COLUMBIA, MO.- The Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri-Columbia College of Arts and Science opened the exhibit The Forgotten Art of Engraving through July 2007. For over 500 years, engraving was one of the most popular printmaking techniques. Today, however, this method of hand-cutting images onto metal plates is rarely practiced. Although professional engravers still work for government mints and postal services, most contemporary intaglio printmakers are etchers, preferring to etch their images onto metal plates with acid. This year-long exhibition explores the history of the all-but-forgotten engraving technique, displaying prints by such celebrated masters as Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius and Lucas Van Leyden.

In antiquity, the only engraving that could be carried out is evident in the shallow grooves found in some jewellery after the beginning of the 1st Millennium B.C. The majority of so-called engraved designs on ancient gold rings or other items were produced by chasing or sometimes a combination of lost-wax casting and chasing.

In the European Middle Ages goldsmiths used engraving to decorate and inscribe metalwork. It is thought that they began to print impressions of their designs to record them. From this grew the engraving of copper printing plates to produce artistic images on paper, known as old master prints in Germany in the 1430s. Italy soon followed. Many early engravers came from a goldsmithing background. The first and greatest period of the engraving was from about 1470 to 1530, with such masters as Martin Schongauer , Albrecht Dürer , and Lucas van Leiden.

Thereafter engraving tended to lose ground to etching, which was a much easier technique for the artist to learn. But many prints combined the two techniques - although Rembrandt's prints are generally all called etchings for convenience, many of them have some burin or drypoint work, and some have nothing else. By the nineteenth century, most engraving was for commercial illustration.

Before the advent of photography, engraving used to reproduce other forms of art, for example paintings. Engravings continued to be common in newspapers and many books into the early 20th century, as they were long cheaper to use in printing than photographic images. Engraving has also always been used as a method of original artistic expression.