Ugo da Carpi

Italian

BiographyItalian woodcutter. He trained as a type-founder and painter and c. 1509 moved to Venice, where he was employed for five or more years making woodcut book illustrations. Despite the menial nature of his work, which involved copying 15th-century designs, he broke with custom by signing his blocks. By 1515 he had secured an important commission from the Venetian publisher Bernardino Benalius to cut blocks for the Sacrifice of Abraham, (Passavant, VI, 223) a large black-and-white print on four joined sheets (Berlin, Altes Mus., 15.15). The composition is a pastiche of elements taken from Dürer and Titian and was designed perhaps by Ugo himself. Benalius sought a copyright for the print, and, probably under this influence, the following year Ugo sought the protection of the Venetian Senate for a colour-printing process he was now using, the chiaroscuro woodcut (see Woodcut, chiaroscuro,§§1 and 2). He claimed to have invented the technique, although it was not this that was patented, as is often thought; rather he copyrighted all his chiaroscuro designs, past and future, doubtless due to the plagiarism of earlier works such as the Sibyl Reading (b. 89, 6). German chiaroscuro woodcuts, in fact, predate his by at least six years, and he probably encountered examples in Venice. Several of these employ three blocks, but Ugo began in the more usual two-block style. A series of three Hercules subjects (b. 133,12; 117,14, 15), printed with detailed black key-blocks over muted background blocks (usually blue), show his rapid progress towards more flexible line and more ingenious schemes of shading. He progressed to four blocks for his next print, the Massacre of the Innocents (b. 34, 8), a skilful interpretation of an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael (b. 34, 18).

Probably in late 1517 Ugo moved to Rome and sought work in the thriving print industry surrounding Raphael’s studio. Nearly all his subsequent chiaroscuro prints, in three to five blocks, reflect the broad massing of colour areas found in the frescoes and monochrome paintings of Raphael’s circle, as well as the planes of tone increasingly used by engravers to interpret them. Ugo’s main contribution to the chiaroscuro woodcut, therefore, was stylistic: the abandonment of closed contours and linear crosshatching in the key-block for strokes of emphasis and massed shadows, and in his tone-blocks the transformation of shapes into flat planes and silhouettes (see fig.). By 1518, the date of a copyright granted him by the Vatican, he was fully in control of his medium, as can be seen in such prints as David Slaying Goliath (b. 26, 8) and Ananias Struck Dead (b. 46, 27), and was acting as his own printer. Perhaps his most remarkable work, with its simple, stylized background, is Aeneas Fleeing Troy with Anchises and Ascanius (b. 104, 12), also dated 1518. Ugo must have begun work not long after this on woodcut typefaces for Lodovico Arrighi’s La operina di Lodovico Vicentino da imparare di scrivere littera cancellarescha (Venice, 1522–3); in 1525, after a dispute with Arrighi, Ugo published another edition, with newly cut blocks. The same year he compiled, cut and published his Thesauro de’scrittori, a similar treatise on writing.

After the Sack of Rome in 1527, Ugo moved to Bologna, where, according to Vasari, he cut his masterpiece, the magnificent Diogenes (b. 100, 10) after Parmigianino, or perhaps after Gian Jacopo Caraglio’s engraving (b. 61) of the subject. Ugo’s editions of his woodcuts are of high quality, usually printed in subdued graduated greens or blues, apart from the striking green and gold contrasts of the Diogenes. Numerous chiaroscuro woodcuts after Parmigianino and others have been attributed to him, despite their relatively superficial resemblance to his 14 documented works, and it is often assumed that he supervised a workshop.

Jan Johnson. "Carpi, Ugo da." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T014316 (accessed April 10, 2012).

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