FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- In the early 16th century, Lucas van Leyden was the most famous and the most highly appreciated graphic artist north of the Alps aside from Albrecht Dürer. His works are distinguished by an independent and original choice of subjects and narration, sureness and fineness of line, and an interest in atmospheric effects. The Städel Museum Department of Prints and Drawings has comprehensive holdings of prints by Lucas van Leyden, of which a selection is presented and commented in the forthcoming exhibition. The show is complemented with selected loans from the engravings collections of Amsterdam, Berlin, and Dresden, as well as with comparative examples by other artists such as Schongauer, Dürer, and Rembrandt.

Biography: “Master Lucas, who engraves in copper, asked me as his guest. He is a little man, born at Leyden in Holland; he was at Antwerp.” Albrecht Dürer’s diary entry about his visit to Antwerp in 1521 is the only extant document which gives us a direct impression of the person of Lucas van Leyden. The diary also shows that Dürer traded in works of his own hand for the complete body of prints by van Leyden. Another admirer of Lucas van Leyden was Rembrandt van Rijn who paid 179 florins for a print (The Beggars [“Owlglass”]) which is also shown in the exhibition; a considerable sum considering that the price of a house was about 1000 florins. Information about the life of Lucas van Leyden is scarce: the most useful biographical source is the “Schilderboek” (“Painter’s Book”) by the Dutch painter and writer Carel van Mander, which was published in 1604 and is based on accounts of the artist’s descendants. According to Van Mander, Lucas was born in May or June 1494 in Leyden, a town of clothiers and merchants, as the son of the painter Huych Jacobsz. Following some basic training with his father, he entered the workshop of the reputed painter Cornelis Engebrechtsz. He presumably became familiar with the art of copperplate engraving when working with an armorer or goldsmith. Van Mander writes that Lucas was a prodigy who engraved his first copperplate at the age of nine, was a master painter at twelve, and completed his masterpiece engraving Mohammed and the Monk Sergius in 1508 at the age of 14. Maybe Lucas really was a prodigy; but maybe the information is a misunderstanding, and Lucas in fact only started to learn copperplate engraving at the age of 14, which would have been a more usual career. In any case, one has to be content with the information that Lucas was born some time between 1489 and 1494. Little is known about the further course of his life: we only know that he lived in Leyden, was a member of the local Painter’s Guild, traveled to the Netherlands and married late, around 1527. He had an illegitimate daughter and died after protracted illness in 1533, believing that he had been administered poison by an envious competitor. His extant oeuvre is comprised of some 25 paintings and about the same number of drawings, as well as about 170 copperplate engravings, 30 woodcuts of his own hand, and another 120 woodcuts used for book illustrations. The exhibition at the Städel Museum Department of Prints and Drawings largely focuses on his copperplate engravings.

Lucas as an engraver: The technique of copperplate engraving originated around 1430/40 in the Upper Rhine region, some time after that of the woodblock print. Initially, it was a mere by-product of goldsmithery where ornaments and figures had long been engraved in metal with the lines filled with dark ink. The difficulty in copperplate engraving for one thing is the act of engraving itself, the controlled incising of lines with a sharp-pointed tool, the graver, into the metal of the copperplate. Another problem is the printing. Unlike in woodcut printing where the ink can be rubbed into the paper with a spoon or folding stick, copperplate prints require high contact pressure in the press. The ink is rubbed onto the engraved plate which is then polished so that the ink remains in the incised lines only. Under the pressure of the press, the moistened paper absorbs the ink from the intaglio lines.

There are two great names that are associated with copperplate engraving around 1500: Martin Schongauer (1440/50–1491), who had created copperplate engravings as an independent art form since 1470 in the Upper Rhine area, and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), who made a name for himself as a young artist before the turn of the century with prints that were as spectacular in technique as they were in subject matter.

Technically as well as in his choice and treatment of subjects, Lucas van Leyden’s engravings show a distinctive style which made the artist well-known and famous throughout Europe after about 1508. Although he took some inspiration from Albrecht Dürer or Marcantonio Raimondi, the engraver of Raffaelo, he developed his own artistic solutions. Lucas offers an exceptionally broad range of graphic techniques, notably so with regard to the rendering of textures and light. In most cases, he did not rely on a precise working drawing, but drafted the composition with fine lines directly on the metal plate and then elaborated it. His handling of the graver has something draftsman-like to it and is distinctly different from Schongauer’s and Dürer’s systematic graphic approach with its precisely planned arrays of hatching. Lucas’s lines are very fine and not particularly deep; in the print, they have a tendency to blur and blend, which results in a very special shaded and painterly effect with deep and rich black tones. In this technique, the plate is worn down quickly in printing so that later prints appear weaker.

Lucas often chose his subjects from literature, mainly from the Bible, and found impressive visual solutions for motifs never or rarely ever represented before. The reading of the Holy Scriptures must have been important and familiar to his audience as well. As a narrator, Lucas shuns the fantastic; he is mainly interested in representing reality, though with an underlying moral meaning. Thus, in his Temptation of Christ of 1518, the devil tempting Jesus to turn stones into bread if he is God’s own son is not represented as a frightful monster with all sorts of fantastic and infernal paraphernalia, as was customary in the 15th century, but as a somewhat odd old man wearing a flowing chin beard and a hooded cloak. It takes a second, closer look to see the clawed foot and the serpent around the hood. Lucas’s understanding of man derives from human nature itself. He always seeks to explore emotional impulses and incorporates them into his narrative; his scenes are always informed by psychological moments. The tension that builds up before the spirit is overcome by the body is demonstrated with subtle and intricate facets in his late work Mars and Venus. The representation of everyday life and his psychological interest relate his work to 17th century art in the Netherlands. One of his best known prints is the 1510 engraving entitled The Milkmaid, which bespeaks the artist’s sense for observing everyday life so that the piece could be misunderstood for mere genre art if it were not for the moralizing background. Engravings such as his Ecce Homo unfold an impressive perspective construction of the city prospect. Here again, as in many other prints, the central scene – Christ brought forward to be condemned to death by the agitated mob – remains in the background, while the crowd of onlookers is represented in great detail in the foreground – another iconographic invention that bears witness of the unconventional pictorial solutions of Lucas van Leyden.