MARCANTONIO [MARCANTONIO RAIMONDI], the chief Italian master of the art of engraving in the age of the Renaissance, and the first who practised it in order to reproduce, not designs of his own invention, as earlier craftsmen had commonly done, but those of other artists almost exclusively. The date of his birth is uncertain, nor is there any good authority for assigning it, as is commonly done, approximately to the year 1488. He was probably born some years at least earlier than this, inasmuch as he is mentioned by a contemporary writer, Achillini, as being an artist of repute in 1504. His earliest dated plate, illustrating the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, belongs to the following year, 1505. Marcantonio received his training in the workshop of the famous goldsmith and painter of Bologna, Francesco Raibolini, usually called Francia. "Having more aptitude in design," says Vasari, "than his master, and managing the graver with facility and grace, he made waist-buckles and many other things in niello, such being then greatly in fashion, and made them most beautifully, as being in truth most excellent in that craft." The real fame, however, of Marcantonio was destined to be founded on his attainments, not in the goldsmith's art generally, but in that particular development of it which consists of engraving designs on metal plates for the purpose of reproduction by the printing press. This art was not new in Italy in the days of Marcantonio's apprenticeship. It had been practised, in a more or less elementary form, for not less than forty or fifty years in the workshops alike of Venetia, the Emilia, Tuscany and Lombardy. But the technical aim of the Italian engravers had not hitherto been directed, like that of Schongauer or Dürer north of the Alps, towards securing such freedom and precision in the use of the burin as should impart to the impressions taken from their engraved plates both a striking decorative effect and a power of suggesting to the eye a complex variety of natural objects and surfaces in light and shade. The Italian masters had been satisfied with much more rudimentary effects. The Florentine primitives had been content either with very simple cloudy patches of cross-hatching in fine straight lines, or with broad open shadings in the manner of a bold pen-drawing. Mantegna and Pollaiuolo, the two chief original masters who practised the art, had used the latter method with great power but at the same time great simplicity.