166 THE FINE ARTS. 
after which he blackened the cast and accidentally took an impression 
of it. 
Copper, however, was not employed at first for printing from; the earli- 
est works were engraved on tin, zinc, or iron, and afterwards the idea was 
adopted of using very fine-grained, homogeneous, and tolerably hard copper. 
The oldest known German copper-plate is of the year 1465, and is marked 
@. S. More than 120 plates have come down to us executed by the same 
md&ter, but of which only ten bear the dates 1465, 1466, and 1467; the 
remainder are without date, and may very possibly be still older. The art 
of copper-plate engraving, properly so called, was introduced from Germany 
into Italy by Sweynheim, who settled there in 1467; at least so he says 
himself in his preface to Ptolemy’s Geography. With the beginning of 
the sixteenth century the new art spread over all Europe, and it has been 
practised with the greatest zeal ever since. Its productions are genuine 
works of art, which, although destitute of the charm of coloring, often 
represent nature in the most pleasing manner. 
There are as many as eleven different modes of engraving on copper, 
viz. 1. Copper-plate engraving properly so called, executed with the graver 
or burin; 2. Engraving with the dry-point; 3. Etching (pl. 22, fig. 2); 
4. Etching and finishing with the graver (jig. 3); 5. Stippling (jig. 6 
exhibits this manner combined with No. 1); 6. Mezzotinto (jig. 4); 7. The 
Le Blon process with various colors; 8. The chalk manner; 9. English 
stippling ; 10. Aquatint engraving (jig. 5); 11. The aquarelle manner. 
The plate intended for engraving must be hammered cold, or still better 
rolled very hard; it must then be rubbed with sandstone, next with pumice- 
stone, and lastly with moistened charcoal ; after which it must be polished. 
For all the kinds of engraving above mentioned, excepting Nos. 6, 7, and 
11, the plate is now covered with a priming or ground. For this purpose 
it is placed over a hot charcoal brazier; and then is rubbed to and fro 
with the etching-ground tied up in silk (fig. 10), which is composed of 
wax, asphaltum, colophony, and mastic or Burgundy pitch. The etching- 
ground, which is liable to come off in some places, is then evenly distri- 
buted over the plate by means of Tampon’s dabber, a ball made of cotton 
wool tied up tightly in silk (jg. 11), so that the ground is made of equal 
thickness throughout. The design is then copied in outline on the ground. 
For this purpose the ground is either whitened with washed white-lead and 
gum, or fastened in a hand-vice.( pl. 22, fig. 8 a) and blackened by passing 
it backwards and forwards over a wax taper; and to this ground the draw- 
ing is transferred, in the usual manner, with tracing paper or by pressure 
on the back of the drawing. Ifthe drawing is to be on a smaller scale than 
the original, the reduction is effected by the aid of a reducing frame 
(fig. 34). ? 
In the first mode of engraving, the outline drawing is scored through the 
ground with an etching-needle or dry-point, a sharp-pointed instrument of 
steel; after which the plate is cleansed and the engraving proper begins. 
The instrument which the copper-plate engraver makes use of is the graver 
of hardened steel (figs. 23-26), one end of which is pointed and the other 
550 
