Overview
The original illustrations for Banks’ Florilegium were done in ink and watercolour. Their reproductions were made from engravings on copper plate. The word engraving can refer to the process of preparing something for reproduction, and to the end product itself.
Engraving is one of the oldest techniques for incising marks on materials. However, line engraving has come to refer specifically to incising metal plates. Its greatest use was for making prints – reproducing multiple copies of drawings and paintings. The technique is thought to have originated in the work of German goldsmiths in the 15th century. Andrea Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods in Te Papa’s collection is a fine example from that time.
The technique produces sharp-edged lines on the prints made from the engraved plate. Copper was the metal favoured for a long time. It is soft enough to incise easily, but hard enough to take the wear from the squeeze of the press, so you can make a number of prints from the plate before the incisions are flattened.
The engraver works chiefly with a cutting tool called a ‘burin’. This makes v-shaped grooves, shallow or deep, swelling or tapering, depending on the pressure the engraver exerts and the angle at which the tool is held. To make curves, the engraver turns the plate to the tool. Other special tools are used, each making its distinctively shaped cut.
To make a print, the engraver fills the plate’s grooves with ink. A sheet of paper is laid on the plate, and plate and paper are passed through a press. The pressure of the rollers forces the paper into the inked lines, drawing the ink onto the paper, and transferring an impression of the image onto the sheet.
To reproduce multiple colour works such as the illustrations in Banks’ Florilegium, the different colours are applied to the plate by hand, using a ‘poupée’, or ‘dolly’, a wadge of cloth on the end of a stick, vaguely resembling a doll. Reproducing the original coloration is a painstaking process, and has to be repeated from the start for each individual print. For the 110 printed sets of Banks’ Florilegium, each of the 786 plates had to be re-inked 110 times, matching the original colours exactly every time. No wonder the whole work took some ten years to actually be printed!
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database.