Engraving is a printmaking technique in which the artist cuts lines by hand into a copper plate, or another metal, with a small steel chisel called a burin.
Ink goes into the grooves, the surface is wiped clean, and a sheet of paper pressed hard onto the plate pulls the ink out of them.
The best known example is Melencolia I, a print about melancholy dated 1514, by the German artist Albrecht Dürer. A winged woman sits slumped with her head in her hand, surrounded by scattered tools and instruments, a ladder, a sleeping dog and a heavy stone block.
Every shadow in the scene, on her dress, on the stone and in the sky, is made of fine strokes dug into the copper. The name of the technique says as much. Engrave comes from grave, an old English verb that meant to dig or to carve, and the engraver works one line at a time.
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From the goldsmith's bench
The burin is older than the print. Goldsmiths used it to cut designs into silver, and the Florentine goldsmith Maso Finiguerra cut a Crucifixion into a pax, a small plaque the priest passed to the faithful to kiss during Mass as a sign of peace.
What Finiguerra then put into the cut lines of that silver was already very close to printing.
What You'll Discover
The signature Dürer hung on a tree.
How a burin turns pressure into shadow.
What Venice decided about the copied monogram.
How Raphael's drawings traveled without his hand.
Why the best printmakers eventually gave it up.