BETH HARRIS: We've talked about Durer
as a great painter from northern Germany.
But Durer was also a great printmaker.
DAVID DROGIN: This is an excellent example
to talk about Durer's printmaking, in part
because it's a woodcut.
There are several different types
of printmaking that are popular in the late 1400s and early
1500s.
And the woodcuts was the first and most popular
type of printing at the time.
There's a couple of reasons for that,
but maybe one of the most important ones
is the way that a woodcut is made.
When we're looking at a woodcut like this,
what we have to keep in mind is that all
of the lines that have been printed on the page
were raised up off the surface of the printing block.
And so we need to imagine that on the piece of wood
that this was printed from, when we look at this cloud,
there was a thin piece of wood standing up from the surface.
And the carver-- sometimes Durer himself-- had carved away
everything that's white and blank.
It's like a stamp.
It's very labor intensive.
But it's worth it in the end, because you
can make a lot of them.
And you can make money that way, as Durer did.
You can spread your point of view that way,
because they can be distributed.
They're very portable.
And so a lot of effort goes into it at first.
But then once you're making the prints, there's a lot of them.
They're inexpensive.
They can be carried around easily.
And so they helped spread your name or your ideas
very quickly.
I was going to say that they were popular
because they could be combined with the printed word, which
is printed more and more often at this time.
Because, like letters in a typewriter,
the images are raised up off the surface like the letters.
And so they could all be combined in the same printing
press and used together.
He was interested in other kinds of media, too.
Because although he could achieve, as we can see,
a great deal of light and shadow and some detail in these
woodcuts, there are ultimately limitations
to the woodcut process, even though Durer
was a great master, as we can see.
And the primary problem is, as we've said,
that you're cutting away what you don't want to print.
It's not a very direct way of making a representation.
You're not drawing with a pen or painting with a paintbrush.
You're making the marks that you don't
want to appear on the paper, if that makes any sense.
And that creates difficulties.
Also, it's very hard in a woodcut,
to get very fine lines or very sharp details.
Because if you want a very thin line,
like the lines in the clouds are, to a certain extent,
you have to imagine-- these are very thin
thins, basically, of wood that are sticking up.
And in the printing press, they might crush.
So Durer is interested in other methods of printing
that can give him the kinds of details and tonal gradation.
And so what he's able to do is then,
instead, later in his life, take advantage
of the engraving printing technique, which
is very different from the way a woodcut is made.
The primary difference is that with an engraving,
the gestures that you make are the lines that
will appear on the paper.
BETH HARRIS: Like drawing.
DAVID DROGIN: Like drawing.
With an engraving, you work with a metal plate.
And you use a very sharp instrument with a V-shaped tip.
It's called a burin.
And you push that through the metal.
The lines that you're making with this tool
can be extremely thin.
You can make the very faintest of lines.
Here we can see how Durer's been able to achieve
the kind of detail and textural nuances and subtleties
of shade and light--
BETH HARRIS: Shadows and light, yeah.
DAVID DROGIN: --that he would never, ever
be able to achieve with a woodcut.
You're carving the lines.
Then the ink goes all over the plate, including in the lines.
BETH HARRIS: And then you wipe it.
DAVID DROGIN: You wipe off the surface of the plate
so that the ink is only in the lines.
And then you put it through a printing press
that presses much harder than in a woodcut printing press.
This is one of the disadvantages of engravings.
There are a couple, compared to woodcuts.
One of them is that, because of the high pressure
of the printing press and the faint, very delicate dots
and lines of an engraving, you can't make as many good prints.
So you can print fewer engravings
than you can a woodcut, surprisingly.
BETH HARRIS: And that would make them more expensive.
DAVID DROGIN: That makes them more expensive,
along with the fact that the raw materials that you're using
are also more expensive-- metal, instead of wood.
BETH HARRIS: And by the way, this
is "Saint Jerome in His Study," by Durer.
DAVID DROGIN: This is "Saint Jerome in the Study,"
a later print by Durer from the early 1500s.
It's amazing how he's able to achieve,
with an engraving, the characteristic features
of northern European painting, like the effects of light
and shadow, the sense of texture, the sense of detail.
And also this idea of the solitary man, working at,
probably, the translation of the Bible that Jerome
is famous for.
That sense of devotion and solitary, pensive thought
is also rather northern.
We should also add that there are influences of Italian art
here.
It's quite evident that Durer has used one-point perspective.
In the early 1500s, there were not
many northern European artists who
had the mastery of perspective as Durer did.
BETH HARRIS: Yes, which he did.
DAVID DROGIN: Since he had travelled to Italy twice
in the 1480s.
BETH HARRIS: [? It's a bit ?] showing off here, I think.
DAVID DROGIN: Absolutely.