The Mysterious Engraver

It has been 500 years since an anonymous German artist finished off an exquisite engraving of the Madonna enthroned with eight angels, then added the date 1467 and the inscrutable initials E.S. To this day, nobody knows his identity. Some scholars believe he was Egidius Steclin, a 15th century goldsmith who worked in the Duke of Burgundy's court. Others insist that he was Erwin von Stege, onetime mintmaster to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. Or, as one archivist suggests, was he really Endres Silbernagel, an obscure Freiburg painter who died of the plague in 1503?

Whoever he was, Master E.S. is considered the first major engraver. To commemorate the quincentenary of his last known work, the Philadelphia Museum of Art this week opens the largest display yet of his prints, providing critics of all persuasions with a rare opportunity to sleuth for themselves. To be sure, the work itself is the liveliest source of clues. Besides the initials, it is full of crests and coats of arms then popular in what is now southern Germany, where the artist probably lived.

His interest in heraldry suggests he may have been a nobleman, though his faulty Latin--the patrician language at the time--contradicts it. He very likely was well traveled; a Bern watermark appears on several prints.

Knaves & Saints. The surest fact that can be gathered from his work is that Master E.S. was a goldsmith whose crisp, fine-lined incising in gold and silver undoubtedly led him to explore engraving on copper plates. Gutenberg had just discovered a way to print words, and perhaps the notion that pictures too could be printed in much the same way led E.S. to experiment. He may have started simply by making studies for goldsmith work. Some of his prints, indeed, seem to be design patterns for chalices and monstrances. But he went on to fashion in copper a Gothic world in microcosm.

His subjects were often religious, but he set them in a provincial milieu: his every window opens onto a Rhine castle, his every Madonna is a Teutonic matron. Knighthood was still in flower --in the ballads of troubadours who wandered from manor house to manor house. E.S. captured the spirit of it; his saints and sinners, knights and ladies tiptoe through dainty Alpine primroses to dally on wattle fences. At times he was downright satirical. His Samson is a knave in a tunic and Tyrolean hat, his Delilah a Hausfrau who has slipped away for an afternoon assignation. As for St. Sebastian, E.S. portrays him peppered with arrows by a merry lot that looks for all the world like Robin Hood and his men.

Pudding Faces. In an artistic sense, Master E.S. was handicapped. He knew nothing of the magical discoveries in perspective being made at the time in Florence by Piero della Francesca. His was strictly a two-dimensional world. As if straining to portray flesh-and-blood emotion, he gave his people big noses, pudding faces, puffy eyelids, and the result was often close to caricature. He himself was not capable of the profound humanity expressed by Flanders' Rogier van der Weyden, nor does his dry decorative line even suggest the sublimely anguished figures of his countrymen to come, Duerer and Gruenewald.

What he did do was pioneer a new technology that gave later, greater artists a medium for more powerful expression.

His achievement came at a time when the Western world stood poised before the high Renaissance on the one hand, the Reformation on the other. With surpassing style, Master E.S. had taken a last loving look at the age of chivalry --and ushered in the angst to come.

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