Cards seemingly made with brush
di // pubblicato il 02 Febbraio, 2012
- Traduzione di Patrizia Cani -
Waiting for the next show entitled “Orpheus, the sweet power of the strings. Orpheus, Apollo, Arion and David Accords between four and Cinquecento”, at Uffizi’s Museum Prints and Drawings Cabinet (GDSU) from 6 December until 11 March 2012 will be displayed a selection of works-curated by Giorgio Marini entitled "Carte che paion fatte col pennello, (Cards seemly made with a brush), Italian chiaroscuro from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century”.
The works usually on display at GDSU, due to their inherent brittleness are mostly forced to remain closed in the Archives’ drawers. The objective of the exhibition is therefore to illustrate to the visitors the great importance of the Cabinet’s possessions. In the current exhibition the protagonist of the selection of works won’t be the drawings, but the type of printing known as chiaroscuro.
Included the show, fifty pieces will give account of a graphical technique that proved very successful since the sixteenth century to survive, often alternating, until the eighteenth century.
The reason for the development of Chiaroscuro was the inescapable need to introduce the color in the print production, a problem previously solved by using colored papers on which were then impressed matrixes made of copper or wood. The use of Chiaroscuro anyway was introduced because the matrix technique very seldom could guarantee the tonal effects required.
In 1516 Ugo da Carpi, Emilian artist working in Venice, claiming the invention of "a new, never seen before, way to print light and brown" demanded to the Venetian Senate that his activities could be protected by some sort of copyright ante litteram.
The prudent Ugo, claimed thus the paternity of a technique that, in fact, had already been tested in Germany in the previous decade, and that made it possible to imitate the design of a wide tonal backgrounds of diluted ink.
The evident intent of the new technique was to overcome the limit set by the use of only whites and blacks of metal engraving.
The closest contact was inevitably the drawing, which was now emulated in print using to the technique of chiaroscuro.
One explanation deserves to be made about the preciousness of these materials widely represented in the Florentine collection, which represent, in itself, roughly more than half of the color woodcuts known to studies.
Just at GDSU took shape in 1956 the first Italian exhibition dedicated to them. The chiaroscuro woodcut, able to emulate the effects of colors and materials of drawing, explains already in its name the use of wood matrices, actually three, each of which is assigned a different tonal pattern that has its only raison d'etre in combination with the remaining two.
Therefore the chiaroscuro technique differs from the Camaïeu technique, which reminds the fine chiseling features of cameos, in the use of a first independent plaque of wood on which is traced the external outline of the entire composition, then completed by two other plaques of wood that will bring the tonal nuances.
The image was imprinted from the lighter tonalities, and often was used the white basis of the paper as the maximum point of light within the composition, reversing what was usually done in the drawing where the flash of white light was lastly affixed to the sheet.
The interest was in reproducing pictorial values, rather than the structure of the graphic designs whose image was perpetuated through these new reproductions.
The imitation that the Chiaroscuro technique made of drawing obviously could not go unnoticed by Vasari, to whom we owe the surprised description: "they make cards with wood prints that seem made with a brush."
Vasari was unanimous in commending the authorship to Ugo da Carpi that made: "cards printed with wood in three colors: the first made the shadow. The other, which was a softer color, did the middle tint, and the third, which was scratched, made the lighter colours. "
Vasari was active in Rome in the graphic distribution of the works of Raffaello in 1518, but following the sack of the city in 1527, he decided to move to Bologna, where, inspired by Parmigianino drawings, he was able to obtain Chiaroscuro prints of great refinement as the “Diogenes” exhibited in the show, or the “Bath of the Nymphs” that we can admire matched with the original drawing.
In Bologna in those years was also active Antonio da Trento, who produced a series of Chiaroscuro prints inspired by Parmigianino Drawings. The displayed series “Martyrdom of Peter and sentence of Paul” was realized in three copies, which reveal different chromatic gradations.
In this very artistic melting pot several artists will start to think about the possibilities of communication given from the Chiaroscuro and its imitation of the drawing, and Vasari later will spend some passages in his manual to describe the technique.
In addition to Ugo da Carpi another of the early leaders of this technique was Nicola Vicenza, active between 1525 and 1550, who devoted himself mainly to the translation of chiaroscuro drawings by Parmigianino.
At the same time some interesting experiments were taking place, for example the eccentric Beccafumi Domenico in Siena, in the middle of the century, used deliciously colored sheets embellished with soft pastel blue and gray and defined the lines with the use of four wood plates. Stands as an example the impression of the almost sculptural figure of St. Peter's shown here.
At the end of the century, several wood plates were purchased by Andrea Andreani, who began to re-use them by inserting his own monogram.
This was probably made possible by the decline of the technique in the late sixteenth century.
The following century had among its protagonists Bartolomeo Coriolano from Bologna, primarily engaged in the transposition of the graphic works of the illustrious fellow citizen Guido Reni, significantly simplifying the technique of Chiaroscuro to render it more similar to Camaïeu.
The grandeur of the technique, however, did not fail, and he often joined multiple sheets together to create large prints. One example is the “Fall of the Giants” copied from the original drawing of Guido Reni in 1647 and created by combining four sheets.
The eighteenth century witnessed a renewed popularity of the Chiaroscuro technique, triggered by the Venetian Antonio Maria Zanetti the Elder, a skilled designer who in the twenties of the eighteenth century bought in London a large group of drawings by Parmigianino and decided to experiment this technique too.
Newly reproduced in chiaroscuro, eighteenth century prints showed a Parmigianino unusually revisited in light colours most exquisitely typical of the century.
The chiaroscuro was then a surrogate of the older and more expensive market of the drawing, which openly denounced the existence of an audience able to appreciate this fine production, as confirmed by their own ancient presence (already at the end of the seventeenth century) in the Florentine collection.
Scrolling the history of Chiaroscuro technique, between his fortune and its reuse, is a pleasant walk in a important and lesser-known chapter in the history of graphic design, represented here in its largest part.