Early copperplate engravings in the Städel: Where artists have greeted you for centuries

WIt is likely that Martin Sonnabend, longtime curator of the Frankfurt Print Room, who is now retiring, is right in his assumption that the technology of copperplate engraving will soon be celebrating its 600th birthday. Invented as early as 1430, the line gravure printing technique, dug into copper plates and duplicated by the hundreds, revolutionized art in several respects. A picture that had been engraved once – admittedly at great expense – could now be reproduced en masse and sent as paper-thin as light as a feather at reasonable prices all over the world.

Sociologically, the master metal engravers often come from the profession of goldsmiths; historically, the new art on paper is in great demand because the so-called Devotion moderna has replaced the traditional worship of saints and the Mother of God exclusively in churches. From 1400 onwards, it was completely customary in private to hang one of the small works of art on paper as a devotional picture, often partially colored, to put it in a book or even to carry it with you at all times. Secondly, the paper miniatures, which are much freer than the laborious and considerably more expensive oil painting, also form the first genre depictions that show what a wealthy urban bourgeoisie wanted to see: hidden object pictures with countless playful details of the belongings of the interiors, which do not “see themselves empty” at first glance ’, but rather cultivated conversational pieces over several rounds to be passed around in humanistic discussions as well as hearty drinking.

And thirdly, the mostly remaining sheet format, i.e. small-format works, are utility images in the literal sense – many of them were templates in workshops for journeymen, which is why most of them did not survive. The third Städel inspector, Johann David Passavant, managed to acquire major works of copperplate engraving during his twenty years of activity, which are now on display in the exhibition of the Frankfurter Kupferstichkabinett “Before Dürer. Copperplate Engraving Becomes Art” and some are only preserved in two or three copies, some are even unique worldwide.

The development of monograms in the fifteenth century also has pragmatic economic reasons. Not only did Dürer sign his AD from 1500 due to the large number of pirated Portuguese copies of his graphics; already his great role model Martin Schongauer in Colmar and other great masters of black art such as ES, FVB, PM, W or IM (Israhel van Meckenem) shortened their names. The works reproduced as templates should remain associated with their author in order to increase the inhibition threshold of copying. The irony here is that the greats who were known at the time are now only known by their anonymous initials and one can no longer assign a real name to even one of the greatest of the early copper engravers, the “Master ES”. However, since it is difficult to engrave writing in reverse for printing in the copper, it made sense to shrink the name to two, at most three letters, from a labor-economic point of view. Another irony is the fact that IM Israhel van Meckenem, one of the most industrious of his profession with over seven hundred engravings, became famous above all with after-engravings such as Schongauer’s censer and bishop’s crook, surpassing the latter with even more splendor.