Exhibitions

The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in wane. Topics encountered within 4. Diogenes, limits as well as the potential of the
Renaissance Italy this broad chronological framework by Ugo da technique and demonstrate how the
Carpi, after
National Gallery of Art, include the processes of making Parmigianino. chiaroscuro woodcut rivals drawing,
Washington the woodcuts, differences between c.1527–30. painting and sculpture.
14th October–20th January 2019 impressions, pigments and tones, Woodcut, 48.4 Research for the exhibition
by 34.8 cm. (Los
translations of one medium into Angeles County was driven by shortcomings in the
by bronwen wilson another and collaborations between Museum of Art; historiography of the subject. Few
exh. National
printers, designers and block cutters. Gallery of Art, sixteenth-century prints are signed or
This visually stunning and Striking examples, such as Domenico Washington). dated, and cataloguing of seventeenth-
meticulously crafted exhibition was Beccafumi’s Apostles and Saints and century prints has been inconsistent.
seen by the present reviewer in its first Andreani’s A skull (no.104; Fig.6), Although the associations between
venue (3rd June–16th September), the printed from five blocks, highlight the Ugo and Raphael, for example, are
vast concrete spaces of the Resnick
Pavilion at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art (LACMA). Its walls
were painted in shades of grey, echoing
the tones of the woodcuts while
enhancing their extraordinary array of
colours. The display also emphasised
the experimental quality of the
prints: their engagement with and
independence from other media, the
interaction between form and content
and their pictorial ambitiousness.
Devised by Naoko Takahatake,
LACMA’s curator of prints and
drawings, who has been working
on the subject for a decade, the
exhibition is divided into six sections.
These address the invention of the
technique (which was largely an Italian
phenomenon); artistic collaboration;
commercial considerations; the
‘painter-printer’; the dissemination of
chiaroscuro printmaking; and its ‘final
flourishing’. For visitors to LACMA,
these themes reverberated with the
city’s thriving culture of printmaking
and graphic design.
Printed in colour by using
multiple woodblocks, chiaroscuro
prints were never common, and are
now rare. With around a hundred
objects from nineteen collections,
the exhibition is a rewarding
experience for the public and a
profound one for specialists in the
history of print and Renaissance art.
Punctuated with arresting, sometimes
monumental objects, it charts a
century of chiaroscuro printmaking
on the Italian peninsula from the first
example, Ugo da Carpi’s woodcut
of Titian’s St Jerome (c.1516; British
Museum, London; cat. no.1), to the
remarkable variety of formats and
themes explored by Andrea Andreani
from the 1580s to 1610, when the use
of the technique was beginning to

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Exhibitions

notably by Konrad Oberhuber and acquired from using translucent

Achim Gnann, have been drawn
on, the exhibition places more
emphasis on clarifying attributions
and chronology. Understanding the
process of making chiaroscuro prints
has been important for avoiding
anachronistic interpretations of them
as drawings, a point made by Antony
Griffiths in his essay in the impressive
catalogue.1 Scientific research, which
has yielded crucial evidence about the
technique, entailed extensive study
of early impressions for knowledge
about patterns of degradation to the
blocks as well as examination of inks
and watermarks.
To meet its ambitious goals, the
exhibition required numerous loans of
early impressions. Although a few key
works in the history of the technique
– Ugo’s Jerome is one example – have
come from the United Kingdom, most
of the nineteen lenders are from the
United States, a mark of the strength
of the country’s collections in this
area. For example, an impression
of Ugo’s Diogenes (c.1527–30; no.22),
after Parmigianino, from the Blanton
Museum of Art at the University of
Texas at Austin was hung close to
variants from the National Gallery
of Art (no.24) and LACMA (no.23;
Fig.4). Each shows the painterly effect
inks that provided close values of
a single hue. The resulting optical
blending is particularly striking in
the LACMA impression, displayed
in the centre. In the impression from
Washington, however, the colours are
not as close, the inks not so fine, and
accordingly the effect is more opaque.
A significantly smaller engraving of
the same design by Giovanni Jacopo
Caraglio (Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; no.25) was placed
nearby to underscore the impact
of Ugo’s colours.
Beccafumi’s extraordinary series
of saints and apostles, made in the
1540s, is shown with examples loaned
from the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, the Cleveland Museum of
Art, and, intriguingly, the Library
of Congress, Washington, which
acquired an album in the 1920s from
Wilton House, Wiltshire. The St Philip
from the Library of Congress (no.69;
Fig.5), printed from three blocks in
light red, medium red and black,
demonstrates one of the striking
characteristics not only of the series
but of the technique, its self-referential
quality. The un-inked page of the open
book reveals the paper ground. The
slab on which Philip stands is scored
horizontally by rough lines to the

clearly documented, numerous 5. St Philip,

questions about the models used for by Domenico
Beccafumi.
prints remained. Although Giorgio c.1540. Woodcut,
Vasari remarked on the technique in 28.2 by 17 cm.
his Lives of the Artists (1568), there are (Library of
Congress Prints
only sporadic contemporary references and Photographs
to chiaroscuro prints. Demand for Division,
Washington;
them in the eighteenth century exh. National
generated interpretations that have Gallery of Art,
sometimes been transposed to the Washington).
earlier period, complicating how we 6. A skull, by
understand the meanings and value Andrea Andreani,
after Giovanni
of these prints for sixteenth-century Fortuna (?).
viewers. For these reasons, exhibitions c.1588. Woodcut,
of early modern prints often focus on 28.1 by 33.7 cm.
(The British
their subject matter. Museum, London;
By contrast, this exhibition exh. National
Gallery of Art,
concentrates on the evolution of Washington).
the technique, material evidence
of workshops and the practice of
individual printmakers. Although
studies of the sources of designs,

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 Exhibitions

right, which, with the raking blade-

like shadow created by his cross, call
to mind the wood matrix and labour
of cutting the block. On the left,
the slab is stamped by the Apostle’s
shadow, where all three colours of
ink can be discerned. These are a few
of the ways in which the impression
evokes the processes of design, of
cutting and of printing in multiple
colours. This emphasis on the process,
and the consequent dynamism of the
saints and apostles, is accentuated by
an adjacent variant from the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston (no.75), which
is printed only with black ink. If
Beccafumi’s chiaroscuro woodcuts call
to mind sculpture in their startling
relief and animation of the figures,
they also demonstrate, in their
engagement with the limits of the
page and the intensities of their tonal
qualities, how the technique went far
beyond efforts to rival sculpture.
The fifth section of the exhibition
emphasises the diversity of the
printmaking centres on the Italian
peninsula. It begins with a section on
Ugo’s work in Venice and Rome, but
the chiaroscuro technique was taken
up in centres less frequently associated
with printmaking, including Bologna,
Naples, Urbino, Cremona, Florence
and Siena. This geographical
dissemination contributed, perhaps
paradoxically, both to the astounding
diversity of chiaroscuro prints
produced in Italy and also to the
limited nature of their niche market.

1 Catalogue: The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in

Renaissance Italy. By Naoko Takahatake,
with contributions by Jonathan Bober,
Jamie Gabbarelli, Antony Griffiths, Peter
Parshall and Linda Stiber Morenus. 288 pp.
incl. numerous col. ills. (Los Angeles County
Museum of Art with Delmonico Books and
Prestel, New York, London and Munich, 2018),
$60. ISBN 978–3–7913–5739–3.

Pure Rubens
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam
8th September–13th January 2019
by david jaffe
Rubens did not invent the oil sketch,
but he was the first artist consistently
to incorporate this medium into his
creative process. From around 1608
his inventions were often based not sense of security and it is a mistake 7. Sketch for the
on graphic drawings but on drawings to treat the oil sketches as unalloyed Rape of Europa,
by Peter Paul
made with a paintbrush. As a result, the evidence of Rubens’s process of making. Rubens. 1636.
oil sketches have come to be regarded Shown at the Museo Nacional Panel, 18.9 by
as the gold standard for Rubens’s del Prado, Madrid, as Rubens: Painter 13.7 cm. (Museo
Nacional del
autograph work. Their expressive of Sketches (10th April–5th August), Prado, Madrid;
vigour appeals to generations exposed this exhibition offered eighty-one exh. Museum
Boijmans Van
to Impressionism, where the planning examples of these preparatory works Beuningen,
step, or ‘l’ébauche’, was transformed into (by comparison, 118 were shown in Rotterdam).
a final work of art. A virtuoso display of the celebrated exhibition of Rubens’s
brushwork, however, may give a false oil sketches in Rotterdam in 1953).1

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