Learning to Look:  Renaissance Engravings at the Cleveland Museum of Art

A remarkable, landmark exhibition is hiding in plain sight in the print galleries of the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Organized by Emily Peters, the museum’s print curator, the show presents an amazing selection of masterpieces, and it has wall labels that glow with superb scholarship.  It’s a world-class production. 

That said, it’s not a show for the casual viewer who just strolls through the galleries. Rather, it is built for those interested in learning to look closely and–as it were–enter the creative mind of the Renaissance artist as he struggled to give concrete form to his inner vision.  If you’d like to do some serious time travel back to the world of the Italian and northern Renaissance, this is a good place to do that. 

Unlike many other museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which holds well over a million prints, the print collection at Cleveland is not very large.  But it holds some of the world’s rarest and most important early engravings, including the only known first state of Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Battle of the Nudes and unique impressions by quite a number of other early masters.  Many of the prints were acquired through the Print Club of Cleveland, the museum’s first affiliate group, founded in 1919 by Ralph King. 

Serious print collecting, like stamp collecting, is a somewhat arcane field in its own right and serious, focused collectors often become the leading experts in some particular zone of the field.  Cleveland benefitted from a very dedicated group of pioneering collectors who started early enough to acquire rarities of a sort which almost never come on the art market today.

The use of engraving to make prints developed rather rapidly in both Italy and Germany between about the 1430s and 1460s, and seems to have grown out of the work of armor-makers and goldsmiths.  Armor-makers, for example, decorated armor by incising or etching ornamental designs in steel.  At some point it occurred to someone to use incised designs of this sort to make prints. 

But successfully making this shift required a number of technical advances, such as shifting from steel which is very hard, to a softer metal, copper; and developing new forms of ink that were intensely black enough to be visible when printed in fine lines.  

Wood-block prints can’t achieve such fine lines.  Engraving on copper introduced a fineness of detail that revolutionized the way that intense realism could be achieved in prints.  But engraving had disadvantages as well.  Since copper is easily scratched, it became necessary to work on a copper engraving in carefully masked-off areas, only a few square inches at a time, and the work was intricate and laborious.  Producing one of Albrecht Dürer’s large engravings took months of intensely focused work, with no allowance for mistakes.  And since copper is soft the plate wears out rather rapidly.  After a few hundred impressions the image starts to get smudgy and blurred.  Compared with woodcuts, engravings were expensive luxury items. 

Essentially, copper engraving seems to have started off in Renaissance Italy, notably in Florence, in ways that were rather crude.  A few decades later it achieved much greater technical progress in northern Europe, in the hands of figures such as Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden.  But since prints are easily distributed, there was a good deal of influence back-and forth.  Dürer’s work, for example, was very precisely copied in Italy by Marcantonio Raimondi, an instance of outrageous artistic theft which triggered one of the first legal suits about artistic copyright. 

In addition to the outstanding quality of the prints on view, the scholarship that went into this exhibition is inspiring.  Essentially, Emily Peters worked in partnership with a contemporary engraver to get a full understanding of the specific techniques employed by each of the artists on view.  In January of 2026, Andrew Raftery–a master engraver and printmaking professor at the Rhode Island School of Design–came to the museum and closely examined every print in the show with Peters. This information is conveyed in extremely informative, clearly written labels, which illuminate technical matters and also zero in on the precise way that different artists made marks, and handled gradations of shadow from light to dark—the strangely abstract, experimental mark-making enterprise that’s central to creating a convincingly realistic image.  In other words, the exhibition invites us to move beyond our surface enjoyment of subject matter and examine the ingenious process by which it was achieved. 

Albrecht Dürer, for example, liked strong contrasts of light and dark, which makes his prints carry in a forceful way.  Lucas van Leyden used more gentle transitions between light and dark, which encourages the viewer to scan the image in a gentler way, without breaking the image apart into different sectors.  Every artist developed his own personal language of contour lines, cross-hatching and little flicks and dashes, sometimes in a way that’s so finely drawn that this abstract language is almost invisible.  A miracle of this sort is a nude by to Giulio Campagnola in which a complex language of marks creates a very unique, velvety texture of tonal gradations, but is so finely executed that the incredible variety of the lines, dashes and dots is difficult to discern.  Even if he had a magnifying lens it’s thoroughly astonishing that Campagnola achieved such mastery of detail.

This is an exhibition one shouldn’t rush through.  While seemingly small, there’s too much to take in all at once.  And technical explanations, even when well written, often take a moment to fully grasp.  The best way to go through the show is to carefully read each of the labels and then to carefully study each print that the label describes.  If your brain is tired after looking at just a few prints that’s okay.  Careful reading, and careful looking at just a few prints, will open up a whole new appreciation of the Italian and Northern Renaissance and of print-making as an art form.  Best to go slow, not rush, not feel you need to take in everything. 

Criticism?  Not exactly.  But exhibition schedules often rush forward too quickly to present scholarship that’s in-the-works in definitive form.  Hopefully this show can be restaged in a few years accompanied by a solid book-sized catalogue—that is to say, a big book for a show that’s not very large in size.  Much of the information in the labels for this exhibition is new, and to my knowledge there’s no book that sets forth the development of Renaissance engraving so intelligently and clearly.  In 1946 William Ivins, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, published a pioneering book titled How Prints Look, which included photographic enlargements of details from famous prints.   It would be nice to do something of the sort in this instance, accompanied by a step-by-step explanation of the complex process of creating an engraving.   

Statement by Emily Peters

This exhibition is the culmination of years of thinking and looking for me. More than fifteen years ago, I had the opportunity to study early engravings with the artist and engraver Andrew Raftery, who transformed the way I think about printmaking as an art historian. Andrew is largely self-taught, learning to engrave by closely studying historical prints. He taught me see with an artist’s eye, that is to look for clues about precisely what the artist was doing when he made a print, and to try to figure out the technical and artistic challenges that he/she faced at every step. 

Andrew Rafferty’s tutelage made me realize that one of the earliest and most important audiences for engravings, beginning in the fifteenth century, was artists who wanted to learn the technique themselves. Before 1500 there was a great variety of regional approaches, but as new engravers adapted and expanded upon the work of their predecessors, they developed a masterful shared visual language that crossed national boundaries.  Dürer in particular unified regional differences into something more universal. I will add that the CMA’s Adam and Eve is the best impression I have ever laid eyes on, and overall this show provided a wonderful opportunity to highlight some of the greatest treasures of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

I’m thrilled that the readership of CAN Journal—which includes many artists–will see this.