The Mystic Line at the Hammer

Claude Mellan, The Sudarium of Saint Veronica, 1649. UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum

Claude Mellan was a prolific engraver of 17th-century France, known for his printed portrait gallery of aristocrats and intellectuals. Yet Mellan's contemporary reputation rests largely on a single print that straddles fine art and believe-it-or-not. It's the face of Jesus, executed as a single spiraling line, 492 ft long. 

Mellan's engraving, The Sudarium of Saint Veronica, is now on view in the UCLA Hammer Museum's "Groove: Artists and Intaglio Prints, 1500 to Now" (through June 16, 2024). Christian legend holds that a woman named Veronica gave Jesus a cloth to wipe his face as he was carrying his cross to Cavalry. His likeness was miraculously imprinted on the cloth—a "print" before the fact. Mellan's interpretation is a picture of a miraculous picture, an immodest comparison of his mortal genius to a holy relic "not made by hand."

Detail of The Sudarium of Saint Veronica

Mellan used a burin to gouge a copper plate. He started at the nose and spiraled outward, counterclockwise. (A print reverses, so it looks like he worked clockwise.) By gouging deeper, he created chiarascuro. The marvel is that he was able to do this while continuously rotating the plate, with no easy way of correcting an error.

Installation view. Photo by Jeff McLane

"Groove" skews phantasmagoric throughout its six-century range. It's a sample of intaglio printing (engravings and etchings, mainly) from the Grunwald Center collection, spanning two famous Renaissance puzzle pictures (Dürer's Melancolia I and Giorgio Ghisi's Allegory of Life), an 18th-century sea monster, Félix Bracquemond's dismal Christmas tree of vermin, and meditations on the strangeness of 21st-century life by Barry McGee. Many of the artists are represented by multiple works.

Albrecht Dürer, Melancolia I, 1514

Nicolaus Mettle, The True Picture of a Sea Dragon or Sea Wonder, Which Has 384 Teeth in Its Jaws, 1770s

Félix Bracquemond, Les taupes (The Moles), 1854

Barry McGee, one of ten prints from Drypoint on Acid, 2006

Nicole Eisenman, Watermark, 2012. (c) Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman turned to etching in 2011, studying with three master printers in New York. Watermark is an artist's eye perspective of Eisenman's children visiting their grandparent's home in Maine. The titles of the books on the shelves tell stories of the viewer's making: "Social Register… Goon Squad… Snobs… For Whom the Bell Tolls…"

Detail of Watermark