FINE MANNER AND BROAD MANNER IN TWO FLORENTINE ENGRAVINGS

7/30/2019 FINE MANNER AND BROAD MANNER IN TWO FLORENTINE ENGRAVINGS

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F i n e M a n n e r v s . B r o a d M a n n e r in T w oFifteenth-Centurylorentine EngravingsMARK J. ZUCKERAssociateProfessorof ArtHistory,Louisiana State University

RECENTLY ACQUIRED BY The Metropolitan Mu-seum of Art, a hitherto unknown fifteenth-centuryFlorentine engraving gives an interesting insight intoprintmaking practices in the early Renaissance.' Thework in question (Figure i) is obviously a fragment(maximum dimensions about 14.3 by 7.3 cm) of amuch larger design that originally represented theCrucifixion. The complete composition, however,can be reconstructed on the basis of a contemporaryversion of the subject by another Florentine en-graver, which is known only in a single impressionbelonging to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Fig-ure 2).2As one can see, the image in its entirety de-picts the Crucifixion rather conventionally. On arocky mound that represents Mount Calvary,Christon the cross is surrounded by five small angels thathover on stylized clouds in the sky.Three angels cap-ture the sacrificial blood in chalices, and the othertwo express grief with formulaic gestures.3 Standingon the ground below, the Virgin Mary and John theEvangelist show their sorrow by means of similar at-titudes, while Mary Magdalen grieves at the foot ofthe cross and St. Jerome, the only member of thegroup who was not actually present at the event,kneels penitentially at the right, gazing upward in ec-stasy as he beats his bared breast with a stone.4The figures of Sts. John and Jerome in the newlydiscovered fragment correspond exactly to the sametwo figures in the Boston Crucifixion; he only ma-jor discrepancy (aside from style and technique) isthe absence from the fragment of the rather ill-conceived lion, one of St. Jerome's standard attri-butes, which crouches behind his right leg in thecomplete version. Moreover, the figures in both en-

gravings are essentially the same size, which furthersuggests that the fragmentary print in its pristinecondition can have varied little from what the Bostonengraving still shows. In view of these similarities, itis natural to assume that one of the two works servedas the other's model, or that both depend on a com-mon source that would probably have been a draw-ing or another engraving. But I find insufficientevidence to decide on the issue and, assuming thatone derives from the other, no way to determinewhich version is the original and which the copy. Ul-timately, however, the design may well be based on acomposition, no longer extant, invented in the 1490sby the Florentine painter Filippino Lippi.5Several ofthe figures, the angels in particular, have fairly closecounterparts in a Filippino school panel of the Crucifixion, now in the Museo Civico at Montepulciano,where the angels are the same as those in Filippino'sautograph altarpiece, formerly in Berlin and datedto about 1497, of the CrucifixionwiththeVirginand St.Francis.6

The resemblances to Filippino may,after all, be co-incidental, but whatever the actual circumstance, onemust finally be more impressed by the stylisticdiffer-ences between the two engravings than by theirobvious compositional similarities. Because the com-positions are identical, the differences seem espe-cially striking. The anonymous Boston Crucifixionhardly by an artist of the first rank, is relatively old-fashioned for its date, presumably the last decade ofthe fifteenth century.7The draperies are voluminous,but their folds take the form of thin, curving linesthat terminate in small, hollow, teardrop-like loops, aformula reminiscent of mid-quattrocento Florentine

21? The Metropolitan Museum of Art g199METROPOLITANUSEUMJOURNAL5

The notes for this article begin on page 26.


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1. Francesco Rosselli (1448-before 1513), Fragmentof a Crucifixion. Engraving, 55/8 x 27/ in. (14.3 x7.3 cm). The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, Pur-chase,Dr.and Mrs. Goodwin M. BreininGift, 1988,1988.1102

drawings. From a technical point of view, the print isalso conservative, for it is executed in a late variantofthe so-called Fine Manner of engraving, prevalentin Florence since the first copper plates wereengraved there in the 146os, a style practiced sporad-ically until about 1500. The Fine Manner technique

is distinguished chiefly by its system of shading withshort, straight, delicately incised lines laid down inparallels or, more often than not, crosshatched. Frequently these tiny incisions are placed so close to oneanother that few, if any, spaces remain visible between them; and when printed they tend to creatpatches or bands of dark, velvety shadow, an effecsometimes likened to (and inspired by?) that of washdrawings.All this can be seen quite clearly in the Boston Crucifixion.The New York fragment, on the other handalthough also conjecturally datable to the 1490s, ialtogether different in style and technique. Thefigures seem more massive and their draperiemore angular; gone are the liquid folds withtheir teardrop-shaped loops. Instead of the old FinManner shading, moreover, forms are modeled inwhat is known, by way of contrast, as the BroadManner. Here we can observe that the lines are alsstraight but that many of them are longer and all othem are oblique and parallel-not unlike the parallel shading of quattrocento pen drawings-and thespaces between them are wider (or "broader"), sothat the white of the page is everywhere visible.Students of early Florentine prints unconsciouslymake certain basic assumptions when they speak othe Fine and Broad Manners, but these assumptionare not always valid. First of all, it is customary tothink of the two techniques as pertaining to two different generations of engravers, the Fine Mannebeing succeeded and replaced by the Broad until, athe beginning of the sixteenth century, a whole newapproach to the medium renders both of them obsolete. There is, of course, some truth to this notioninasmuch as the Fine Manner certainly was the earlier of the two principal engraving techniques indigenous to Florence in the quattrocento. During the1460s, in fact, it may well have been the only oneavailable to local artisans. By the 1480s, however, inot by the 147os, the Broad Manner had definitelyemerged, and for the remainder of the century icoexisted with the Fine Manner, never actuallsupplanting the latter, as we can see in the two Cruc

fixions.

2. Anonymous Florentine, Crucifixion. Engravinlo3/16 x 71/4 n. (27.5 x 18.5 cm). Boston, Museumof Fine Arts (photo: Museum of FineArts)22


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3. Francesco Rosselli, Descentof theHoly Spirit,from theLife of the Virgin series. Engraving, 83/4 x 6'/V6 in.(22.2 x 15.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum ofArt, Rogers Fund, 1917, 17.60.4

It is a fallacy of a different sort that the Fine andBroad Manners are commonly perceived as havingbeen practiced by a considerable number of differentanonymous craftsmen, rather than by a smaller num-ber of known masters. To some extent this is truewith regard to the Fine Manner. Yetwithin the groupof 250-odd extant Fine Manner prints, some 130 arein my opinion attributable to Baccio Baldini8 andnearly 25 to the so-called Master of the Vienna Pas-sion.9 The remainder of the lot are by a variety ofdiverse hands, and the artist who produced the Bos-ton Crucifixion,with whom no other works can be as-sociated, is among them. For surviving BroadManner prints the results are somewhat more sur-prising. Excluding North Italian engravings by Man-tegna and his following, fewer than 90 Florentineplates are known to have been executed in the classicBroad Manner. And except for a few stray pieces, ofwhich Pollaiuolo's Battle of Nudes is by far the mostfamous, the rest can be given to a single hand. By mycount they amount to between 75 and 80 differentsubjects, including the fragmentary Crucifixion nNew York.This impressive body of work comprises many sig-nificant and highly regarded engravings: such seriesas the Life of the Virgin (Hind B.I. 1-17 [see Figure 3]),the Triumphs of Petrarch (Hind B.II.1-6), and theProphets Hind C.I.1B-24B [see Figure 4]) and Sibyls(Hind C.II.1B-12B), as well as two book illustrations(Hind B.IV.1-2) and an important selection of indi-vidual items (Hind B.III. 1-11, 18-20).10 A. M. Hind,the great cataloguer of early Italian engravings, sawthat all of these prints were related, but he did notwish to ascribe them to one artist. Accordingly, he di-vided them up among five separate sections of hismonumental corpus, thereby obscuring the unity ofthe group. The master who seems to be responsiblefor them must, however, be credited with havingbeen the premier and almost exclusive practitionerof the Florentine Broad Manner. In my view he canbe identified, virtually without question, as the versa-tile Francesco Rosselli (brother of the better-known

painter Cosimo), a mapmaker and manuscript illu-minator besides being the foremost engraver of histime in Florence.This is not the place for a full-scale treatment ofRosselli, who was born in 1448 and may have diedbefore 1513, but the course of his career can be plot-ted with some degree of accuracy." Up to a point,one can also detect a modest development in tech-nique if not in style, and the fragmentary Crucifixionaccords well with a date of execution in the 149os.12In any case, the engraving is manifestly by thesame hand as the group of works listed above andcomparable, for example, to various members of theLife of theVirginseries (Figure 3) or almost any of theProphets Figure 4) or Sibyls.There is no reason to

4. FrancescoRosselli, Ezekiel, rom the Prophetseries.Engraving, 71/16 x 43/16 in. (17.9 x 0o.6cm). TheMetropolitanMuseumof Art, HarrisBrisbaneDickFund, 1929, 29.16.19

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make extravagant claims for its importance in thehistory of Renaissance printmaking, but it is a wel-come addition to Rosselli'salready substantial oeuvreand, together with its relative in Boston, a convenientvehicle for reevaluating the relationship betweenthe Fine and Broad Manners of early Florentineengraving.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI am grateful to Leo Steinberg for bringing the print tomy attention, to Alan Stone for permitting me to studyit, and to Suzanne Boorsch for reading an early draft ofthis article. Thanks also to Colta Ives, curator in charge,Department of Prints and Photographs at The Metro-politan Museum of Art.

NOTES1. MMA, acc. no. 1988.1102. See "Recent Acquisitions: A Se-lection, 1988-1989," MMAB (Fall 1989) pp. 40-41.2. The Boston impression measures ca. 275 x 185 mm (widthbetween border lines at bottom, 165 mm). It was first described

by A. M. Hind, Catalogueof Early Italian EngravingsPreserved ntheDepartment f Prints and Drawingsin theBritishMuseum,SidneyColvin, ed. (London, 1910) p. 584, Appendix II, no. 1; then byH. P. Rossiter, "Three Early Florentine Engravings," Bulletin oftheMuseumof Fine Arts,Boston 29, no. 171 (1931) pp. 2-4; andagain by Hind, Early Italian Engraving, A CriticalCataloguewithCompleteReproductions f All the PrintsDescribed (London, 1938)p. 56, no. A.I.81.

3. See Moshe Barasch, Gesturesof Despairin Medievaland EarlyRenaissanceArt (New York, 1976).4. For another early Italian engraving of a Crucifixion with asimilar kneeling St. Jerome, see Hind, Early Italian Engraving,no. E.III.58 (probably late-fifteenth-century Milanese).5. In ibid., Hind spoke vaguely of Filippino's influence butcited, for comparison, a Ghirlandaiesque Crucifixionwith Sts.Benedictand Romuald in the convent of S. Apollonia, Florence(R. Van Marle, The Developmentof the Italian Schoolsof PaintingXIII [The Hague, 1931] fig. 89) as by Davide Ghirlandaio.6. Paintings illustrated by Katherine B. Nielson, FilippinoLippi (Cambridge, Mass., 1938) figs. 69 and 72.7. Hind's initial date of ca. 1460, which Rossiter followed, wastoo early by a full generation; Hind later modified his opinion,

dating the print to ca. 1480-1500.8. Specifically, I ascribe to him the Planets (Hind, EarlyItalian

Engraving, A.III. 1-9), the Fine Manner Prophets and Sibyls(ibid., C.I.A. and C.II.A.), most of the OttoPrints (ibid., A.IV.1-

42), the illustrations for the Monte Sanctodi Dio (ibid., A.V.i[1-3]) and the 1481 Landino edition of Dante's Inferno (ibid.,A.V.2[1-19]), and miscellaneous individual subjects (ibid.,A.I.66, 68-70; A.II.i-5, 7-1 1, 16-20, 23-26). For Baldini, seemy forthcoming Commentaryo vol. 24 of TheIllustratedBartsch,as well as Oberhuber's brilliant essay in Jay A. Levenson, Kon-rad Oberhuber, and Jacquelyn L. Sheehan, EarlyItalianEngrav-ings from the National Galleryof Art, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.,1974) pp. 13ff.

9. Specifically, the Vienna Passion itself (Hind, Early ItalianEngraving, A.I.25-34), five of the six Fine Manner Triumphs fPetrarch ibid., AI. 19-23), and various other items belonging tono particular series (ibid., A.I.I, 11, 35, 38, 40, 44; D.I.5). Forthe Vienna Passion Master, see also the forthcoming Commentarto vol. 24 of The IllustratedBartsch and my article "The MadonnaofLoreto:A Newly Discovered Work by the Master of the ViennaPassion,"Print Quarterly6 (1989) pp. 149-160.

o1. The unity of this group has been recognized by JohnGoldsmith Phillips, Early Florentine Designers and Engravers(Cambridge, Mass., 1955) pp. 68ff.; and Konrad Oberhuber,EarlyItalian Engravings, p. 48.11. Ibid., pp. 47-62. However, Oberhuber's chronology nowneeds to be revised in light of a recent discovery by MadelineCirillo Archer, "The Dating of a Florentine Life of theVirginandChrist,"Print Quarterly5 (1988) pp. 395-402. I shall review Ros-selli's career in detail in my forthcoming Commentary olumecited in note 8 above.

12. Archer's findings suggest that none of Rosselli's engrav-ings predates the 148os, and the New Yorkfragment is certainlynot one of his earliest works; nor can it possibly be as late as hisengraved map of the world (Hind, G.6), signed and dated 1506.

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FINE MANNER AND BROAD MANNER IN TWO FLORENTINE ENGRAVINGS

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