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Was Pollaiuolo an Engraver?
Abstract
In 1938, in his 7-volume Early Italian Engraving, Arthur Hind wrote: “With a few exceptions, of which Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Mantegna are the most notable, the early Italian engravers are artists of secondary importance, craftsmen who never had the same status ... [as] the painters, sculptors and architects, in the society of the time.” The singling out of Pollaiuolo and Mantegna seemed perhaps to imply a doubt on Hind’s part about their exceptional status, but his text betrays no hint of doubt. As early as 1943, however, Erica Tietze-Conrat published an article entitled “Was Mantegna an Engraver?” She contested the received wisdom, stating her belief that the answer to her question was “no.” A half century later, working on the Mantegna exhibition of 1992, I came to the same conclusion as Tietze-Conrat. In 2000, an important corroborative document was discovered, a contract of 1475 in which Mantegna hired the goldsmith Gian Marco Cavalli to make engravings. And by 2013, Sharon Gregory could write: “the general consensus now seems to be that Mantegna never actually engraved his own prints.” Recently I have been thinking about this same question regarding the other artist in Hind’s statement, i.e.: Was Pollaiuolo an engraver? My belief is that the answer is also “no”. Pollaiuolo is generally believed to have made just one engraving, the well-known large Battle of Nude Men, inscribed OPUS ANTONII POLLAIOLI FLORENTTINI. I will show why I believe this inscription identifies the designer, but not the engraver.
