Mercury, plate six from The Seven Planets with the Zodiacs 1539

Sebald Beham made this tiny engraving, Mercury, plate six from The Seven Planets with the Zodiacs, sometime in the first half of the 16th century. Engraving is an incisive process. The artist carves lines directly into a metal plate, which are then filled with ink and printed. The hardness of the metal allows for incredible detail, seen here in the god Mercury’s winged helmet and the caduceus he carries, the staff of commerce and negotiation. The medium lends itself to sharp contrast, evident in the stark definition of the figures against the background. Prints like this were relatively inexpensive and circulated widely in Beham’s time, spreading both classical knowledge and astrological ideas. Consider the labor involved, cutting these intricate lines into metal, in order to produce multiples. This speaks to the democratizing power of printmaking and the entrepreneurial spirit of artists like Beham, who straddled the worlds of art and craft. By attending to these aspects of material and making, we get a richer sense of the social role that prints played in the Renaissance.