Graven Images

By ROBERT HUGHES

What is the ideal museum show?

The answer will depend on what you think museums ought to do, but in the area of art history it would be very hard to better the main summer offering of Washington's National Gallery of Art, "Early Italian Engravings." This is a recondite field, for Italian Renaissance prints are rare, and great ones excruciatingly so. Simply because they were meant to be widely distributed--whether as cheap ex-votos or as artists' samples--most of them have been lost.

The National Gallery's show, directed by a trio of experts (Konrad Oberhuber, Jay Levenson and Jacquelyn Sheehan), brings together some 200 examples, ranging from masterpieces like Andrea Mantegna's Entombment of Christ to a cheery bit of erotica (involving a girl who bears a startling resemblance to Alice in Wonderland) by an anonymous North Italian artist of the late 15th century. This is the kind of thing major museums ought to be about, when they are not distracted by show biz and self-puffery. One sees the print discovering its own nature and destiny as copper engraving changed from popular illustration to the status of an independent "fine art" medium.

Several things commended engraving to artists of the Italian Renaissance.

At the beginning, it was linked to (and may have come from) niello-work, a decorative technique used by goldsmiths and armorers since the Middle Ages. With his sharp cutting and scratching points, his burin and needle and burnisher, the artist scribed a design on a metal plate and filled its grooves with a black pigment which, when heated, solidified like enamel.

The first niellist to substitute wet ink for hard paste, to press a sheet of paper onto the metal and so invent the copperplate engraving, seems to have been a Florentine goldsmith named Maso Finiguerra (1426-64). The technique suited its period. It demanded tough, precise outline drawing and responded to absolute clarity of form. Hence it was ideal for a precisionist like Mantegna, whose few engravings are almost mineral in their sharpness. Not even the drapery on his figures was soft; with deep cuts and cracking angles, it might have been carved from obsidian.

The medium obviously did not rival painting or drawing in importance. Nevertheless, a wide range of artists (Fra Angelico, Jacopo de' Barbari, Francesco Rosselli) did multiply their images on copper, so that Italian prototypes and compositions filtered increasingly through to northern Europe; in the mid-17th century, Rembrandt was still extracting poses and situations from prints Mantegna and others had made 200 years before.

Ritual Combat. Leonardo da Vinci made no prints of his own (the hard engraver's line could not produce the veiled modeling he sought), but some of his designs were engraved by Milanese artists. These were the "knots" (see cut), which may have been used as entrance tickets for the sessions of an artists' club over which Leonardo is thought to have presided in Milan. No doubt these patterns, interlacing and returning upon themselves with eye-fooling complexity, have a remote origin in Islamic tilework. But like the plant tendrils and braided water currents that recur in his drawings, they are also part of Leonardo's delight in twisting movement, here rendered abstract with a deliberate, icy involution that was one of his mental traits.

Mantegna apart, the Renaissance master most associated with the print was Antonio Pollaiuolo. A chicken seller's son who ran one of the most versatile and prosperous studios in late 15th century Florence, he was, in Lorenzo the Magnificent's eyes, "the greatest artist of the town, perhaps the greatest that ever existed." Only one engraving by him survives: a Battle of the Nudes, dating from the early 1470s. It was large (over two feet wide), and its influence was immense. Ten naked men --five have headbands and five do not, which is the only sign of a uniform--are hacking at one another in front of a frieze of vegetation, corn, olives and grapevines. Who they are and what they symbolize remain obscure. This is no Renaissance tourney but something far more bitter and primal, a death fight of gladiators. A recent theory holds that since ancient Etruscan and Roman funerals were often accompanied by ritual combat, Pollaiuolo was referring to that practice, and his print commemorates the burial of some eminent Florentine, possibly Cosimo the Elder.

Whatever the image may mean, there is no doubt of its importance in the history of figure drawing. As his 16th century biographer Vasari remarked, "Antonio's treatment of the nude is more modern than any of the masters who preceded him." It is a singular feat of anatomical research, set down muscle by silver-shadowed muscle. For all their ferocity of expression and darting energy of movement, Pollaiuolo's figures achieve a stubborn monumentality --largely by the device of keeping each warrior's head over the foot that bears his weight, so that each pose has a strong axis from which movement can flicker and radiate. With this one composition, Pollaiuolo established what print makers have been striving to affirm for 500 years: that a woodcut, a lithograph, or (in this case) an engraving can be as "major" a work of art as any painting or sculpture. "Robert Hughes

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