Mezzotint is a way of making prints that works from dark to light. The artist begins by roughening a whole copper plate until it would print solid black.
Parts of that surface are then smoothed back down, a little for the half tones, the grays in between, and completely for the highlights. The finished print has no lines, only tones that shade into one another.
The name is Italian, made of mezzo, "half," and tinta, "tone." Before this technique, a printed shadow was built from strokes. Engravers and etchers darkened an area by laying lines close together or crossing them, a method called hatching, and up close the eye could always pick them out.
The French gave the new process a name of their own, la manière noire, the dark manner, because every mezzotint begins as a black plate.
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Two men have a claim to the invention. The first, Ludwig von Siegen, was a German lieutenant colonel working in Amsterdam, and his portrait dated 1642 is the earliest known mezzotint.
The second is Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a Bohemian prince living in exile. Sixteen years after Siegen's portrait, he made The Great Executioner, the print at the top of this page, which shows an executioner holding the severed head of Saint John the Baptist.
For a long time, the invention carried Rupert's name. As a prince and a soldier, he was far better known than Siegen, and a story grew up around him. In Brussels, the tale goes, he saw a sentinel busy with a musket that the night dew had rusted.
The pitted barrel, so the story runs, gave him the idea of making a picture out of roughened metal. It may well be a legend, and the dates favor Siegen.
Ludwig von Siegen's portrait
Siegen's print shows Amelia Elizabeth, landgravine of Hesse-Cassel, the noblewoman then at the head of that German state, who had been his patron…
What You'll Discover
How a picture comes out of a black plate.
Why mezzotint suited copies of oil paintings.
What Rupert's rocker marks still show.
Why the plates wore out so quickly.
How London made it the English manner.