Mezzotint

Mezzotint (from the Italian mezzo, «half», and tinto, «tone») is an intaglio printing technique developed in the seventeenth century that allows for soft tonal gradations and rich, velvety blacks. Work begins by uniformly roughening a copper plate with a special toothed tool, the rocker, which covers the surface with countless tiny burred pits; if such a plate were printed straight away, it would yield an even velvet-black impression. The artist creates the image working «from dark to light», scraping and burnishing the areas that are to be lighter: the more they are smoothed, the less ink they hold. The technique is attributed to Ludwig von Siegen; mezzotint developed especially in eighteenth-century England, where it was widely used to reproduce portraits. Unlike linear techniques such as etching or engraving, mezzotint works with tone and chiaroscuro, approaching painterly expressiveness, which is precisely why it was prized for reproducing paintings.