Note 285 — Chapter XIX · (XXXIII.)

In Vasari’s first edition, of 1550, there is a notice of Finiguerra in the Life of Antonio Pollaiuolo (p. 498) and he there celebrates only the skill of Maso as a niellist, but in the edition of 1568 there is another notice of him in connection with Marc Antonio (Opere, ed. Milanesi, V, 395), and here Vasari claims for him the credit of being the first to make the advance from niello work to copper-plate engraving. This second passage is a famous one, and describes how Finiguerra moulded his silver plate, incised with a design, in clay, and then cast it in sulphur, and subsequently filled the hollow lines in the sulphur cast (which reproduced the incisions on the silver plate) with lamp-black, so that they showed up more clearly. He then seems, according to Vasari, to have pressed damp paper against the sulphur plaque so treated, and obtained a print by extracting the black from the lines. Benvenuto Cellini however, a better authority than Vasari on Finiguerra, praises him as the best niello worker of his time, but says nothing about this further development of his craft, and on the contrary ascribes the invention of copper-plate engraving to the Germans. Cellini tells us at the end of his ‘Introduzione,’ that in 1515, when fifteen years old, he began to learn the goldsmith’s trade, and that then, though the art of niello work had greatly declined, the older goldsmiths sang in his ears the praise of Maso Finiguerra, who had died in 1464. Hence, Cellini says, he gave special attention to niello work, and he describes the process, at rather greater length than Vasari, in the first chapter of his Treatise on Gold-work (I Trattati, etc. di Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Milanesi, Firenze, 1893).

The question of the origin of copper-plate engraving need not be here discussed. Any of the incised silver or bronze plaques of the ancients might have been printed from; and as a fact some incised bronze discs that are placed at the bottoms of the towers in the great crown-light of the twelfth century in the Minster at Aachen have actually been put through the printing press and the impressions published, though no one at the time they were made can have thought of printing from them. In the same way wooden stamps in relief were used by Egyptians and Romans for impressing the damp clay of their bricks, though no one seems to have thought of multiplying impressions on papyrus or parchment. So trial impressions of niello plates, before the lines were filled in permanently, may often have been made, and not by Finiguerra alone. The idea of multiplying such impressions on their own account is now universally credited to the Germans, and this seems also to have been the opinion of Cellini. See his ‘Introduzione.’