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Johannes Stradanus (Bruges 1523-Florence 1605)

Engravers at work c. 1590

Pen and ink with wash and white heightening over black chalk | 18.7 x 27.4 cm (sheet of paper) | RCIN 904760

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  • A drawing of a scene within a printing shop; on the left is a screw press being turned by one man, while another examines an impression. Damp paper hangs drying above them. In the centre, around a table, several engravers are at work on metal plates copying the designs on vertical stands in front of them. This is connected with the designs for the Nova Reperta, but the corresponding engraving, plate 19, (RCIN 808377) is very different.

    Born in Bruges and trained in Antwerp, Jan van der Straet travelled to Italy in 1545 and worked there for much of the rest of his life under the names Stradanus or Giovanni Stradano. He practised as a painter but gained greater fame for his designs for tapestries and prints, many of which were woven or engraved in Flanders from drawings he sent from Italy. This drawing, and another closely related (RCIN 904761) are connected with the Nova Reperta ('New Discoveries'), a suite of 20 engravings depicting technological and scientific advances – spectacles, gunpowder, sugar refining, clocks, stirrups, the discovery of America and so on – published by Philip Galle in Antwerp.

    The two drawings emphasise the collaborative workshop nature of printing (both books and engravings) during the Renaissance. The drawing of Printers at Work corresponds with the engraving as published, in reverse. To the right, three compositors set the type from manuscript sheets pinned above their type-cases, while a spectacled man checks a proof; to the left, a man inks a forme with a pair of leather dabbers, while another operates a screw-press; in the foreground a boy lays out freshly printed sheets to dry; at far left the master of the workshop looks on, with more sheets hung to dry above him. The inscriptions state that the technology was introduced by Joannes Gutenberg in Mainz in 1440 and that ‘The smoke, as it prints little black figures on the page, produces a book up to a thousand thousand columns long’ – ‘smoke’ refers to the soot that was used to make black printing ink.

    The drawing of Engravers at Work, by contrast, is compositionally unrelated to the published print. Here three engravers work their copper plates from images on stands before them; to left and right, pairs of men operate the screw-presses; the man seated in the right foreground may be correcting a proof of a plate requiring further work. All of the men appear to be left-handed, a feature that would be reversed in the printing. The print of Sculptura in Æs (‘copper engraving’) in the Nova Reperta shows the process modernised: an engraver is joined by an etcher taking a plate out of an acid bath and the screw-presses have been replaced by roller-presses, which were being introduced at the end of the sixteenth century and may be depicted for the first time in Stradanus’s print. Philip Galle was clearly intent on making the Nova Reperta as up to date as possible and must have asked Stradanus to make a new drawing incorporating the latest developments.

    Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016
    Provenance

    Probably acquired by George III in 1762 as part of the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Albani; first recorded in a Royal Collection inventory of c. 1800-1820 (Inv. A, p. 18: 'Strada & old Masters 73 Drawings 55 pages')

  • Medium and techniques

    Pen and ink with wash and white heightening over black chalk

    Measurements

    18.7 x 27.4 cm (sheet of paper)


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