De zondeval 1504 - 1508

Lucas van Leyden created this tiny, intricate print, *The Fall of Man,* sometime in the early 16th century. The medium is engraving, meaning that the artist would have used a tool called a burin to manually carve lines into a copper plate. Look closely and you can see how the composition is built up from these marks, each one made through the direct application of hand pressure. It’s a demanding, time-consuming process, and the result has a crispness that is very different from a drawing or painting. Van Leyden was a virtuoso of this technique, and the print would have been sold and collected as a precious, finely wrought object. The industriousness that made the Northern Renaissance so remarkable is right there in the lines. A commercial transaction in the guise of a religious scene. Ultimately, thinking about the intense labor involved helps us understand that even images have a material history, and a social context.