"The Chiaroscuro Woodcut" at LACMA

Ugo da Carpi (after Raphael or Giulio Romano?), Hercules and the Nemean Lion, c. 1517-18

Chiaroscuro woodcuts are Renaissance pictures printed from multiple wood blocks, in more than one color of ink. The process was not unlike the more colorful Japanese prints of the Edo period, but the goal was to achieve painterly dimensionality rather than full color. German printmaker and publisher Jost de Negker was making such woodcuts by 1510. That didn't stop an Italian artist, Ugo da Carpi (c. 1480-1523), from claiming the medium as his own invention and demanding a patent in 1516. The rest is art history, as told in LACMA's "The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy," a major, international loan show with over a hundred carefully chosen impressions.

The exhibition positions Ugo and his successors Antonio da Trento, Niccolò Vicento, and Andrea Andreani as major, though underappreciated, Renaissance artists. Their role was something like a film director or even a studio head. They hired artists to adapt the work of other artists.

Hokusai, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

That raises the question: Who is the auteur of a chiaroscuro woodcut? We might as well ask who created Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. We say it was Katsushika Hokusai, of course, for he designed the image to be marketed around his brand. But it's not that simple. Japanese prints were intensively collaborative, with skilled block-cutters and printers contributing to the end result. The same goes for the Italian prints.

Ugo, for instance, collaborated with Titian and Parmigiano and pirated Raphael. The LACMA show includes prints after—sometimes long after—Mantegna, Giulio Romano, Pordenone, Giambologna, and other boldface names of the Renaissance. Such prints have been dismissed as reproductive. But major painters saw the value in having portable, inexpensive versions of their work. They also must have recognized that chiaroscuro can achieve painterly effects as the most masterful engraving cannot.

Domenico Beccafumi, St. Philip, probably 1540s

There was one painter-printmaker of the chiaroscuro medium. Domenico Beccafumi, the last great artist of the Sienese school, carved and printed his own woodblocks. A room of the show is devoted to him, but Beccafumi was an outlier in this regard.

The exhibition seems timely given the collaborative nature of much contemporary art. The chiaroscuro process challenged the notion of authorship; and from Ugo onward the medium was often predicated on appropriations of intellectual property. Consider Antonio da Trento, who in Vasari's unreliable narration "opened a strongbox, stole all [Parmigianino's] copperplates, woodblocks, and drawings, and must have gone to the devil for all that was ever heard from him."

"The Chiaroscuro Woodcut" runs through Sep. 16, 2018, and travels to the National Gallery of Art.

Andrea Andreani, The Triumphs of Caesar, after Mantegna's paintings