Prints and Printedness: Mark Making, Meaning, and Perceptions of Print in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how aesthetics of printedness—in particular, styles associated with professional engraving—were developed, interpreted, and deployed in the Netherlands in the long seventeenth-century. I pursue printedness by examining period commentaries alongside carefully chosen stress points and limit cases—instances where print syntax was pushed beyond its functional necessity, reduced to its essential features, or isolated from print’s materiality in processes of intermedial transfer or hybridization. My objects of study include prints that call attention to their means of rendering—either through flamboyant stylistic displays or by deploying disparate styles side by side—as well as paintings and drawings that emulate print aesthetics to various ends. Examining these varied invocations of printedness, I argue that certain styles of printmaking had valences including but not limited to mechanical objectivity, facticity, and a transferral or elision of authorship. Chapter 1 considers the professional print style developed and codified by reproductive engravers across Europe in the later sixteenth century to elide their own hands in favor of showing others’ designs. The hallmarks of this style are regularity of hatching and consistency of mark, features essential to its codification as a style that could present itself as objective and unaffected: as a non-style. I trace how the style developed and was conceptualized in the seventeenth century in ways that explicitly engaged its rhetoric of transparency, shaping the perception and understanding of professional print style well into the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 explores these notions—transparency of style, authorial transfer, and mechanical regularity—with respect to the work of Hendrick Goltzius, an artist who constantly engaged with print syntax and its implications. His works often call attention to the way hatching can remake the world, highlighting moments of metamorphosis and material ambiguity by showing pure hatching as it develops into form. He was famous for a series of prints imitating the styles of previous artists, performing acts of self-erasure that paradoxically highlighted his own virtuosity. Highly attuned to intermediality—he explored the syntax of engraving not only in print, but also in painting and drawing. Chapter 3 investigates intersections of print and drawing, then grouped together under the critical category of teycken-const (art of delineation), though both were increasingly defined against each other in this period. Copying prints was also central to drawing pedagogy, and printed drawing books provided models for this purpose. Printed drawing books provide insights into how different print styles were used to call attention to some syntaxes while deemphasizing others, and copies drawn by amateur and professional artists reveal how they perceived and interpreted print styles. Chapter 4 looks at lines and linearity conceived broadly, starting with penschilderijen, a peculiar genre of marine paintings made in a style imitative of prints. Its practitioners were not trained painters, but came from various backgrounds including tile painters, bookkeepers, and silversmiths, and for them print style offered a facticity and clarity of description associated with engraving. Some of them were calligraphers, and the chapter pivots to looking at resonances between engraving and calligraphy, both arts concerned with how lines organize to create meaning. I conclude by contextualizing these within contemporary theorizations of a universal mathematics that could describe all of the world and its movements in a rudimentary sign system, an idea I relate to standardized professional print syntax.