Holy Family with St. Elizabeth and the Infant St. John the Baptist

By the 1490s, Andrea Mantegna stopped making his own engravings and hired skilled engravers, including Giovanni Antonio da Brescia. Mantegna provided detailed drawings, which were transferred to a copperplate using tracing paper. Da Brescia refined Mantegna’s tonal system by employing regular, parallel lines and a “return stroke,” or zigzag (evident on the Virgin’s cloak), to produce continuous areas of shadow. Da Brescia’s access to carbon-rich (thus, blacker) ink, his careful, clean wiping of the plate, and his likely use of a roller press resulted in a clear, polished presentation of Mantegna’s composition.