Lente 1566

Pieter van der Heyden made this print, entitled ‘Lente,’ sometime in the 16th century. It’s an etching, meaning that the artist would have applied a waxy ground to a copper plate, drawn his design with a sharp needle, and then bitten the plate with acid. It's a relatively indirect way of making an image, but the payoff is in the incredible fineness of line, which you can see if you look closely. The texture is so precise, it almost resembles the work of a silver- or goldsmith. And that’s no coincidence: etching was a new technology at this time, and many of its earliest practitioners had a background in metalwork. This print would have been one of many, produced for sale on the open market. So we can see it as part of the rise of the commercial art world, and also of printmaking as a kind of proto-industrial process. It was this capacity for reproduction that gave prints their power – making images and ideas available to a wide public.