What can be drawn from the etymologies of words to do with relief and intaglio printmaking? It has become noticeable to me through comparative study of the interweaving histories of the distinct methods of making prints that some methods and prints carry more cachet than others. Can etymology throw any light on the process? This was brought into focus by my coming across in …. The etymology of ‘cliché’ as the metal imprint of a wood-engraving used for stereotyping, a quick method of producing a large number of printing matrices in order to print on a number of presses simultaneously.
A list of etymologies, mainly using the Online Etymology Dictionary etymonline.com, which I have found to be reliable, and the Oxford English Dictionary.
Print – to print, meaning to make a mark from an impression, as from a seal, is c 1350 prenten, from Old French (from which it goes into various Germanic languages); the use of prenten for ‘to set a mark on a surface’ is from the late 1300s. Caxton used enprynte for his products in 1474. ‘A print’ is from early 1600s. The source is Old French preinte, from Latin premere.
Press – Presse is found in English from c1300 presumably for a clothes press, from French via Latin pressare. But late Old English also had press for a clothes press.
Relief – about 1600, from the French relief, from Italian rilievo ‘something raised’, from Latin relevare ‘to raise’.
Woodcut – ‘wood’ is from Old English wudu meaning ‘tree, trees, forest, the substance of wood’, from conjectural proto-Germanic widu.
‘Cut’ is from about 1300, presumed to be from Old English non-attested cyttan. Or possibly from Scandinavian sources, via conjectural North Germanic kut (non-attested), which is the source of Swedish dialectal kuta ‘to cut’, kuta ‘knife’, and Old Norse kuti ‘knife’; alternatively from Old French couteau ‘knife’.
Wood engraving (and engrave) – ‘engrave’ is mid 1400s, either based on French engraver, or from ‘to grave’, from the Old English grafan ‘to dig, carve’, the source of the noun ‘grave’. Similar words in Dutch, German, Gothic, and Old Norse argue a proto-Germanic grabanan (non-attested). The French engraver, according to Dauzat (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, Albert Dauzat, 1954) derives from the Frankish non-attested graben.
Copper – The late Old English coper was from Proto-Germanic unattested kupar (giving Middle Dutch koper, Old Norse koparr, Old High German kupfar), but these came into Germanic from coprum a variant Latin form of the Classical Latin Cyprium aes ‘Cyprian metal’.
Etch – in English from 1630s, from Dutch etsen (and NB the common etch for copper is still called ‘Dutch mordant’, ‘mordant’ meaning ‘biting’, from Old French mordant ‘biting’, from Latin mordere ‘to bite, sting’); this is from the German ätzen ‘to etch’, from Old High German azzon ‘give to eat; cause to bite, feed’, which is from the non-attested Proto-Germanic atjanan ‘to make eat’, itself from etanan ‘eat’, from the Indo-European root ed ‘eat’.
Drypoint – ‘Dry’ is from Middle English drie from Old English dryge, from Proto-Germanic non-attested draugiz, the source of Middle Low German dröge, Middle Dutch druge, Dutch droog, Old High German trucchon, German trocken, Old Norse draugr); the Germanic root is the non-attested dreug ‘dry’.
‘Point’ is in Middle English, from the Latin punctum meaning ‘small hole made by pricking’, which developed to include any small dot. Punctum developed into Old French point ‘dot, smallest amount’ which was adopted into Middle English by about 1300. Another, reinforcing, source was the Latin pungere ‘to prick, pierce’ gave puncta, Medieval Latin for ‘a sharp tip’, which developed into Old French pointe ‘point of a weapon, vanguard of an army’, which passed into English in the 1300s. The OED’s citation for the sharp point of a tool, for the point of a compass, is 1392, but there are earlier 14thcentury citations for needles and swords.
Intaglio – This is Italian, coming into English about 1660, from the word for engraved or incised work, from intagliare ‘to cut in, engrave’.
Pull – Old English pullian ‘to pluck off, to draw out’, is of unknown origin, but perhaps related to Low German pulen ‘to remove the shell or husk’, Frisian pûlje ‘to shell peas, husk’, Middle Dutch polen ‘to peel, strip’, and Icelandic pula ‘to work hard’, Middle Dutch pōlen ‘to shell (peas, etc.)’, West Frisian piele ‘to tinker, fiddle, potter’. The OED admits that the etymology is uncertain, and the range of applications in northern Germanic languages is very, sometimes startlingly wide, but the source is clearly Germanic.
Turn – Late Old English turnian ‘to rotate, revolve’ was reinforced in Middle English by Old French torner ‘to turn away or around; draw aside, cause to turn; change, transform; turn on a lathe’. The source for both was Latin tornare ‘to polish, round off, fashion, turn on a lathe’, from the Latin tornus ‘lathe’, from Greek tornos ‘lathe, compass’; the Indo-European root was tere ‘to rub, turn’.
Burin – The French burin was cognate with the Italian bolino and borino, Spanish buril, Portuguese buril, and Old Spanish boril; the OED suggests these may come from the Old High German bora ‘boring-tool’, but I think the Romance/Germanic divide raises doubts. The ‘burr’, the curved material lifted off when using the burin, is not related, its curvature, or more likely its sharpness, possibly relating it to Scandinavian words for seed-heads.
Knife – The late Old English cnif was from Old Norse knifr, stemming from Proto-Germanic unattested knibaz (giving Middle Low German knif, Middle Dutch cnijf, and German kneif).
Gouge – Attested in English from the late 1400s, this is from Old French gouge, from the Late Latin gubia, probably of Celtic origin - the OED cites Old Irish gulba‘rostrum’, modern Welsh gylf ‘beak’, and Cornish gilb ‘boring tool’. But the French is related to Spanish gúbia, Portuguese goiva, Italian gubbia, gorbia, all of which are from the late Latin gubia and gulbia in Isidore’s Etymologies.
Draw – There is a common Germanic model seen in the Old Saxon dragan, Old High German tragen, Old Norse draga, Gothic (ga)dragan; in Old English this is dragan, with the sense, shared with Old Norse, of ‘pull, draw’ – in other languages it means ‘to bear or carry’. The sense of creating an image on a surface is from about 1530.
My longstanding hypothesis is that wood-based printmaking was of a lower status than metal-based printmaking, from the earliest period of printing. Woodcuts were used for pictorial narrative and decorative purposes; engraving was for describing scientific information, and for producing copies of paintings. Durer progressed from primarily wood-based work to primarily metal-engraving. Scientific representation moved from wood-based work to metal-based image-making. Woodcuts provided emblems, while engravings provided representations of specimens. To put it theoretically, copper-plate engraving provided an objective truth, while woodcuts provided a subjective truth. Comparing the woodcuts in Henry Lyte’s Niewe Herball of 1578 with Beatrizet’s moray eel from twenty years earlier, we see the plant laid out as a type of a flower, an idealised form, while the eel is an individual animal.
Not that engraving did not have to work through artifice. Marc Antonio Raimondi, working in Venice and then Rome at the start of the 16thcentury, initiated the process of engraving copies of paintings, working from paintings by Raphael and Peruzzi. He created a system of lines based on the linear shading of Durer’s woodcuts and his engravings, which allowed a spatial description of form, which became the standard style for line engraving. Vesalius’ book on Anatomy De humani corporis fabrica, from 1543, included engravings by engravers from the workshop of Titian, where the cut line is used to create space, form, and the direction of muscle simultaneously. Perhaps it is Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) that established without doubt engraving as the visual language of the illustration of science. Hooke was the first to publish a book of images engraved from his drawingsof items seen through both microscope and telescope; the process involved translation through several visual and technological stages. Henry Power’s Experimental philosophy, published in 1664, was distinct in that it used woodcuts. Decades later Hogarth used engraving to disseminate an idea of social truth through his copies of his paintings and his political caricatures. Meanwhile woodcut had become the printmaking method of choice for chapbooks, cheap books for children and the poor.
How does etymology support this? If we divide the terms above into Latin/French-based and Germanic-based camps, we see the definitely Latin/French include ‘print’, ‘intaglio’ and ‘turn’; the definitely Germanic include ‘press’, ‘wood’, ‘woodcut’, ‘etch’, ‘pull’, ‘knife’, and ‘draw’. ‘Engrave’, ‘copper’, ‘drypoint’ include aspects or transitions through both areas of linguistic influence, while ‘burin’ and ‘gouge’, both tool-words are more widespread in their possible origins. ‘Burin’ feels French though, as does ‘engrave’; their nearest points of contact to English are French. There is a sense in which the words of the delicate – even, referring to the hypothesis, more authoritative – processes – ‘burin’, ‘engrave’, ‘turn’, ‘intaglio’, ‘copper’ (and to this list could be added ‘edition’, ‘signature’, ‘portfolio’) are all Latin and French-based words; while the less delicate processes and materials – ‘etch’, ‘press’, ‘woodcut’, ‘knife’ – are Germanic in origin.
Can language be used to support the hypothesis? Absolutely, it guides our attitudes – if woodcut were instead called dendrographology we would view it differently; if copperplate engraving were called metal-cut it would be considerably downgraded.
Isidore of Seville, d 636, was the author of The Etymologies, an encyclopedia based on summaries of what from the classical world the Christian church thought worth preserving. The Vatican considered naming Isidore the patron saint of the internet (this is according to Wikipedia; given the wildness of some of Isidore’s proposals, it is surprising that nobody suggested that it might have been more appropriate to name him as the patron saint of Wikipedia). One section of the vast work deals with etymologies, and through its often erroneous proposals promotes the idea that the deep meaning of a word is embedded in its history. For example, ‘the walking stick (baculus) is said to have been invented by Bacchus, the discoverer of the grape vine, so that people affected by wine might be supported by it.’ Or the idea that the word ‘foetus’ derives from fovere‘to keep warm’.
This is now known as the etymological fallacy and we consider it naïve and misleading. But from the above we see that what a word conveys is not just the thing it signifies; the construction, length and form of the word matters, and these are created by the language and the sociological, cultural and historical environment that formed and were facilitated by that language. A word is not just its meaning – ‘execute’ means the same as ‘behead’, ‘show’ the same as ‘demonstrate’, ‘people’ the same as ‘population’. Their connotations, the back-story and environment they imply are hugely different.
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