Review: “The Renaissance Engraver at Work,” Cleveland Museum of Art
It’s curious how little we know about Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. Lawyers for one man who claimed to be Satoshi argued in a Norwegian courtroom that the pseudonym came from the Japanese for “ash,” since he wanted his invention to be the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the current monetary system. Reporters looked into it and found that this particular claimant wasn’t the inventor of Bitcoin. Moreover, they found that satoshi doesn’t mean ash, though it is the default name for the hero in the Japanese version of the original Pokémon game, aka “Ash” in America. That link feels appropriate. If you’re a Millennial there’s no real path to a retirement fund, apart from Bitcoin and Pokémon cards.
A similar gap in technological history is examined by “The Renaissance Engraver at Work,” a new show at the Cleveland Museum of Art that seeks to explore the early days of engraving in Europe. The medium emerged in the mid-1400s and remains somewhat mysterious, as scholars and curators still don’t really know how these early plates were cut or, in some cases, how they were printed. The museum holds some of the oldest and rarest early engravings in existence and for this show examined them using the paper lab’s stereomicroscope and a variety of light sources and magnification, “revealing material and technical details not visible to the naked eye,” which means whatever is visible now carries a whiff of scientific gravitas.
Not that a work called Battle of the Nudes ever risked seeming unimportant. Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s work from the 1470s or 1480s shows a group of naked men in a violent battle, weirder still because each one appears to be a clone of the same man. They’re amid foliage, but all boast rolling hills of muscles so it’s possible this was meant for the study of anatomy. It’s a beautiful abstraction of war without any of the legitimizing influence of a Bible story behind it—a fight to the death between NPCs.
Martin Schongauer’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1475-90) is no less compelling for being well-trod territory. Christ falls on a rocky landscape, almost swallowed by the crowd of uncaring onlookers. This work is likely based on a lost Jan Van Eyck painting, but it is in the engraving that we feel the texture of the cruelty. We see the vain intricacies of the soldier’s armor, the complicated weave of someone in a turban negotiating something. Richest of all is the wood grain right at the center of the work, the final moment of peace.
The works in this exhibition sometimes seem to refer to their own creation, as in Hendrick Goltzius’s The Farnesian Hercules, from Three Famous Antique Roman Statues (1592). The male nude seems to be the subject, but then we’re not actually seeing Hercules but a statue of him in the courtyard of the Farnese Palace that had been unearthed from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. In the right corner two contemporary fellows—Goltzius and his stepson—gaze up at the figure, their heads each as large as one of his buttocks. He is comically veiny and if the other nudes had hills of muscle, he has valleys. What can his admirers do but raise their eyebrows?
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