Maso Finiguerra - Controversy Over Vasari's Claim

Controversy Over Vasari's Claim

But the paragraph of Vasari which has chiefly held the attention is that in which he gives Finiguerra credit of having been the first to print impressions from niello plates on sulfur casts and afterwards on sheets of paper, and of having followed up this invention by engraving copperplates for the express purpose of printing impressions, and thus the inventor of the art of engraving for printing and printmaking. Finiguerra, adds Vasari, was succeeded in the practice of engraving at Florence by a goldsmith called Baccio Baldini, who borrowed his designs from other artists and especially from Botticelli. In the last years of the 18th century, Vasari's account of Finiguerra's invention was held to have received a decisive and startling confirmation under the following circumstances. There was in the Baptistery at Florence (now in the Bargello) a beautiful 15th-century niello pax of the Coronation of the Virgin. The Abate Gori, a connoisseur of the mid-century, had claimed this conjecturally for the work of Finiguerra; a later and still more enthusiastic virtuoso, the Abate Zani, discovered first, in the collection of Count Seratti at Ligorno, a sulfur cast from the very same niello (cast now in the British Museum), and then, in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, a paper impression corresponding to both. Here, then, he proclaimed, was the actual material first fruit of Finiguerra's invention and proof positive of Vasari's accuracy.