TALK – SALVATION AND DESTINY OF BURIN ENGRAVING

Talk
Maddalena Rocco |
Viale Toscana, 17 Milan
21 October 2022 | 10 am – 11 am | Language: Italian

The burin engraving technique is little known and not very widespread. It had a glorious past in the Hellenistic period and then it has been handed down over two thousand years of history, encountering happy moments and moments of oblivion. It certainly had a dissemination purpose of the images of works of art when photography did not exist and the engraved plates were inked and printed accompanying the books, after the invention of printing. In the Renaissance workshop it was used together with wax modeling, chisel, niello, to create jewels, weapons, and in the art of the table, and in medals. Today this tradition is being lost, because with the advent of the mechanization of work, in favor of a massive production of low-cost objects, the workers are on the verge of extinction. The technique itself has lost its meaning, and it is preferred to use it in the field of jewelry, to embellish surfaces with Renaissance decorative features and fine satin finishes, rather than adding meaning to the act itself, giving meanings. Thus in art graphics, a return to the burin would be desirable, because as a slow and complex technique, it would add value to the art print.

About the Speaker

After completing her studies at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Maddalena Rocco enters the world of jewelry. Over the years she refined the burin engraving technique and created a personal line of jewels in which the engraving is a visual trace scratched on the metal and the subjects are represented in a fragmented vision, in an apparently casual way, almost a sort of small Enigmatic “frame” that remains imprinted on a mirrored surface.

Galdus |