A History of Wood-EngravingWoodberry, George Edward
History
A History of Wood-Engraving
Woodberry, George Edward
Wood-engraving; Wood-engraving -- Bibliography
Chief among the successors of Dürer who shared in this vast production
were the group of artists known as the Little Masters, although the name
is one of ill-defined and incomplete application; they were so called
because they chiefly engraved small designs; but they also engraved
large designs, and their number, which is usually limited to seven,
excludes some whose works are on the same small scale. The first of them
was Albrecht Altdorfer (1488-1538), said to have been the pupil of
Dürer and the inventor of engraving in this manner; in his day he was
more celebrated as an architect and painter than as an engraver, but his
fame now rests on his works on copper and in wood. The best known of his
sixty-five woodcuts is the series of forty designs, scarcely three
inches by two in size, entitled the Fall and Redemption of Man, in
depicting which he had the Smaller Passion of Dürer to guide him. In
these he attempted to obtain effects by the use of fine and close lines,
such as were employed in copperplate-engraving; but, although his
success was certainly remarkable, considering the rude mechanical
processes of the time, yet his method clearly produced results of
inferior artistic value in comparison with the works in the bold, broad
manner of Dürer. All of his woodcuts, excepting four, are
representations of religious subjects; they are marked, like his other
works, by an attention to landscape, that truly modern object of art, of
which he probably learned the value from Dürer, who was the first to
treat landscape with real appreciation. In Hans Sebald Behaim
(1500-1550?) the spirit of the age is revealed with great clearness and
variety (Fig. 49); both his life and his art were inspired by it. In his
early manhood he was banished from Nuremberg for denying the doctrines
of transubstantiation and the efficacy of baptism, and for entertaining
some vague socialistic and communistic opinions; but it is not clear to
what extent he held them, if he held them at all. He seems to have been
one of the most advanced of the religious Reformers, and he employed his
art in their service, as, for example, in a book entitled The Papacy,
which he illustrated with a series of seventy-four figures of the
different orders of monks in their peculiar costumes, beneath each of
which satirical lines were written. He is best known by his eighty-one
Bible-cuts, which were the most popular, perhaps, of the many series
published in that century, not excepting the impressive Bible figures of
Holbein; they passed through many editions, and were widely copied. The
first English Bible was illustrated by them. Besides these two series,
and one other in illustration of the Apocalypse, he designed many
separate prints, both in the small manner of the Little Masters and in
imitation of the large works of Maximilian, such as his Military Fête,
in honor of Charles V., his Fountain of Youth, and the prints of the
Marauding Soldiers, which measured four or five feet in length. His
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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