The cylinder press of Jackson's design was finished in 1735 and paid for 

 by the income from prolonged sieges of work for printing offices. But the over- 

 work and resulting exhaustion laid him low; a serious illness followed and for 

 several months he was close to death. When he eventually regained his health he 

 found that his cuts for Baglioni and Pezzana had been copied and mutilated by 



an engraver at Ancona. This pirate 

 was encouraged by the head of a 

 large printing establishment newly 

 founded in Venice, who thereupon 

 offered Jackson work at greatly re- 

 duced prices. He refused the of^er. 

 With hack woodcutters now stealing 

 both his designs and his manner of 

 cutting, and working at a far lower 

 rate than he could afford, he found 

 that the market for his higher priced 

 work had almost entirely disap- 

 peared. He still received occasional 

 commissions, among others the title 

 page to a translation of Suetonius' 

 Litres of the Twelve Caesars, printed 

 by Piacentini in Venice in 1738. His 

 splendid design, which shows considerable burin work, is at odds with the crudity 

 of the remainder of the book. Inferior hands reproduced in woodcut outline 

 Hubert Goltzius' medallion portraits of Roman emperors, originally executed 

 in chiaroscuro (see p. 22). Stimulated, no doubt, by the combination of chia- 

 roscuro and antiquity, Jackson produced a portrait of Julius Caesar in four tones 

 of brown after Egidius Sadeler's engraving of a subsequently lost painting at- 

 tributed to Titian. This was not the only time Jackson translated a line engrav- 

 ing and added chiaroscuro modeling of his own. He did not make line-for-line 

 copies. Jackson was interested in broad effects even when leaning heavily on the 

 delicate linear conventions of line engraving. The lines, therefore, are firm and 



Illustration for Albrizzi's Istoria, in 

 which it was cut No. 136. From Hertz's 

 Biblia Sacra, vol. i. Actual size. 



29 



