intaglio

Intaglio comes from Italian intaglio (a cut, an incised design, a carving), from intagliare (to cut into, to carve, to engrave), from in- (into) and tagliare (to cut), from Vulgar Latin *taliare (to cut), from Latin talea (a cutting, a stick, a twig). The same Italian tagliare gives English 'tailor' (one who cuts cloth), 'detail' (a cutting away of smaller parts), 'retail' (cutting again, selling in smaller pieces cut from larger), and 'entail' (cutting into the line of inheritance). In the fine arts, intaglio names two related but distinct practices united by the single act of cutting into a surface: first, the ancient craft of carving designs in relief into hard gemstones, rock crystal, or metal, creating an image that is recessed into the material rather than raised above it (as in a cameo, where the image stands proud); second, the family of printmaking techniques — engraving, etching, aquatint, mezzotint — in which an image is incised or bitten into a metal plate so that ink fills the recessed lines and is transferred to paper under the heavy pressure of a printing press.

The ancient craft of intaglio gem-carving was one of the highest-status luxury arts of the ancient world. Greek and Roman craftsmen carved incredibly fine designs into carnelian, chalcedony, agate, and other hard stones at a scale that often required magnification to fully appreciate — figures barely five millimeters tall executed with anatomical precision in stone that resists the cutting tool. These intaglio gems served as personal seals: pressed into wax, they transferred a mirror image of the carved design, identifying the owner and authenticating their documents. The sophistication of Roman intaglio work was so highly prized by Renaissance collectors that the stones were often remounted in new settings and the finest ancient gems were attributed to legendary makers, forming a canon of great intaglios that drove collecting and connoisseurship for centuries.

As a printmaking technique, intaglio encompasses several related methods that all work on the same principle: the image is incised into a metal plate (typically copper, and later steel), the plate is inked so that pigment fills the incised lines, the surface is wiped clean so that only the recessed lines hold ink, and the plate is pressed against dampened paper with enough pressure to pull the ink from the lines. Engraving achieves this by cutting directly into the plate with a burin — a steel tool with a sharpened end; etching by covering the plate with an acid-resistant ground, drawing through it with a needle, and then immersing the plate in acid which bites the exposed metal; aquatint by using acid with a resin ground to create tonal areas; mezzotint by roughening the entire plate surface and then selectively burnishing areas smooth. Each method produces a characteristically different quality of line and tone.

Dürer's engravings, Rembrandt's etchings, and Goya's aquatints represent the three great peaks of intaglio printmaking, and each exploited the distinctive possibilities of their chosen technique. Dürer's engraving Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) demonstrates the ability of the burin to achieve almost superhuman precision and density — the crosshatching in the shadows contains hundreds of individually cut lines of different angles and depths. Rembrandt's etchings used the needle's freedom and the acid's bite to create an expressive line impossible in engraving — spontaneous, varied, sometimes scratchy. Goya's Disasters of War series used aquatint to achieve tonal ranges of shadow that print in a continuous gradient, giving the images a photographic darkness that prefigures photography itself.