There is a paradox about the tradition of Western classical oil painting—its stubbornly tangible and unyieldingly smooth surfaces are more ‘real’-looking than anything any other world culture has produced—and yet, the more ‘real’ they appear to be, the more the painter cannot be penetrated: artists seem to be forever hiding behind their depictions. Oil painting is like oratory, the true motivation of the artist hidden behind a swathe of rhetoric. Oil paintings are there to convince the onlooker that the depicted scene is tangible and apparent—and beyond this, they solidify the social order into which they are inserted. They are designed to maintain the status quo.

I suppose I’m saying this because I’ve always been rather put off by oil paintings: they seem like the products of an alien world, products of an alien socio-political situation, and yet popular culture hails them as ‘timeless’ masterpieces.

If the oil painting is a speech, then the print or drawing is a conversation. Psychological and motivational processes lying behind what an artist produces are much more plainly laid out. One can view the work in the process of its formation, a position from which the viewer can have much greater empathy with the artist. This greater empathy was something which I found in abundance with the printed etchings on offer at this exhibition at the Fitzwilliam.

Etching is a pretty simple process. The Fitz kindly provides an explanation of the procedure on a display at the end of the room. A wax ground is laid over a copper plate. This wax is then ‘etched’ into with a stylus. When this is finished, the plate is placed in a bath of acid, which then eats into the exposed copper, leaving the metal under the wax raised at its original level. From this plate a limited number of prints can be made.

In some works, one can witness how artists are getting to grips with the medium (some of these pictures are early examples of etching, the process of etched printmaking only being invented at the end of the 15th century). Beyond the left-hand border of Carracci’s ‘Saint Jerome in the Wilderness’ (c. 1591), one can see the scribbles of the etching needle as he tests the thickness of the wax—one can almost feel the nib’s process through the waxy ground. Seeing this informs the interpretation of the image itself—lines are of such spontaneity that they almost seem ‘discovered’. Jerome’s foreshortened facial expression—the centre of the image—is odd and askance. Proportions are askew (limbs too big, hands too wide). But these things emphasise the emotive privacy of the picture. The single line that makes up the crown of Jerome’s head is the only line, the only possible line. Without it, the rest of the image would fall away: it is the pivot around which everything else turns.

Other prints in the exhibition have a similarly marvellous ‘wrongness’ to them. Passarotti’s ‘A Religious Ceremony’ (c. 1550) is an example. Here, figures appear squashed—they have been squeezed into the boundaries of the print—a character’s foot is misshapen, as if chewed by the ground; faces are incomplete and malformed. But this ‘wrongness’ is intriguing and revealing. The artist has not had time to correct himself and to cover his tracks: his embarrassment is our fascination.

In a glass case in the centre of the room there are some enormous books laid open. On one page is Piranesi’s conspicuous ‘Grotesque with Skeletons’ (1747-8). This is an image of a different era, the high Baroque—it is a thing, from a modern point of view, which is bordering on kitsch. Psychologically grotesque, with its reclining skeleton and detail of almost pathological density, this is an image that looks forward to Romanticism.

Though, perhaps the most striking image for me was Schedoni’s ‘The Holy Family’ (1600-07). Intimate, off-hand, private, it is lacking in the expected obscurantist formality which is typically associated with this subject. The family seems like a ‘real’ family, psychologically real, rather than visually tangible. We are spying on them; there is no ‘publicity’, they do not ‘present’ themselves to us.

These prints show artists exercising private freedom in exquisite, short doses. Sometimes their images reveal all of their quibbles and faults. But it is not a kind of aesthetic schadenfreude that beguiles us (pleasure in draughtsmen’s failings)—rather it is seeing a purer form of expression from these artists. These are images that seem to escape the apparently mandatory expensive rhetoric of their age.