The master E.S. and the Ars moriendi : a chapter in the history of engraving during the XVth century, with facsimile reproductions of engravings in the University Galleries at Oxford and in the British Museum / by Lionel Cust.

  • Cust, Lionel, 1859-1929.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The master E.S. and the Ars moriendi : a chapter in the history of engraving during the XVth century, with facsimile reproductions of engravings in the University Galleries at Oxford and in the British Museum / by Lionel Cust. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    chains and take its place as a means of pictorial expression. The substance on which the block or plate could be impressed required to be both cheap and durable, and capable of resisting the indispensable friction and pressure. The earlier forms of paper were too costly or brittle to endure this process, while parchment and vellum were articles of luxury, requiring careful preparation and ill-suited for rapid and repeated printing. A vehicle too was required to carry the pigment or colouring matter necessary for the transfer of the design from the block to the surface which was ready to receive it, a vehicle fluid enough to be easily spread and siccative enough to remain permanent when the impression had been made. The ink of the scribe was ill-suited for the requirements of the press, and the ordinary pigments of the painter were equally so. Such a paper and such an ink were hardly forthcoming before the com- mencement of the fifteenth century, and, given their discovery, engraving was ready to make its appearance upon the scene as a new pictorial art, one moreover which was destined after the lapse of very few years to give birth to what has perhaps proved the most important invention ever made for the benefit of the human race, that of printing with movable types. In the history of engraving the precedence is usually given by historians to wood-engraving, though this is an assumption rather due to an absence of evidence to the contrary, than to any positive proof that the art of copper-plate engraving was a subsequent invention. The earliest dates which appear on wood-engravings are 1418, which is affixed, not without some doubt as to its authenticity, to a coloured woodcut of'The Madonna and Female, Saints' now in the Print Room of the Royal Library at Brussels, and 1423, an undisputed date, which appears on a woodcut of ' St. Christopher/ pasted in a manuscript from the convent of Buxheim in Bavaria, lately in the Althorp Library and now in the Rylands Library at Manchester, The earliest date which appears on a copper-plate engraving is 1446, which is affixed to one of a series of small engravings of 'The Passion,' now in the Royal Print Room at Berlin. Early as these dates may seem, and rude as the execution may be, especially in the case of the woodcuts, they can be only taken as suggestive of something approximate to a fixed date for the invention of engraving. There is nothing in any one of these instances to prove that they were the very earliest production of the two respective branches of the art, or