached eight. The colored French engravings of this period are for the most part remarkable and valuable.
But all the most difficult techniques of the 18th century - mezzotints, complex etchings and engravings - at the beginning of the 19th century were subjected to a severe blow: the German Johann Alois Senefelder invented around 1798 in Munich completely new way printing - lithography. This is a method related to flat printing, based on the repulsion of fats from water. Prints are obtained by transferring ink under pressure from a printing plate - lithographic stone (limestone) - onto paper. The image is applied to the stone with oily ink or a lithographic pencil. Moreover, the circulation with this method of printing could many times exceed all the methods of printing prints that existed at that time in terms of the number of prints.
In 1806, Senefelder opened the first lithographic workshop in Munich, and published a manual on lithography in 1818, and in the first quarter of the 19th century, similar workshops were launched in almost all major European capitals. This, of course, was facilitated by the industrial revolution, due to which such an easy, relatively cheap and at the same time replicable method became so popular.
Among the first lithographers, besides Senefelder himself, by the way, not an artist at all, but an actor and author of musical plays, one can note the names of the famous German artists Franz Kruger and Adolf von Menzel. Also, Francisco Goya, Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix turned to lithography.
Lithography in the middle of the 19th century became a sharp political tool. It is in this context that the greatest master of lithography, the French caricaturist Honore Daumier, is presented, whose art had such a high resonance that even in Russia in the second half of the century several major lithographers-caricaturists worked: Alexander Lebedev, Pyotr Boklevsky, Nikolai Stepanov.
As for the Russian lithographers of the first half of the 19th century, then, as well as abroad, this new art was primarily attended by major Russian artists - Alexei Orlovsky, Orest Kiprensky, Alexei Venetsianov. The largest Russian lithographer of that time was Karl Petrovich Beggrov.
Thanks to his large-scale publishing activity, Vasily Timm became famous, leaving many hundreds of sheets of varying quality, but extremely curious in content, often turning into caricatures. Lithography in Russia was also the first method of color printing. In this technique, the excellent master Ignatius Shchedrovsky published in 1845 "Scenes from Russian Folk Life".
In connection with lithography, many varieties of flat printing arise, especially for color images that were most in demand in the last third of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These techniques are gradually moving away from the artist's directly original work, which is now called autolithography, and are moving into the category of large-circulation graphics. Although now, at the beginning of the 21st century, many even large-circulation printed works seem to be wonderful examples of graphic art.
We will try to list some of them. The most demanded of the techniques was chromolithography. In this case, for each color of the image, a separate printing plate was made - a stone (later - a zinc plate), however, with the invention of photography, these labor-intensive methods were quickly replaced by photomechanical methods of transferring the image to the printing plate. This is how photolithography appeared, which in the final print practically does not differ from chromolithography.
In the end, we want to say more about photomechanical methods for making printing plates. Some of these techniques are almost indistinguishable from the original printmaking techniques. They developed after Louis Daguerre announced in 1839 in the Royal Society that he had discovered a method for obtaining images on photosensitive layers, which he called daguerreotype, and now called photography.
Zincography was the most widespread in the first half of the 20th century. In this case, the image is applied to the form not by the artist, but by photographic transfer to a zinc plate, which is then etched in those areas of the image where the primer of the zinc board should be selected. Zincography was first invented in France in 1850 and was named zhillotyping after its inventor.
With the help of zincography, both line drawings and multi-color images (especially copies from woodcuts) are transmitted during printing, but this method cannot transmit a tone image. It is worth saying that some artists, in the evolution of their experiments on printing methods, tried themselves in the original zincography.
The fact that a technique so convenient for printing images does not allow transferring tone images forced many talented printers and engineers to work hard, which led to the invention of raster in the 1880s, and with it a new letterpress printing technique - autotype. The Brockhaus and Efron Dictionary calls autotyping "one of the ways to turn a manuscript, drawing, or photograph into a cliché for printing." It was invented simultaneously in Russia and Germany. In this case, the tone image is applied to the zinc plate by means of a raster grid, which divides the tones into small dots, distributed evenly; thus, the size of the dot will depend on the tone at that specific location in the original. That is, in bright places, the points will hardly be visible, but in dark places, on the contrary, they are large and almost merge.
As was the case with other printing methods, autotype eventually became color. It comes in three colors (with three clichés) and four colors (respectively with four), and modern machines sometimes make five colorful layers. For a better transfer of monochromatic images, duplex autotype is sometimes used, where one cliché is the main one, and the second is an additional one, with a soft tone - blue or fawn.
Another method of photomechanical transmission of the original is phototype. Invented in 1855 by the French chemist Alphonse Poitevin, it turned out to be, although not as widely used, unlike zincography, chromolithography and autotype, however, it made it possible to convey complex artistic originals with great accuracy. It was this feature of phototype that caused the engraving historian Dmitry Alexandrovich Rovinsky to publish atlases with all the etchings by Rembrandt and Van Ostade in the phototype technique.
And finally, we want to talk about heliogravure. This printing method is very close to etching, but before etching, the image is applied to the board by a photomechanical method. It is quite unproductive, but copies made with it from classical engravings and etchings can be easily confused with the originals at first glance.
Of course, we cannot describe the entire evolution of printed graphics in a few pages. But from timid first experiments, amazing classical engraving, Dutch etching, excellent, absorbing all the skill of printers and artists of color engravings of the 18th century, phototypes and multi-color autotypes of the 20th century, they are all amazing examples of the art of the Middle Ages and modern times.
Starting from the 15th century and only in the 19th century, steel planks began to be used. Richer and more varied in tonal pattern. The drawing is cut into the metal. Barma - protrusions, shavings. Bosch. Printed under pressure. On metal, you can make fewer grooves of about 100, and not 1000, as on woodcuts. A print is an imprint.
Chemical engraving - Drypoint. The action of the paint is enhanced with acid. It is scratched on a copper plate. Lines with fuzzy edges, formed thanks to the barma. The effect is softer. A maximum of 10 prints can be made.
Etching - a metal board is covered with a layer of special soil (asphalt, wax), heated, smoked. The metal is scratched up to the point of removing the varnish. Then the board is treated with acid, which does not interact with the varnish, but interacts with the metal. Therefore, when printing, a perfectly even pattern appears, lines, the board can be etched and printed a lot. Gives light-air perspectives. Used in landscapes.
· 
Etching + Drypoint. Rembrandt
Soft lacquer. 17th century Animal fat is added to the varnish. Paper is superimposed on a metal board, a drawing is made on it, and from the pressure and the etching field, a soft, velvety drawing will turn out.
· 
Aquatita - 1765. (Jean Baptiste Lenprince) The end of the 17th-18th century. Picturesque property of graphics. After etching, a special primer, the primer is washed off and dusted with asphalt powder. After heating, it melts. Then it is again pickled and the acid corrodes the asphalt pores. For even darker light, it is etched and coated again, and the light is varnished. Thomas Malton
Mezzotint (from the end of the 17th century) - Black Manner. Ludwig Won Sigingmund. Porter Amily background. The board is prepared with special tools that scrape the metal, the more notches, the darker it is then leveled with a knife, the notches are polished, where the white line will be. Francisco Goya. Only tonal drawing.
· Mezzotint + etching
Aquatita + etching. Richard
· Lithography (stone engraving) Drawing is covered oil solution. Flat engraving in oil.
History of etching
· From the 14th century to the 18th century - painting technique. Auxiliary graphics. Office (14th century) Sketches.
· 15th century - cardboards, which were created in real sizes of the image, from which the drawing was transferred from cardboard to the wall along the grid. Rembrandt. Pastel
Graphically independent images
a. portraits
b. landscapes
18th century - strict,
20th century - woodcut, etching (Van Gogh). At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, graphics change. The Impressionists created Pointelism (from the French word - pointe
Engraving is one of the most ancient and noble ways of decorating the surrounding world that are only known to man. Suffice it to recall rock art - these were the first attempts of a person to carve a drawing on a hard surface.
In our article we will talk about the engraving business. Let's talk about the directions of this craftsmanship, about products and their creators. But let's start with history...
History of engraving
It is believed that engraving as an art originated about three thousand years ago, in China. Even then, craftsmen carved divisions and intricate patterns on the dials of sundials. Despite the fact that soft cutters of that time were poorly suited for processing any hard materials, and were of little use even for working with precious metals, ancient jewelers managed to create real works of art.
Greek sundial
Engraving became much easier after Greek craftsmen discovered the hardening of iron in the 7th century BC. After that, shtikheli - i.e. the cutters used by the engraver approached modern samples in hardness, and the craftsmen were able to fully concentrate on the creative side of the process.
Already in the 4th century BC, engraving was used everywhere: in the manufacture of linear scales for water clocks and plates for compasses (analogous to a modern compass), to create jewelry and medals. In addition, in ancient Greece and Rome, dishes and household items were decorated with engraving, and Caucasian engravers covered battle axes and other weapons with engraved images of animals.
Amazing examples of engraving left by the masters of ancient Rus'. Pavlovian locks for caskets are especially interesting. These are figurines of buffoons and riders, lions and mermaids, cranes and strange birds decorated with skillful patterns.
Engraving on gold items was popular in ancient egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia and other countries of the East. In the Middle Ages, there was a tradition to put on Jewelry commemorative inscriptions.
Russian printed rings, XV-XVI century
Rings, brooches, pendants, bracelets, caskets, as well as any works of jewelry art were decorated with inscriptions.
However, engraving became really in demand all over the world only after one and a half thousand years - in the middle of the 11th century. It was the era of conquering the ocean, and compasses and chronometers created by skilled engravers played an important role in it.
History of engraving in Russia
Six centuries later, the fashion for engraving came to Russia, along with the great reforms of Peter I. Previously, only wooden book covers and some household items were massively decorated with engraving. The real rise of the art of engraving occurred in the 18th century, and again due to the development of science: Russian Academy Sciences needed a lot of precise goniometric instruments.
Book with carved wooden cover
Interestingly, in the same period, engraving became in demand among the population: “Fryazh sheets” - engravings cut on copper and wood - decorated the houses of merchants and aristocrats. In addition, engravings were used as congratulatory sheets or commemorative messages.
Fryazh leaf
In the 18th-19th centuries, engraving was used to decorate weapons: skillful paintings on coldly shiny steel were the calling card of many gunsmiths.
Gun by Paul Poser
Engraving in the USSR
With the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, many jewelers were persecuted, and luxury goods were considered a crime against ideology. However, the change of power influenced the development of the engraving business ... positively. Yes, yes, science again.
Already in 1922, the creators of the new era needed a huge amount of grids, scales, limbs and various parts for devices. And in 1926, with the creation of a scientific photography laboratory, it became obvious that the demand for engravers would only grow.
It should be noted that in these years engraving skills reached a new level: using combined and photographic methods, jewelers could apply symbols and divisions with incredible accuracy.
Jewelry Engraving Techniques
According to the technique of execution, jewelry engraving today is manual, milling (including diamond engraving) and laser, acid etching is also used.
Hand engraving in jewelry is by no means an inscription on a metal product, which will be done in any shopping center. The tool for manual engraving is the already mentioned engraver. In modern production, an artist-designer makes a 3D model of a product - such work requires a lot of knowledge, skills, and experience.
The artist works through all the smallest details, and only after that the product is cut out using modern equipment. But even after the most precise technique, the master manually refines each drawing. Here, the approach is much more serious, and the result of the work will be able to evaluate not only customers-buyers, but also professional colleagues.
The engraver has no right to make a mistake: any trembling of the hand can irrevocably spoil the product. Hand engraving is "jewelry work" in the truest sense of the word. Today, hand-crafted engravers do what their predecessors did thousands of years ago. The hand-engraved jewelry is truly unique, there is no other like it in the whole world.
You can process objects with a bur, or a cutter. There is a great variety of milling machines and attachments for them: from the notorious drill to the diamond milling engraving machine. The diamond cutter leaves deep four-sided pits on the surface of the product, creating an exclusive three-dimensional image.
The creator of the jewelry house "Kvashnin" released a large number of jewelry engraving tool patented by Rospatent. This equipment makes it possible to perform the most complex jewelry work, engraving decorating awards, medals, cups.
The real discovery of modernity is laser engraving. A special machine is programmed to apply a specific image, after which a workpiece is placed in it. The laser vaporizes metal particles, changing its structure and color, resulting in a photographically clear image. Especially popular is laser engraving for the manufacture of religious jewelry, in particular wearable icons.
engraving masters
With the flourishing of engraving skills in Russia, a whole galaxy of worthy engravers was brought up at the Leningrad and Moscow mints (and later, in the 20th century, at the Gokhran of Russia). In our articles you can read in detail about the masters of different centuries, and here we will touch on the life history and work of three especially outstanding engravers, each of whom made a huge contribution to the development of Russian jewelry.
Ivan Alekseevich Sokolov
Ivan Sokolov was born at the very end of the reign of Peter I. He became one of the most outstanding masters of engraving in the history of Imperial Russia. The future "copper artist" studied in art classes at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences: drawing with Schumacher, engraving with Christian Albert Wortman and Ottomar Elliger.
In 1745 Ivan Sokolov became the chief master of the Academy. Over the next 12 years, he trained many engravers and did everything to ensure that the engraving art in Russia was in no way inferior to the achievements of Western jewelers.
Sokolov himself was a great master of ceremonial portraits - carved paintings that repeat pictorial originals. Sokolov managed to achieve incredible realism of the materials and objects depicted in his works: he accurately conveyed the silky texture of fur and the soft sparkle of expensive fabrics, cold reflections of metal and soft hair lines. Each of Ivan Sokolov's works was not just a reproduction of a painting, but a real work of the author's engraving art.
Mikhail Evlampievich Perkhin
Mikhail Perkhin comes from a family of peasants who, for the services rendered to the Fatherland, were exempted from service and taxes. At the age of 18, Mikhail left for St. Petersburg to work, entered the apprenticeship of a jeweler and forever connected his life with the "gold craft". Already at the age of 26 (1886), he received the high title of master and was invited to work in the Faberge workshop.
Mikhail was a real genius in jewelry: just two years later he opened his own workshop, became the chief master of Faberge and received the right to a personal brand: the initials “M. P.". It is with this hallmark that 28 of the 54 imperial Easter eggs are adorned, including such famous works as:
- "Rosebud";
- "Palaces of Denmark";
- "Trans-Siberian Express";
- "Madonna Lily";
- "Bronze Horseman";
- "Gatchinsky Palace", etc.
Mikhail Evlampievich Perkhin was the chief master of the Faberge house for 18 years. During this time, he became a true legend of Russian jewelry in general, and engraving in particular.
Anton Fyodorovich Vasyutinskiy
If we talk about the development of medal art in Russia, then the first person worth remembering will be Anton Fedorovich Vasyutinsky. This master graduated from the Academy of Arts in 1888, and already in 1891 his works - medals presented at an exhibition in Paris - were awarded an Honorary Diploma.
Since 1893, Vasyutinskiy was a senior medalist at the St. Petersburg Mint. In 1920, he became an assistant manager of the Medal and auxiliary parts (naturally, the mint had already become Leningrad), in 1922 - manager, and in 1926 - chief medalist.
Although the master worked in the Russian Empire for most of his life (for example, it was from under his hand that the jubilee ruble came out for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1912), he made a really great contribution to the development of engraving in the USSR.
It was Vasyutinsky who did everything to ensure that a medal department was opened at the Academy of Arts. His students were N. A. Sokolov, V. V. Golenetsky, S. L. Tulchitsky and other outstanding masters. In fact, Vasyutinsky created a whole school of Russian medalists.
Among the personal works of Vasyutinskiy, one can note the stamps for the coins of the USSR: 10, 15 and 20 kopecks, silver 50 kopecks and the ruble, gold chervonets. He was also one of the masters who worked on the creation of the stamp of the Order of Lenin.
Jewelry engraving today
Engraving remains the most the best way to make an ornament or a souvenir truly unique, to give it a special value. This technique is used to apply inscriptions and drawings on:
- Rings;
- Tablets;
- wedding locks;
- Caskets;
- Medals;
- rings;
- Watch;
- Bracelets;
- Pendants, necklaces and other jewelry.
Are you looking for highly professional engravers? Just to the jewelry house "Kvashnin": we can make a model of any complexity: the quality of the result and its high artistic value will allow you to keep the product with trepidation and pass it on from generation to generation.
Tradition links the origin of copper engraving with the niello technique. The term "niello" means a technique used by jewelers since the Middle Ages; when working on metal or silver products, including plates intended for decoration with niello, the surface of the metal with a pattern applied to it, cut deep into, was covered with black powder. Consisting of sulfur and other components, this powder was called the Latin word "nigellum". The metal plate was heated, and the molten black mass filled the deep grooves of the pattern left by the cutter. After cooling the product, the excess parts of the hardened "nigellum" were removed, and the pattern stood out clearly on the surface of the metal with thin black contours, giving the work a finished and precious character. Apparently, before proceeding to the last stage of work with "nigellum", the artists, in an effort to check the desired result, filled the grooves of the lines cut into the depths of the drawing with ink or dark paint, and then made test prints on wet paper. This is how the first, at first random engravings were obtained. Giorgio Vasari, an Italian painter, architect and eminent art historian, attributes their invention to the Florentine master Maso Finigverra, dating the birth of the niello engravings to 1460. However, Vasari's claim is hard to believe. Many engravings on copper that appeared in Italy in the middle of the 15th century, and even earlier in Germany and the Netherlands, could not be due to only one master; probably, such samples on paper naturally arose in many jewelry workshops. Among the early works of this type that have come down to our time, several miniature engravings stand out, which, in the words of the Italian researcher Mary Pittaluta, owe their “precious charm” to their small size and close spacing between strokes.
On the tiny surface of the engraving "Adoration of the Magi" (115 x 105 mm), thirty-two figures of the procession participants fit in, compositionally reminiscent of the frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in the Medici-Riccardi Palace in Florence (1459 - 1463) - The creator of the engraving does not yet know the laws of linear perspective, the decorator's instinct draws him to the filling of space - and he weaves, like a pattern, the procession of the Magi from bottom to top, from right to left. From the dark depths of the “niello”, light, with light shadows, figures of Mary, Joseph, magician kings protrude, and quite far away - horsemen, horses, camels and even shepherds - characters of another plot, “The Adoration of the Shepherds”.
Even finer and more delicate is the portrait of Bentivoglio inscribed in the circle. Delicate features, a delicate profile, a sad expression are in harmony with the colors that appear around the young figure. likened to precious jewelry the engraving resembles a chased medallion.
Graceful "niellos" are characterized by light forms protruding from the darkness. This could become a kind of pictorial canon, if the desire to surround the object with a spatial environment that arose in the Renaissance did not lead the first engraving masters to abandon dark backgrounds and use the artistic possibilities of white paper.
The niello type, with its black background, found its further development in Bologna in the second half of the 15th and early 16th centuries in the work of Pellegrino da Cesena. In purely decorative terms, like a white pattern on a black background, having lost its connection with niello, it continues to live in 17th century.
One of the first masterpieces of new art is considered to be the "Portrait of a Noble Lady", preserved in a single copy in the collection of the Berlin Engraving Cabinet. The engraving on copper was made by a master of the Florentine school; it dates back to the 1440s-1450s. Only a jeweler, carefully working in small forms and on expensive materials, could draw such a clean and elegant line as the outline of a lady's profile. Her headdress, precious necklace, clothes are filled with finely designed ornaments. And this complex patterning could also be recreated only by a skilled goldsmith. It is in the opposition of the clean surfaces of the face and neck, limited by only one contour, to the decoratively designed surfaces of the headdress, necklace and dress that the main artistic effect of this work lies. At the same time, its special charm keeps traces of the contact of the jeweler's skill with the great art of the early Renaissance. There is no doubt that this engraving bears the memory of the famous profile portraits that emerged from the workshops of the painters Domenico Veneziano and Paolo Uccello.
In addition to the “Portrait of a Noble Lady”, several early Italian engravings should be mentioned, which clearly show the fruitful influence of the Renaissance art of Florence on the development of Italian engraving. The composition “The Resurrection of Christ”, known from a single print in the collection of the British Museum in London, directly repeats the relief of Luca della Robbia on the same plot, commissioned in 1443 for the Florence Cathedral. The impact of the harsh realism of Andrea del Castagno is found by a few sheets engraved by the anonymous Master of the Passion from Vienna. Even in such engravings as "Christ in Glory" (the only copy in the graphic collection of the Uffizi Gallery) and " The Ascension of Mary”, with their intense ornamentation, features of the compositional structure, balance and clear correlation of forms cannot be imagined outside the discoveries of new art.
