Early Engravings Research Articles

Panpipes and clubs: early images of Tanna Islanders

William Hodges, James Cook’s artist on his second voyage, produced notably popular and influential drawings and paintings. These included several illustrations of Tanna Islanders (Vanuatu) that shaped European visions of the island from the 1770s through the 1830s, after which they were supplanted by Christian missionary depictions. Influenced by neoclassicist artistic convention, Hodges’s engravings, which subsequently were much copied, commonly paired panpipes with clubs in islander hands. A chain of early engravings that feature panpipes and clubs reveals an initial heroic vision of natural island dignity, as both these accessories evoked European classical ideals. Although subsequent Christian and social evolutionary views later disavowed noble savage tropes, these persist in contemporary touristic appreciation of island musical talent and tradition.

Sequential Incisions on a Cave Bear Bone from the Middle Paleolithic of Pešturina Cave, Serbia

We present the detailed analysis of a cervical vertebra from a cave bear, found at Pesturina cave, Serbia, in a Mousterian archaeological level dated by radiocarbon at 43.5–44.6 kyr cal BP, and by ESR to between 93.5 and 102.5 kyr BP. Identified as a portion of the cranial articular facet, the fragment displays ten subparallel grooves. The microscopic study of these grooves and other surface modification present on the bone fragment, conducted with multifocus optical and confocal microscopes and complemented by a taphonomic analysis of the associated faunal assemblage, supports the hypothesis that the incisions were made by humans. Results are used to critically examine ambiguities implicit in the analysis and interpretation of early engravings, a category of material culture that has been playing a key role in the identification of early instances of symbolically mediated behavior.

Marcantonio Raimondi’s Orpheus Enchanting the Animals: Intersection of Prints Between North and South

SummaryArt historians have often characterized the Italian Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480-before 1534) as a foremost reproductive engraver. This view was based mainly on the artist’s activity in Rome when he worked after Raphael’s designs. Until recently, his pre-Roman years were less frequently treated. It has been widely known that he borrowed motifs from Northern sources as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Lucas van Leyden (c. 1494–1533). This essay suggests that Marcantonio drew inspiration, especially in his Bolognese years, from the works of two early engravers from the Upper Rhine, the Master E.S. (active c. 1450–1467), and the Master of the Playing Cards (active c. 1430–1450). He did not copy line-to-line motifs from these masters, however, but reinvented some of their work and imaginatively incorporated them into his own print, Orpheus Enchanting the Animals, c. 1505. This new engraving shows the artist’s creative strength and ability as an independent thinker. The fact that some other North Italian artists also explored the engravings of the two masters from the Upper Rhine reinforces the plausibility of Marcantonio’s engagement with the same sources.

<b>Donald C. O’Brien.</b> <i>The Engraving Trade in Early Cincinnati</i>. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. ix, 194 p. ISBN 978-0821420140. $29.14

Donald C. O’Brien’s The Engraving Trade in Early Cincinnati is the first published survey of individuals and businesses engaged in engraving, lithographing, and printing in early Cincinnati, Ohio. Mr. O’Brien, a retired public educator, is a past president of the American Historical Print Society and a member of the American Antiquarian Society. This title highlights the work of early engravers and printers in Cincinnati in the wider context of American engraving and illustration, while also giving an overview of notable items and titles produced by these firms. O’Brien gives a roughly chronological look at the firms and their work in . . .

The context, form and significance of the MSA engraved ostrich eggshell collection from Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Western Cape, South Africa

Broken ostrich eggshells are commonly found in Middle Stone Age sites of southern Africa, presumably collected for food consumption, and later used as artefacts. At Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Middle Stone Age inhabitants used ostrich eggshells as a medium to convey abstract depictions. Since 1998, excavations at Diepkloof have recovered 408 engraved pieces of ostrich eggshells. The study of these shows that Diepkloof inhabitants applied a restricted set of geometric engraving patterns, with the dominance of 2 main motifs, one using a hatched band and the other sub-parallel to converging lines. These motifs coexisted, but shifted in frequency toward the latter through time. Together with evidence that ostrich eggshells were used as containers, these patterns support the hypothesis that engravings were made with respect to clear but flexible social conventions and were part of a complex system of visual and symbolic communication. Since our last report (Texier et al., 2010), a few engraved pieces have been found in lower stratigraphic units, expanding substantially the time-range of the engraving practice on ostrich eggshells at Diepkloof. The earliest engravings appear at the end of the Early Howiesons Poort phase, but become numerous only during the Intermediate and Late phases of the Howiesons Poort. The collection from Diepkloof is presently unique and likely underlines the existence of regional traditions within the Howiesons Poort. Interestingly, and significantly in our view, the engraving disappears at the same time as the Howiesons Poort technology. We argue that this disappearance may reflect a modification in the way late Middle Stone Age inhabitants interacted with one another.

The Hensler Petroglyph Site (47 do 461): an Early Engraving Site in the North American Mid-Continent

The Hensler Petroglyph Site (47 do 461): an Early Engraving Site in the North American Mid-Continent

Simon de Passe's cartographic portrait of Captain John Smith and a new England (1616/7)

The complex image John Smith New England 1 — designed and engraved by Simon de Passe (c.1595–1647) 2 and printed in London by one George Low in 1616/7 — has attracted the attention of many histori...

Review: Early Engravers and their Public: The Master of the Berlin Passion and Manuscripts from Convents in the Rhine-Maas Region, ca. 1450–1500

Review: Early Engravers and their Public: The Master of the Berlin Passion and Manuscripts from Convents in the Rhine-Maas Region, ca. 1450–1500

Early Engravers and Their Public: The Master of the Berlin Passion and Manuscripts from Convents in the Rhine-Maas Region, Ca. 1450-1500. Ursula Weekes

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsEarly Engravers and Their Public: The Master of the Berlin Passion and Manuscripts from Convents in the Rhine-Maas Region, Ca. 1450-1500. Ursula Weekes Alison StewartAlison Stewart Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 81, Number 2Apr., 2006 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400003638 Views: 7Total views on this site Copyright 2006 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard's "Narrative" of King Philip's War and His "Map of New-England"

Matthew Edney is associate professor of Geography-Anthropology and American and New England Studies and faculty scholar of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland. Susan Cimburek received her master's degree from the Program in American and New England Studies, University of Southern Maine, in 200oo3. She currently resides in Washington, D.C. The authors would like to thank Joseph Conforti, Wim Klooster, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Dr. Mary Pedley provided invaluable assistance, for which we are most thankful, in her review on our behalf of Randolph Adams's bibliographical records on file in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 1 Cartobibliographic descriptions are Joseph Sabin, Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from its Discovery to the Present Time (New York, I868-1936), nos. 33444-33445; Barbara B. McCorkle, New England in Early 1515 to I8oo: An Illustrated Carto-Bibliography (Providence, R.I., 2zooI), nos. 677.2-3; and James Clements Wheat and Christian F. Brun, Maps and Charts Published in America before I8oo: A Bibliography, rev. ed., Holland Press Cartographica, III (London, 1978), nos. I44-145. 2 Samuel A. Green, Ten Fac-Simile Reproductions Relating to Old Boston and Neighborhood (Boston, 1901), no. 2; A Descriptive Catalogue of an Exhibition of Early Engraving in America, December I2, Io04-February 5, I9po5 (Cambridge, Mass., 1904), no. 171; Emerson D. Fite and Archibald Freeman, A Book of Old Maps Delineating American History fJom the Earliest Days Down to the Close of the Revolutionary War (1926; rpt. New York, 1969), no. 43; Lawrence C. Wroth and Marion W. Adams, American Woodcuts and Engravings, I67o-I8oo (Providence, R.I., 1946), no. 3; Lloyd A. Brown, The World Encompassed: An Exhibition of the History of Maps (Baltimore, I952), no. 214; Prints, Maps and Drawings, 1677-1822: A Massachusetts Historical Society Picture Book (Boston, I957), no. s; Alexander O. Vietor, Printed Maps, in Helen Comstock, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of American Antiques (New York, 1957), II, 437-443, no. 277a; Thomas Winthrop Streeter, The Celebrated Collection of Americana Formed by the Late Thomas Winthrop Streeter, Morristown, New Jersey; Sold

Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (review)

Reviewed by: Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch Margaret Homans (bio) Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch, by John Plunkett; pp. x + 256. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £19.99, $29.95. John Plunkett's book provides a fascinating, detailed look at the transformation the Victorian news media underwent between Victoria's coronation and her death, as woodcuts and steel engravings gave way to lithography and photography and as the diverse and often anti-monarchist print media yielded to a professionalized journalism increasingly invested in promotion of the status quo. Tracing this history through the lens of the media's relation to Victoria's monarchy, the book argues that developments in the two were interdependent: that the media required an alluring and never-ending source of material through which to promote its own indispensability, and that the monarchy depended entirely on the media to become both populist and constitutional. Thus the book claims to be at once about "Victoria's media making" and about "the media's making of its own mythology" (7). While the book succeeds as a richly researched history of the Victorian media and the individuals who directed its growth, it is less persuasive in its claims about Victoria's "media making" and about the mutual dependency of the two institutions. The same media history could presumably have been traced by charting changing representations of other subjects as well; moreover, the media underwent similar developments in other nations without the benefit of Victoria's monarchy. "Victoria's endless materialization" (7) in word and image may have constituted her monarchy for her subjects, her image "made" in her subjects' minds by their daily "practice" of reading about her in the papers (8), but the book cannot make good on its needlessly overstated claim that Victoria was "made" without her agency: "The number of contradictory portrayals demonstrates that the royal family was far from having any self-fashioned representation" (2). The book claims a one-directional causal relation between an active press and a passive royalty: "Rather than events producing a spate of prints, the illustrated press had itself to produce a constant series of events" (98). The book makes this claim sound plausible only by ignoring the kinds of evidence that have led others to take seriously Victoria's agency. Discussing her unglamorous coronation, for example, the book focuses on media representations and on Tory and Whig responses but takes no notice of who devised the ceremonies in the first place. [End Page 520] There is little consideration of the public images that Victoria commissioned or selected, such as the memorial images of Albert in which she took such an obsessive interest after 1861. Plunkett offers astute deconstructive readings of early engravings of Victoria, but when it comes to the photographs of the queen, although he tells us a great deal about the photographers and the public reception of their work, his gift for close reading goes curiously unused. I agree that "it was not that Victoria's image was disseminated through photographs. The royal image itself became photographic" (7). But why insist that the royal image became photographic without Victoria's agency? The subject of a photograph must pose; is this why Plunkett has so little to say about the images themselves, with their suggestively varied adjustment of the queen's pose in relation to her family? In arguing for the media as the unique cause of developments in the monarchy, the book also underrates the power of readers. The media may have driven the craze for Victoria's images, but it cannot have determined which images would sell like hotcakes and which would not. In my view, which this book did not persuade me to abandon, Victoria's "contradictory" representations and her unprecedentedly public monarchy resulted from an active collaboration between her and her subjects, including those who depicted her in words and images. Indeed, the book's evidence shows that Victoria actively took part in constructing and disseminating her media image. A court case, interestingly, indicates that "the publication of [J. J. E. Mayall's] Royal Album can be seen as a response to external pressures rather than simply a proactive decision on the...

Photography, printmaking, and the visual economy in nineteenth-century France

Early in his pioneering History of Photography, first published in 1955, Helmut Gernsheim breaks off from his consideration of Nicéphore Niépce, ‘the first photographer’, to warn the reader about the ‘confusing and at times even misleading’ terms in which the Niépce brothers discussed their experiments in the mid-1820s. As Gernsheim puts it, ‘the nomenclature of the older arts, especially of engraving, was drawn upon by the Niépces’.1 Nearly half a century later, one may well feel that that it is the virtual ignorance of the entire domain of early nineteenth-century engraving, both for its own sake and in relation to the new domain of photography, that causes the confusion, and is liable to lead students of the visual arts of the period astray in some of their assumptions. Without any doubt at all, the horizons of the Niépce brothers were bounded by the conceptions of artistic practice and production of their epoch, and their use of the vocabulary of engraving is a faithful sign of this. What I propose to do in this short article is to sketch out in brief what might be called the visual economy of the period from around 1815 to around 1860, and to show how certain of photographic history's founding myths sit awkwardly in this context. My focus will be exclusively on France, but I hope it may have comparative value for an English scene, which is, of course, different in many important respects.

The Master of the "Sola-Busca Tarocchi" and the Rediscovery of Some Ferrarese Engravings of the Fifteenth Century

The article examines an important series of seventy-eight Italian engravings, known as the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, and attributes them decisively to the late quattrocento Ferrarese school. The Master of the Sola-Busca Tarocchi remains anonymous, but a num­ber of other prints can be assigned to his hand, most notably a group that had been published in1949 but then dropped out of sight. These and several other works, distinctive in both style and iconog­raphy, are herein ascribed to the Master, who emerges as a major figure in the field of early Italian engraving. Lists of prints attributed to or associated with the Master of the Sola-Busca Tarocchi are included in appendices.

Early Italian Engravings for Religious Orders

Early Italian Engravings for Religious Orders

Dating and Context of Rock Engravings in Southern Africa

Rock art is seldom recovered from sealed archeological contexts and is therefore difficult to date or integrate with other artifactual assemblages. South African engravings, found on low rocks at open-air sites, exemplify the problem. Multiscale spatial study of technique, thematic variation, faunal content, geoarcheological paterning, settlement history, and ethno-archeological setting provides coherent information on environment, time, and group identity. The major periods of naturalistic animal engravings coincide with wetter and warmer climates abot 3200 to 2500 and 2250 to 1800 years before present, but the earliest engravings may be older than 4000 years. Geometric designs were favored after 1300 years before present, when climate was drier and when one identity-conscious population of Bushman engravers first encountered domesticated animals.

An early engraving of the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis (L.)) made by Jan Wandelaar

Journal Article An early engraving of the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis (L.)) made by Jan Wandelaar Get access L. C. ROOKMAAKER L. C. ROOKMAAKER 1c/o L'Abri Fellowship, Burg. Verbrugweg 16, Eck en Wiel, Holland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 1976, Pages 87–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8312.1976.tb00243.x Published: 14 January 2008 Article history Accepted: 01 October 1975 Published: 14 January 2008

Jacopo della Nave or Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau?

Cabinet des Estampes in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, has for many years been attributed to Jacopo della Nave, and was published by Arthur M. Hind in his Early Italian Engraving as by an anonymous engraver of the sixteenth century.' It is the purpose of this note to suggest that, instead, the artist in question is the Frenchman Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau. Jacopo della Nave is an extremely elusive creature; he appears in none of the obvious sources-neither in other museum and library print rooms nor in dictionaries of artists, with the exception of Zani,2 who seems to have started the misnomer simply by naming the artist from the monogram on two of the prints, IA with a boat. The nameJacopo della Nave thereafter appears in the catalogue of the Bibliotheque Nationale's Reserve by Courboin,3 and although Hind was doubtful about it, he had nothing else to suggest. He thought that these seven prints were by the same hand as an Italian Virgin and Child (Figure I). This seems to be an obvious mistake: the Virgin and Child is by one artist, an Italian, and will therefore not be mentioned here again, while the other seven (Figures 2-8) are by an entirely different artist, a Frenchman. If there is any question that this group is by a single artist, details of the cherub heads or of the shields, for instance, link the whole group irrevocably. It seems highly unlikely that anyone with the name Jacopo (if we are to consider that name for a moment) would abbreviate it by capitalizing the first two letters of his first name only, IA. The more usual abbreviations of Jacopo are Iac. (or Jac.) and Io. (or Jo.), not I A (or J A)--I and J being interchangeable equivalents to all intents and purposes. It seems more probable that instead of being an abbreviation these are initials and that the A stands for a second name (Figure 9). The della Nave, the name evidently invented by Zani, seems simply to refer to the little boat above the initials. Now a caravelle under sail is part of the coat of arms of the city of Paris.4 It was used as a symbol and emblem of Paris from time out of mind, for instance on coins and medals of the thirteenth century. In the temporary

Early American Book Illustrators and Wood Engravers, 1670-1870: A Catalogue of a Collection of American Books in the Princeton University Library

Early American Book Illustrators and Wood Engravers, 1670-1870: A Catalogue of a Collection of American Books in the Princeton University Library

Early Florentine Designers and Engravers: A Comparative Analysis of Early Florentine Nielli, Intarsias, Drawings, and Copperplate Engravings

Early Florentine Designers and Engravers: A Comparative Analysis of Early Florentine Nielli, Intarsias, Drawings, and Copperplate Engravings

Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue with Complete Reproduction of all the Prints Described, Part II: Known Masters Other than Florentine, Monogrammists and Anonymous

Early Italian Engraving: A Critical Catalogue with Complete Reproduction of all the Prints Described, Part II: Known Masters Other than Florentine, Monogrammists and Anonymous