Opening September 18, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art presents “The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480‱650,” featuring 85 objects from the museum’s collection of Renaissance and baroque prints †until now unpublished and rarely viewed †as well as objects from major public institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit will be on view through January 3.
Although most people see and even touch an engraving every day †US currency and many stamps are engraved on steel †few artists work in the medium today. In the Renaissance engraving was new, and one of the world’s first reproducible art forms, full of possibility for the spread of designs of all types throughout Europe.
“The Brilliant Line” focuses on the height of the medium, from 1480 to 1650, when engravers made dramatic and rapid visual changes to engraving technique as they responded to the demands of reproducing artworks in other media. The exhibition follows these visual transformations and offers new insight into the inventiveness and technical skill of Renaissance and baroque engravers. The exhibition will travel to the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., in April.
Renaissance engravings are composed entirely of lines. Engravers learned quickly from one another by buying and trading engravings and meeting fellow practitioners on transcontinental travels. The exhibition takes an international approach, following connections among engravers from Nuremberg to Rome and on to Paris, and the cumulative effects of the knowledge they shared.
Objects on view lay out the medium’s continuities, or “systems” †those visual tricks that responded so well to the pictorial problems of tone, texture and volume †while highlighting the ingenuity of individual engravers.
Visitors will be invited to think about the relationships between fine prints by Albrecht Dürer and Marcantonio Raimondi, Cornelis Cort and Agostino Carracci, or Martin Schongauer and Robert Nanteuil.
The RISD Museum of Art is at 224 Benefit Street. For information, 401-454-6500 or www.risdmuseum.org .
