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May 14-20, 2003 art Metal Heads
Early pioneers in the art of engraving are on display at the Art Museum. The great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was known in his day as a new breed of Northern European artist. He was trained as a traditional craftsman/artist of the late Middle Ages. Craftsmen and artists of this period, after they completed their apprenticeships, would often travel as 'journeymen' for several months or a year to visit and work at other workshops before they opened their own studios in their hometowns, but Dürer prolonged this tradition into a lifelong pursuit of knowledge and technique -- journeying to Italy twice, and traveling to The Netherlands and throughout Germany. In his travels he studied classical and Italian art, along with work by Northern European masters like Martin Schongauer, and began to incorporate the influences of Renaissance humanism into his work, energetically pioneering new styles, themes and techniques of art-making. This exhibition of exquisitely beautiful engravings by Dörer and his contemporaries, now up at the PMA, offers insight into the development of one of the techniques that Dörer helped establish. Born into a family of goldsmiths, as were many important early engravers, Dörer was one of the first artists to realize the creative potential of engraving, a process used by gold- and silversmiths for relief decoration of metal objects to create prints on paper. Early engravings are similar in design and execution to woodcut prints, but by the late 1400s they had become increasingly detailed and complex, with rich textures and values, graceful contours, patterns of dots and dashes and crosshatching all made up of thousands of tiny hairlike lines. Technically, engravings are still made very much the same way today as they were in Dörer's time. A very sharp V-tipped gouging tool, called a burin, is pushed like a plough into a shiny polished plate of copper or other soft metal. The plate is inked and the excess ink is rubbed off the high, flat areas of the plate, leaving ink only in the engraved lines. A sheet of damp paper is laid on the plate and then run through a press, transferring the image onto the paper. It's a difficult and exacting process. Although the exhibition focuses on the technical development of the art of the engraving, all of the prints in the show are subdivided into thematic groupings. Popular themes from the Middle Ages, such as love, death, faith, virtue and vice, along with the new and radical theme of the nude human body, are illustrated with examples of prints by different artists. The section on death contains some of the most marvelously expressive and graphic images. Michael Wolgemut's print, Skeletons Dancing (1493), shows a jubilant scene of the end of the world with skeletons dancing and playing musical instruments, while Hans Holbein the Younger's prints, The Count and The Old Man from the 1526 book Imagines Mortis, use black humor to ponder the universality of mortality. Religious subjects, always popular, allowed artists to reflect on ordinary life and values in their own time. For example, Dörer's The Prodigal Son at Prayer (c. 1496) shows a middle-aged playboy surrounded by a crowd of livestock and a wonderfully asymmetrical arrangement of high-roofed buildings typical of Nuremberg at the time. Similarly, Lucas van Leyden's The Dance of Saint Mary Magdalene (1519) weaves together a biblical theme with life in Northern Europe, combining scenes from three different points in the Magdalene's life, each a little smaller and lighter. In the last she ascends to heaven -- very pale and the size of a grain of rice. Even in an engraving like this one, with a historical or religious theme, people are shown dressed in the fashions of the time of the artist. One of the most interesting thematic sections of the show illustrates a shift in the conventions of representing the human body, marking the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. An engraving with a very gothic sensibility, Martin Schongauer's Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons (c. 1470-75), shows the monk resigned to his fate and floating in space while being clutched and grabbed from all directions by an assortment of devils and demons -- all spiky, hairy, scaly human-animal hybrids with horrible fangs and hideous leers. This print is contrasted with several engravings of nude figures that illuminate the idea -- new in Northern Europe at the time -- that the human body could be a beautiful form in itself. Dörer's Adam and Eve (1504) adds classical Roman noses to fleshy and muscular Northern European bodies, hinting at his interest in systems of ideal human proportions. Using the same theme to express a more complex view of humanity, van Leyden's extraordinary Adam and Eve (1529) juxtaposes a lovely naturalistic female nude bathed in light and shadow with an expressively contorted male nude. All of these magnificent engravings are fascinating, visually rewarding and well worth examining closely with a magnifying glass provided by the museum! The Art of the Burin: Engraving in Northern Europe in the Age of Dürer, Through May 25, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Parkway, 215-763-8100 
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