Inventing engraving’s origins: Unrecorded print attributed to Maso Finiguerra.
[Maso Finiguerra] / [Engraving]. [Adoration of the Shepherds]. S.l.: inscribed in the plate “Finiguerra Fecit 1457” and “M. F. 1457.” Folio [25.4 x 16.2 cm; laid to sheet which 26.0 x 16.9; which in turn is laid to 37.8 x 24.3 sheet], [1] f. engraving, small (5 x 5 mm) loss to lower left corner completed in facsimile, manuscript annotations, laid to two sheets of paper, borders drawn on largest sheet, minor toning, wrinkling, and edge wear, remnants of mounting on verso, early inv. no. in bottom corner, codes on verso.
Unrecorded—and rather enigmatic—Adoration of the Shepherds print purportedly executed by Maso Finiguerra (1426-64), who was long considered to be the inventor of the art of engraving. Inscriptions engraved in the plate read “Finiguerra Fecit 1457” and “M. F. 1457.” An 18th-century(?) manuscript note written directly on the print states that this early engraving is by Maso, who was the inventor of the medium according to Vasari, [Filippo] Baldinucci (1625-96), “and others” (“Stampa de primi tempi e si dice possa essere di Maso che in Firenze ne fù l’inventore Baldinucci e Vasari ed altri”).
These are astounding claims, but there is no need to rewrite the history of printmaking: The item is no doubt an early forgery repurposing a preexisting copperplate. It likely was produced to dupe/satisfy a print collector or scholar who, having read Vasari, et al., was in search of an authentic print by Maso Finiguerra.
Nowhere on the print is the source of the design indicated, but it is, in fact, an image of the ‘Madonna della Vittoria,’ a panel painting located above the high altar of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Today the church is famed for housing Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, but it was dedicated to this miraculous painting in 1622. The panel is said to have been desecrated (the eyes of the figures gouged out) by Protestants in Prague at the start of the Thirty Years War. The picture was discovered by the Carmelite Domenico di Gesù Maria (1559-1630), who used it to inspire Catholic forces to victory in 1620 at the Battle of White Mountain. The panel soon found its way to Rome.
There soon appeared a handful of early printed reports about the miraculous Madonna della Vittoria. These sometimes included a printed image of the panel (e.g., Relazione della processione e feste fatte in Roma per la vittoria havuta contra gl’heretici e ribelli della Boemia [Rome: Mascardi, 1622]). Such engravings, however, are vignettes or 12mo- or 8vo-sized. The ‘Maso Finiguerra’ engraving offered here is larger, folio-sized, and is in fact the exact dimensions of the panel painting. (Note that the original panel was destroyed by fire in 1853, and that the painting today hanging in Sta. Maria della Vittoria is an early reproduction.)
Why then was a copperplate of the Madonna della Vittoria inscribed with Maso’s name and passed off as an incunable of the art of engraving? I can only hypothesize that, in the 18th or early 19th century, someone in possession of a copperplate—engraved with an Quattrocento-style design—responded to the demand for a Maso Finiguerra original by filling in a gap in the historical record. He likely did not even know that the copperplate depicted the Madonna della Vittoria, and, if he did, he certainly believed that his potential client for the forgery would be ignorant of subject matter.
Antony Griffiths, in his “William Smith (1808-76) and the Rise of Interest in Early Engraving” (in Antony Griffiths, ed., Landmarks in Print Collecting: Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum Since 1753, pp. 90-112), provides a succinct history of the moment in early print collecting out of which our forgery was likely born, and I quote it here at some length:
“From the days of Vasari, writing in 1568, the subject of the discovery of engraving by the Florentine goldsmith Maso Finiguerra had been part of scholarly enquiry into the history of printmaking …
“Through most of the eighteenth century the Finiguerra problem remained a matter of concern to only a few. The great French connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette was interested in this matter and in 1732 asked his Florentine correspondent Francesco Maria Niccolo Gabburri to find him a print by Finiguerra. Gabburri replied: ‘I have rummaged all Florence, hoping to have the good fortune to discover at least one print bearing the name or the cypher of that artist. But after having in vain searched the museums of the Gaddi, the Niccolini, the Giraldi and Covoni families, besides many other smaller collections belonging to private persons ... I have at last given the matter up in despair.’ Mariette himself had announced his intention to publish a treatise on this subject, and for decades the scholarly world waited in eager anticipation for his conclusions. But nothing ever came out.
“By the end of the century the matter had become of more general significance. Vasari had claimed the invention for Finiguerra, but German scholars were now asserting that the Germans had invented it before him—correctly, as modern scholarship has decided. So it became a matter of great importance to Italian scholars to demonstrate the accuracy of Vasari’s report. Vasari had said that Finiguerra was a niellist—that is, he specialised in engraving decorative designs on to pieces of metalwork, and then filling these lines with ‘niello’, a black substance that made them stand out against the silver background. One day Finiguerra had thought of filling the lines with ink rather than niello, and by rubbing, transferring the design to paper. Hence the invention of engraving as an art of printing rather than simply metal-decorating. Vasari had identified as Finiguerra’s work a pax of The Coronation of the Virgin in Florence that still survived. So if an impression on paper could be found from this pax before the lines had been filled with niello, Vasari’s report could be confirmed.
“The momentous discovery of just such an impression was made by an Italian scholar, the Abbé Zani, in 1797, in a volume in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and he published his find in 1802. Zani knew a number of Italian collectors who were interested in these precious documents of Italian ingenuity. Their interest embraced not only nielli (the term used for prints from such plates), but the plates themselves, the sulphur casts that were very occasionally made from them as an alternative to paper impressions, and the printed engravings from plates made specifically for that purpose” (Griffiths, pp. 91-2).
I have discovered no other examples of the print offered here. While forged nielli-style prints attributed to Maso are known to have invaded eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print collections (see, e.g., Richard Fisher, Introduction to a Catalogue of the Early Italian Prints in the British Museum [1888], pp. 32-47), conventionally executed engravings attributed to him are all but unknown.
* A. Griffiths, “William Smith (1808-76) and the Rise of Interest in Early Engraving,” in A. Griffiths, ed., Landmarks in Print Collecting: Connoisseurs and Donors at the British Museum Since 1753, pp. 90-112; L. Whitaker, “Maso Finiguerra and Early Florentine Printmaking,” in S. Currier, ed., Drawing, 1400-1600: Invention and Innovation, pp. 45-71.