Tricks of the Trade: The Technical Secrets of Early Engraving (original) (raw)

2013, Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe

A n essay on engravings and secrets might be expected to start from a print like Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I (1514) (see in "Introduction"), representative of a new class of objects produced for often solitary, if not wholly private, contemplation, enjoyment, and even deciphering.' lndeed, the very foundations of the iconological hermeneutic might be traced through precisely such an image, in which symbols and ciphers yield their meanings through the painstaking and deliberate work of scholarly decoding. This essay, however, treats the technical secrets of engraving and will begin instead with another of Durer's prints from the previous year} the Sudarium with Two Angels ( .1)2 The legend of the veronica, or sudarium, a miraculous imprint of Christ's visage on cloth, served as the inspiration for countless devotional paintings and prints throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries' The sacrality of this relic was tied not only, or even principally, to the fact that it preserved a record of Christ's features, but rather to the miraculous means by which that image was transferred to cloth without the intermediary of a human craftsperson. Joseph Koerner has provocatively connected the miraculous record of the holy face on the veil to the processes of Renaissance printmaking, observing that "Durer thus fashions the Christian non manufactum to mythicize the process and the product of printing:" Though Koerner's likening of the angels in Durer's later etched Sudarium ( .2) to printmakers hanging their fresh pages to dry has aroused skepticism, the comparison is hardly inapt.'