22 The New York Review
out of linen, tow, hemp, leather, and
iron. Dürer was interested enough
to make a detailed drawing of one of
these coifs.
The German artists shared their
world with armorers, cutlers, smiths,
and workers in all kinds of metal, and
would long have been aware of the pro-
cess by which a design could be etched
or engraved on armor or weapons. En-
graving relied on the artist’s skill with
a burin, the fine instrument with which
a line could be dug in the metal. Etch-
ing involved drawing onto the prepared
waxed surface of the metal, then using
acid to bite into the exposed surface
areas. Both engraving and etching ap-
pear to have been in use since medieval
times as ways of decorating the surface
of metal. But nobody had yet thought
of the possibility of printing from such
ornamental metalwork.
It must have required a leap of the
imagination. The dominant form of
printmaking in Europe, since around
1400, had been the woodcut, taken,
as the name implies, from a flat block
of wood on which an image had been
drawn. The artist cut away at the sur-
face of the wood, wherever he did not
want it to print. When the ink was ap-
plied to the block, only the uncut sur-
face areas would be inked, which is why
a woodcut is known as a kind of relief
print.
With etchings and engravings, the
opposite is true: only the lines or areas
engraved or etched with acid into the
metal plate will hold the ink, because
the plate has been cleaned in such a
way as to remove all other surface ink
and dirt. The etcher’s press, with its
wheel and blanket, is designed to en-
sure perfectly even pressure exerted on
the paper and plate. Under this pres-
sure, the slightly damp paper is forced
into the grooves on the plate, where it,
so to speak, finds out the ink.
Most likely, the items necessary for
this new process, called intaglio print-
ing, had been present in the workshops
for decades before someone decided
to pursue this counterintuitive tech-
nique—printing as it were from the
groove rather than from the ridge. Who
that someone was is not known. Dürer
made etchings, but only half a dozen
of them survive, as opposed to nearly
a hundred engravings and over three
hundred woodcuts. If he invented the
printed etching (as was sometimes be-
lieved), he did not pursue it with great
zeal.
Perhaps, though, the artists were a
little slow to appreciate the revolution-
ary potential of the etching process.
That might be because the early Ger-
man etchers printed from iron plates,
which had a tendency to rust, to the
detriment of the image. In due course,
however, they switched to copper, and
the whole technology began to make
better sense.
The missing link between the world
of etched armor and that of the printed
etching on paper appears to be the
Augsburg-based artist Daniel Hop-
fer. The catalog of the Met’s exhibi-
tion “The Renaissance of Etching”
shows us what appears to be the very
first etching—alas not included in the
show. Discovered recently in Bologna,
it is signed prominently by Hopfer, can
be dated to around 1493, and depicts
the Battle of Thérouanne, with a large
array of field guns in the foreground
and a bloody encounter of cavalry and
infantry in the middle distance.
What the Met was able to display in
the exhibition—with a flourish—was a
cuirass from its own collection, appar-
ently decorated by Hopfer and dated
sometime between 1510 and 1520. This
indicates that there was at least one art-
ist who was working simultaneously in
the world of etching armor and making
prints. Some of these prints are indeed
designs for armor decoration, minia-
ture in scale and intended as patterns
for friezes and borders, for the chan-
nels of fluted armor, and for daggers
and sheaths.
The catalog of “The Renaissance of
Etching” makes the important point
that “there is no evidence that thetechnique of etching was constricted
by guilds or regulations anywhere dur-
ing this formative period. Artists and
craftsmen appear to have been free to
learn the technique and apply it as they
saw fit.” This goes some way to explain
the feeling one gets when examining the
work of the so-called Kleinmeister, or
little masters, who grew up in Dürer’s
shadow and made prints of anything
that interested, impressed, or amused
them—everything, that is, from the
Passion of Jesus Christ to an orgy in
an Anabaptist bathhouse. A monk en-
gaged in alfresco sex with a nun. The
hero Regulus nailed into a barrel by the
Carthaginians. A sheath for a dagger on
which a nude man and a woman wear-
ing a chastity belt converse. A portrait
of Martin Luther. A frieze of naked
children fighting with bears.Mostly this kind of work was exe-
cuted on a miniature scale. One thinks
of the goldsmith’s or silversmith’s art,
which had such an appetite for deco-
ration. But the practical uses of these
ideas on paper would extend to larger
objects as well—tiled stoves, cisterns
or wall fountains, windows long since
broken and crockery consigned to the
midden. The artists were free to invent
or to copy as they pleased. This was
all about the transmission of ideas for
ornament.Some of the work is of very crude
quality indeed—this was for the popular
market. I have an earthenware cistern
(of a kind that was hung on the wall and
filled perhaps with rose water, for wash-
ing the hands before a meal) the front of
which depicts, in low relief, a prisoner
in the stocks, and beside him an angel
at prayer. This turns out to be based
on an image by Hans Sebald Beham:
an allegory of Hope. In the etching,
the word SPES (hope) explains all.
Beham’s etching is only an inch and
a half high. The cistern is more than a
foot tall. The man who made the cistern
(he was called a Hafner, and this kind
of pottery is known as Hafner ware)
created a plaster press-mold for the
front of the cistern. From this he tooka first impression in clay. In copying
the etching he omitted the inscription,
which he perhaps could not understand.
I have read that the etchings of the
Kleinmeister were, since they are usu-
ally so small, intended for the albums
of collectors. More probably, they were
small because copper had its price and
because the artist did not need to make
the image large in order to get his point
across. The Hafner in my (imagined)
example takes the little etching and
pins it up above his workbench. By the
time he has made his press-mold, con-
structed his crude cistern, and fired it,
or fired several cisterns, the etching is
probably a mess, spattered with slip,
passed from hand to hand, in any case
not treated as a collector would treat an
etching. What was once common thus
becomes rare.
Among the favorite subjects of the
Kleinmeister were foot soldiers and
their accompanying wives, and par-
ticularly standard-bearers with their
fantasticated slashed doublets and
enormous sleeves, and the flags that
they carried on foot into battle. An-
other of Beham’s etchings shows such
a standard-bearer in an awkward posi-
tion, seemingly struggling with a snake
between his legs. The catalog says that
he “holds the phallic-shaped snake’s
tail between his legs, he is bent in an
unheroic pose, and he wears a foolish
and insolent expression of a masturbat-ing man.” It seems that only two cop-
ies of this print survive and that “it is
conceivable that the etching enjoyed
a certain popularity, and that its few
surviving examples are the result of its
having been frequently used as a frivo-
lous wall decoration.”
This is a good point. The way prints
were used determined their ability to
survive to our day. The same applies
to, say, early American wallpaper. If
the wallpaper was stuck to the wall, in
the manner of any conventional wall-
paper, it was unlikely to survive the pe-
riodic redecoration of the house. If on
the other hand some leftover scraps, as
frequently happened, were used to line
a bandbox, that wallpaper could well
survive.
If an etching (frivolous or otherwise)
was stuck to a wall in 1520, it’s not
going to be there today. But if the crud-
est of medieval woodcuts were used
to line, for instance, a small personal
chest in 1450, there is a slim chance that
they could have survived. When such
chests are examined today, they turn
out, sometimes, to be lined with unique
examples of woodcut prints.
The genius of the German etching
expressed itself in miniature and on the
smaller scale. The genius of the wood-
cut recognized no limits to its ambition.
Paper size presented no problem. The
standard large folio sheet was roughly
one and a half by two feet, but Dürer
and Albrecht Altdorfer and their work-
shop got around this limitation when
creating their Arch of Honor for Maxi-
milian by printing a complex image
and text on thirty-six sheets of paper,
using (the “Last Knight” catalog says)
“roughly 195 woodblocks.” The result-
ing work of art defies conventional
display—it is over eleven by nine feet—
and can hardly be read by the specta-
tor, unless one were provided with stilts
or some sort of hydraulic hoist.^3
It is always, however, a pleasure to see
one of these gigantic composite prints
brought out of the print room and as-
sembled for the benefit of the public.
Only a handful of examples of this Arch
of Honor survive. The one on view in
“The Last Knight” belongs to the Na-
tional Gallery of Art in Washington.
It sets forth Maximilian’s “ancestry,
his territories, his extended kinship,
his predecessors as [Holy Roman] em-
peror, his deeds and accomplishments,
his personal talents and interests, and
thus his glory.” About that glory, the
emperor was very clear. If he did not
promulgate it, nobody else would:He who during his life provides no
remembrance for himself has no re-
membrance after his death and the
same person is forgotten with the
tolling of the bell, and therefore
the money that I spend on remem-
brance is not lost; but the money
that is spared on my remembrance,
that is a suppression of my future
remembrance, and what I do not
accomplish during my life for my
memory will not be made up for
after my death, neither by thee nor
others.With this in mind, he ordered for his
praise what was surely the biggest
woodcut in the world. QAlbrecht Dürer: Italian Joust of Peace Between Jacob de Heere and Freydal,
circa 1517–1518National^ Galleryof^ Art,^ Washington,D.C.(^3) High-resolution images of the Arch of
Honor can be seen on the Met’s web-
site at metmuseum.org.