larly, that both Seurat and Morandi looked at. It has been said that Rembrandt's etchings are more like paintings than drawings. They are things of deep, subtly varied shadows and strong lights. His etching needle was like an extension of intuition, incisive and free, accumulating a range of tones from the darkest black to the pure white of the paper. Forms emerge from shadow into light. Or their surfaces seem to shift from clarity into an obscurity where the edge of a hat brim or the underside of an arm can't be seen, only assumed. The viewer's knowledge takes over from his eye and we agree, on trust, that the forms hidden in the rich darkness are actually there.
The process of making an etching is linear. But Rembrandt adapted, from earlier kinds of engraving on metal, a stock of hatching and crisscrossing techniques that in his hands produced a range of textures and shadows rather than outlines and edges. It is as though he wanted the needle to approximate the effects of the brush. He worked with a freedom of marks, lines, and movements that a craftsman intent on merely reproducing a picture would hardly have invented. Rembrandt treated the print as a primary f orm of art, a highly sensitive medium responding directly to the artist's hand.
Rembrandt was an avid art collector and was profoundly interested in the work of artists who preceded him. The way in which he transformed such closely studied precedents into works totally his own tells us much about the meaning of genuine originality.
Rembrandt also collected curiosities, and presumably the beautifully marked mollusk shell that was the subject of one of his rare still lifes - a small etching - was in his collection. Perhaps Rembrandt saw a parallel between the checkered patterning on this particular shell and the skills and potential of making an etching on a metal plate. That interest alone was apparently the reason he chose to make an etching of the shell.
And Morandi, in 1921, at just the point he is believed to have studied Rembrandt's etchings most closely and started to explore the shadowy effects of crosshatching, also made a small etching of a conical shell. But the differences are revealing: Morandi's shell is confined in such a narrow frame that it seems almost insignificant and cowed, hidden perhaps under something, while Rembrandt's shell, drawn with precise bravura, is in striking perspective and is grand in scale. Morandi's object is humble and
discreet, Rembrandt's, by comparison, almost elemental in its impressive presence.
The Morandi etching "Still Life with Vases on a Table" (made 10 years later) is an accomplished development conceptually. But his technique has remained uncomplicated, almost a system (unlike Rembrandt's extraordinary freedoms) of lines crossing each other with increased density where darker tones are required. The vases in the foreground have had shadings actually blanked out to make them into completely white shapes, and the vessels behind them have in turn been reduced to gentle shadows. The white ves sels, with their characteristically wavering edges, have become like the spaces in the image, while the "background" has become more palpable and dense. Spaces and solids, objects and the intervals between them, interchange. Instead of using the Rembrandtesque etching techniques to describe the form of objects, Morandi has taken both the brightest and dimmest tones he could produce by the etching process to the extremes of perception. It is almost as if he wanted to see how far he could move away from clear
delineation and yet still retain the feeling and presence of the objects. Morandi could hardly have moved further from Rembrandt, and yet his means remain rooted in that tradition of an etching as a thing of light and shadow, of the perceptible and the imperceptible. And like Rembrandt's etchings, the shadows always have within them little specks and dots of light.
This may well have been what attracted Seurat to Rembrandt's etchings. Seurat was not a printmaker. But his drawings have much in common with prints in their scrup