GRAPHIC ART TECHNIQUES continued from page 44 Clair-obscur or chiaroscuro woodcut (from the French and Italian words for light and shade) is closely related to a type of drawing, favored by Swiss and German artists, that employs dark and white inks or chalks on tinted paper. In the woodcut process, a line block is combined with one or more tone blocks, gouged out in places, that print respectively, black lines and tonal areas or white highlights. In early Italian chiaroscuro woodcuts, best represented by the works of Ugo da Carpi, the line block is subordinated to the tone blocks, thus producing a more painterly effect. Da Carpi, who used the technique primarily to achieve the effect of wash drawings, claimed in 1516 to have invented it, despite the earlier experiments of German artists: for example, Hans Burgkmair’s “St. George on Horseback” (1508), at first printed partially in metallic inks suggestive of medieval manuscripts. Perhaps with the help of cutter Jost de Negker, Burgkmair next omitted the metallic highlights and combined the black line block with a tone block that echoed colored paper. Paired with an equestrian portrait of the emperor, “St. George” emphasized Maximilian’s identification with the Christian knight. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s “St. Christopher” (ca. 1509) is a vigorous restatement of an old motif that gained greater significance as the association between spirituality and the landscape grew during the sixteenth century. In one sense, the technique has been employed in both of these prints as a shortcut to achieve effects native to drawing. But the chiaroscuro woodcut had aesthetic possibilities all its own, allowing German printmakers the nervous linearity they loved with a new sculptural plasticity created by broad tones. It must have been regarded as a significant discovery, because Cranach apparently back-dated “St. Christopher” to appear to have precedence over Burgkmair. The vigor of chiaroscuro woodcut is especially evident in Hans Baldung Grien’s “Witches Sabbath” (1510), perhaps the masterpiece of German examples of the technique. It was printed with either an orange or a gray tone block. Like Cranach’s “St. Christopher,” this woodcut has an extraordinary energy, but unlike the former, Baldung’s print presents a relatively new subject matter with an unprecedented intensity and completeness. Despite its traditional title, it probably does not represent the large, orgiastic homage to the Devil called the witches’ sabbat or sabbath, but the magical preparations, including the rubbing of the witches themselves and their forked sticks with the drug-laden “flying unguent” in the central jar, for levitating to this gathering. Although Dürer’s art and personality had enormous impact on his pupil and lifelong friend, Baldung’s work took a decidedly individual direction, even from their earliest association. Here, the wildly gesticulating, naked witches cook their repulsive brew amid a clutter of bones, sticks, and other paraphernalia. Along with Dürer’s “Four Witches,” this print introduces us to the disturbing world of witchcraft belief that was soon to escalate into the genocidal witch-hunts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fact that this subject now appears in prints is one indication of its growing appeal. Baldung’s attitude toward these women was partly satirical, but he also revealed his penchant for observing the dark side of human nature that the far more idealistic and spiritual Dürer tended to suppress or control. Baldung also stands out as an exceptional woodcut artist when working with pure line. He directed the line-woodcut away from Dürer’s approximation of engraving toward a more direct, raw vigor, while retaining its capacity to define powerful volumes and masses. His best-known woodcut, “The Bewitched Groom” (1544), portrays a man rendered helpless or dead by a witch and a malevolent horse. It remains enigmatic despite many attempts to explain it in narrative or allegorical terms. The presence of the artist’s coat of arms on the stable wall suggests that the horse and the witch are personal demons to which he has succumbed or which, at the very least, dominate his artistic imagination. Both the witch and the horse function in Baldung’s art as representatives of irrepressible appetites that come into conflict with Christian morality and reason. The eerie effect of the image depends not only on the ambiguous situation it depicts but also on its sheer boldness of form. The pronounced massiveness of the horse and groom, both sharply foreshortened, seems too much for the room to contain. The spatial recession pulls us back quickly, while the projecting glance and huge rear end of the horse (ironically taken from Dürer’s gentle “Large Horse,” an engraving of 1505) propel us back to the picture plane, where the fascinating woodcut lines—now architectonic, now wildly curling— exist in and for themselves. We become aware that the forms on the base of the pier to the left are nearly repeated in the capital and that there is a disturbing similarity among the coursing lines in the witch’s torch, the horse’s mane and tail, the hay, and the rumpled sleeves of the groom. “The B e w i t c h e d Groom” proclaims an imaginative freedom, and yet (if we can indeed take the groom as the artist’s alter ego) warns of its dangers. Bal-dung has clearly left Dürer’s balanced world for an eccentricity more akin to sixteenth-century Mannerist art. The robust, arabesque linearism of the Swiss artist Urs Graf bears much in common with Baldung’s style. An exact contemporary of the Strasbourg artist, Graf also plunged headlong into the sensual aspects of life with even less faith in restraint and rationality than Baldung seems to have had. His quirky individualism emerges in his drawings and prints, such as this white-line woodcut, “The Standard Bearer of the Canton of Unterwalden” (1521). In this technique of woodcutting, the positive design is carved out of the block, leaving a much greater portion of it to be inked. Here, the white lines flash against the black ground to express the flamboyance of the uniform with its split sleeves, feathered cap, tight leggings, and prominent codpiece. When not in jail for his unruliness and intractability, Graf spent much of his time with the Swiss mercenaries who fought against the French for control of the Duchy of Milan. His drawings show that he knew not only the pageantry of war, but also its horror; one depicts the gore of a battlefield, another an armless woman with a wooden leg, a camp-follower apparently wounded in crossfire. When understood in the context of all his works, the rooster-like arrogance of the soldier is conditioned by Graf’s awareness of the precariousness of life. The emperor Maximilian sponsored a number of printed projects that utilized the talents of many artists and took printmaking into realms formerly reserved for the arts of architecture and pageantry. Within his far-flung empire, Maximilian realized, prints could serve important political purposes. Dürer functioned as the chief designer for the “Triumphal Arch,” a paper tribute to the emperor comprising 192 woodcuts, which, when assembled, would measure about 11 by 9 1/2 feet. He collaborated with Johannes Stabius, Maximilian’s poet, astronomer, and historiographer, who devised the program, the architect Jörg Kölderer, the woodcutting firm of Hieronymus Andrae, and his friend Willibald Pirckheimer, who helped with the work’s iconography. “The Arch” was completed in 1517 and was to be supplemented by an equally remarkable “Triumphal Procession,” a long frieze composed of individual woodcuts. The completion of the “Procession” was cut short by Maximilian’s death in 1519, but Dürer published the imperial chariot—formed from eight woodcuts of his own design—in 1522. About half of the remaining woodcuts of the “Procession” were designed by Hans Burgkmair the Elder of Augsburg. Other artists who worked on the project were Albrecht Altdorfer, Wolf Huber, Hans Springinklee, Hans Schäuffelein, and Leonhard Beck. The woodcuts by these artists were published in 1528-1529, without Dürer’s, by order of Ferdinand, King of Bohemia. This article by Linda C. Hults is part of a continuing series. Susan Gillette’s “Homme I” is a hand-pulled etching in an edition of 175, measuring 9 3/4 by 29 3/4 inches ($325). Call Grand Image Ltd., Seattle, at (206) 624-0444, or visit the website located at: www.grandimage.com. PAGE 46 ART WORLD NEWS

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