osely 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 scrupulously observed and rendered gradations of shadow and sudden contrasts of pure whiteness. Made with conte crayon on heavily textured Ingres paper, they deal with forms both clearly illuminated and completely lost in darkness. But like Rembrandt's and Morandi's etchings, inside that darkness there is a wonderful sparkle. This is achieved by a c ollaboration of conte crayon and paper, the lights left blank and untouched, the blackest areas produced by such vigorous downward pressure that the paper's miniscule hills and valleys are flattened. All the in-between gradations of light and dark are captured with such subtlety that it is hard to believe they were made by a man with a crayon in his hand.
Contemporaries of Seurat in Paris certainly imitated Rembrandt's etchings in their drawings and prints, some almost to the point of deliberate derivation. But Seurat used what he learned from Rembrandt for his own unprecedented aims. In the process he, like Morandi, made images in black, white, and all the nuances of tone between that are consummately his vision.
The crosscurrents perceivable in the images on this page shed telling light on the individualities of the three artists. Yet it seems certain enough that Seurat's supreme drawings would not have been what they are without Rembrandt's remarkably powerful etchings there first. And Morandi's moving and deeply pondered prints would not have been what they are without the achievements of both older artists.