Halftone engraving

Berceau.

The “half-tone engraving” (from Italian mezzo-tinta), “engraving in the black manner” (French manière noire) or smoke engraving is a type of printing made using the intaglio method that, unlike other direct engraving techniques such as burin engraving and point dry, purely linear, it manages to reproduce shades and chiaroscuro.

Procedure

The plate must be prepared by roughening its surface, so that its inking gives rise to a deep black that is later tinted until it achieves midtones and white, through a polishing process. To achieve the granulation of the plate, the grainer and the berceau (or scraper) are used, and the whites are achieved on the black using burnishers and scrapers. Black can also be achieved by repeatedly using the aquatint technique on the plate until a deep black tone is achieved, this technique being known as "false black manner".

The necessary instruments are different types of rattles and the halftone grainer, a heavy tool with a semicircular serrated blade, which when applied with a rocking movement on the copper sheet leaves the marks of the teeth on the surface, leaving this covered with fine parallel grooves bordered by barbas, as in the drypoint engraving technique.

It is a long and tedious procedure, since the artist has to work by graining first in one direction and then at right angles in that direction, then diagonally in both directions and finally between all the diagonals, so that the entire surface is finely granulated. If the sheet were inked and stamped at this stage of the process, the resulting image would be a consistent velvety black.

The engraver must create the image by removing the roughness of the plate surface, reducing or in some cases completely eliminating the engraver's marks. When the image is finished, the sheet is inked and the engraving is stamped. The plate progressively crushes the granules, so this technique does not allow the reproduction of a large number of specimens.

The tonal gradations from the areas of consistent black to those of pure white produce strong contrasts, which make halftone especially suitable for the chiaroscuro technique, which is why it was widely used to reproduce paintings, especially in the 18th century, being later its place occupied by the aquatint engraving.

History

Portrait of Amalia Isabel de Hanau-Münzenberg (1642), by Ludwig von Siegen, first recorded in half ink.

Its invention is attributed to the German soldier Ludwig von Siegen, a lieutenant colonel in the service of Landgrave Wilhelm VI of Hesse-Kassel who in 1642 made the portrait of Amalia Elizabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg in this technique. Later he was in the service of Prince Rupert of the Rhine in Brussels, to whom he taught the procedure.However, the authorship of the invention is not fully established. On the date that Siegen made the first engraving of him, the Flemish painter Wallerant Vaillant also made some engravings in this technique, so it is difficult to establish which of the two was the first. A few years later, the British engraving historian John Evelyn awarded his invention to Prince Rupert, who had published some prints with this technique in London. For all these reasons, in 1656 Siegen began to sign his works as "the first and true inventor of this genre".