Intaglio process
By the 16th century, though, some names had become synonymous with fine line engraving. As Anthony Gross points out in his Etching, engraving, & intaglio printing, most were known to us by their work only, historians having invented names for them based on their prints – ‘Master of the Playing Cards’, ‘Master of the Garden of Love’ and ‘Master of Saint John the Baptist’. We are fortunate to know their names, since so few early engravers have been identified. It would be almost a century later, in 1562, when the first depiction, by Balthasar Jenichen, of an engraver at work on a copper printing plate appeared. Though engravings on metal emerged as early as the 1430s, the earliest illustrated act of engraving on a metal plate appeared in c1465, when Baccio Baldini engraved a goldsmith at work on a flat, rectangular plate in his shop. It likely found its origin in the workshops of the gold- and silversmiths, where the craftsmen not only used the method to decorate and inscribe their metalwork, they generated printed impressions as a means of recording it. Line engraving, with its prints comprised of incised lines, was the most widely adopted, and probably earliest, method of intaglio engraving.