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A Painter's Medium: Etching in Venice and Verona
From about 1530 to 1560, following Parmigianino's printmaking activities in Bologna, etching was mainly a northern Italian phenomenon. The medium flourished in the wealthy cities of Venice and Verona, deployed primarily by painters who, like Parmigianino, were skillful draftsmen. Artists such as Battista del Moro, Angelo Falconetto, and Battista Franco delighted in the technique's proximity to drawing and its rich aesthetic possibilities. They produced a variety of prints, from carefully executed figural compositions after some of the leading artists of the day to landscapes drawn in a free and fluid manner. Indeed, etching was particularly well suited to the depiction of landscape, a subject that developed as an autonomous genre during the period and was widely appreciated among a new generation of connoisseur collector.
By the early 1560s, etching had evolved from a sporadic production, representing only a tiny proportion of the prints produced in Italy, into a favored medium of professionals working in the extremely successful print, book, and map industries in Venice and Rome. |