Chapter Text

The Impressed Line: Lithography, Etching, Engraving and the Manufacture of Memory at Estate Olivardo

A Treatise on the Printed Collections of the House of Olivardo

Judith Vale

Part I — The House That Reproduced Itself

I had been warned before travelling to the Pyrenees that the Olivardo collection was badly catalogued.

This proved inaccurate.

The collection was not badly catalogued. It had been catalogued obsessively, repeatedly, contradictorily and according to systems that had ceased to make sense to anyone living.

There is a significant difference.

A badly catalogued collection presents the researcher with disorder. The Olivardo archives presented me with something more formidable: several centuries of competing orders superimposed upon one another.

One eighteenth-century inventory arranged prints according to subject. Another grouped them according to presumed artist. A third classified them by the family member responsible for acquisition. The nineteenth-century archivists preferred chronology, except when chronology proved inconvenient, whereupon they resorted to dimensions. A twentieth-century curator introduced accession numbers, then abandoned the system midway through the letter G.

There were also three card indexes.

They disagreed with one another.

This is before we consider the handwritten marginal annotations, the private catalogues of individual dukes, the lists prepared for insurers, the wartime evacuation records, the post-war restitution registers, the photographic surveys, the inventories made for inheritance taxation, and a remarkable leather-bound volume maintained between approximately 1810 and 1846 whose anonymous compiler classified engravings according to what he believed to be their spiritual temperament.

The categories included:

devotional,
melancholic,
martial,
amatory,
discordant,
deceptive,
dangerous after midnight.

The modern archivist who first showed me this volume apologised.

I told him not to.

It was one of the more intelligible catalogues.

My commission had originally sounded straightforward.

I was to spend three months at Estate Olivardo examining the family's holdings of lithographs, engravings and etchings and to prepare a provisional scholarly catalogue. The collection had never received sustained attention. Paintings naturally dominated previous studies of the Olivardo patronage, particularly the celebrated family portraits, the religious works and those more controversial collections that generations of curators have described with varying degrees of diplomatic discomfort.

The prints had remained secondary.

That neglect was understandable.

It was also a mistake.

Prints reproduce.

That simple fact alters their relationship with history.

A painting may remain in a room for four hundred years. An engraving leaves.

It travels folded inside books, pasted into albums, mailed between courts, carried in diplomatic baggage, sold through dealers, stolen, copied, altered, recopied, counterfeited and eventually rediscovered somewhere entirely unrelated to its origin.

A portrait is an object.

A print is also an event.

At Olivardo, this distinction becomes crucial.

The family has always been peculiarly concerned with the reproduction of itself.

Its members commissioned portraits, circulated marriage likenesses, preserved photographs, maintained genealogies and cultivated what later historians rather lazily called the 'Olivardo appearance': pale complexions, narrow faces, pronounced cheekbones, severe mouths and those recurrent dark eyes which painters across several centuries somehow rendered with suspicious consistency.

The printed collection reveals that this visual language was not confined to paintings.

It was disseminated.

Repeatedly.

Deliberately.

And sometimes beyond the family's apparent ability to control it.

That was where my study began.

It did not, unfortunately, end there.

I. Estate Olivardo

Estate Olivardo lies in a fold of the Pyrenees which maps represent more simply than experience permits.

The nearest town is approximately forty kilometres away by road, though this figure conceals the behaviour of the road itself, which climbs, turns, descends, loses confidence, crosses two ancient bridges and eventually arrives at a pair of iron gates bearing a coat of arms worn almost smooth by weather.

Beyond them the mountains close again.

The castle is not beautiful in the conventional sense.

It is too large, too altered and too stubbornly occupied.

Different generations have added to it without removing much of what came before. A medieval defensive core survives beneath Renaissance galleries, seventeenth-century domestic wings, nineteenth-century service corridors and several additions whose architectural justification appears to have been that somebody wanted another room.

From a distance the estate seems coherent.

It is only when walking through it that one notices the centuries arguing.

A Gothic stair rises into a Baroque landing.

A Renaissance window opens onto a Victorian conservatory.

An austere chapel adjoins a corridor decorated in early twentieth-century geometric tiles.

There are doors which have been sealed and doors which lead unexpectedly into rooms several metres lower than the corridor from which one entered.

The family explains these things as the consequences of continuous occupation.

This is probably true.

One grows suspicious nevertheless.

I arrived in early September.

The lower valleys were still warm, but autumn had already begun higher in the mountains. Each morning mist settled below the estate, leaving the castle apparently suspended above cloud. The effect was picturesque for approximately two days.

By the end of the first week I found it irritating.

The archive occupied part of the eastern wing.

The print collection was stored below it in six rooms constructed during the nineteenth century and subsequently modernised with climate control, fire suppression and security equipment which appeared both expensive and temperamental.

My principal working room had formerly been a billiards room.

The table had been removed.

Its lamps remained.

Thus I spent three months studying demons, saints, ancestors, military campaigns, anatomical curiosities, landscapes, marriages, executions, allegories and several things for which I still lack satisfactory nouns beneath green-shaded lamps intended for a game nobody had played there in eighty years.

There are worse research conditions.

II. The Problem of Print

The first error one can make when approaching the Olivardo graphics collection is to treat engraving, etching and lithography as merely technical categories.

Technically, of course, they are.

Engraving traditionally involves cutting lines directly into a metal plate, usually copper, using the burin. Etching achieves its line chemically: the plate is protected with a resistant ground, the artist scratches through it, and acid bites the exposed metal. Lithography, developed much later, depends upon the antipathy between grease and water, allowing an artist to draw upon prepared stone and subsequently print the image.

These distinctions matter.

The hand behaves differently in each process.

Engraving disciplines the line.

Etching liberates it.

Lithography approaches drawing.

But at Olivardo the technologies also correspond broadly to changing philosophies of representation.

The earliest engravings in the collection concern authority.

They reproduce seals, genealogies, devotional images, battles, heraldry and the formal likenesses of family members whose political usefulness apparently outweighed their personalities.

The eighteenth-century etchings become stranger.

They introduce satire, landscape, ruins, informal portraiture, private allegory and a growing fascination with decay.

By the nineteenth century, lithography allows the family image to proliferate.

Faces multiply.

Houses multiply.

Children multiply.

There are lithographic portraits prepared for marriage negotiations, reproductions of paintings sent to distant relations, architectural views, commemorative images and private albums containing portraits of individuals who cannot be identified from any surviving genealogy.

The transition is therefore not merely technical.

The Olivardo archive moves from inscription to multiplication.

The engraved image says:

This is established.

The etched image says:

This has been observed.

The lithographed image increasingly says:

This can be repeated.

One should be cautious about neat historical schemas.

History usually punishes elegance.

Nevertheless, the tendency is sufficiently pronounced to deserve attention.

Especially because the family appears to have understood it.

III. The First Plates

The earliest object placed before me was not especially impressive.

It was a small engraving, approximately fifteen centimetres high, depicting the Virgin and Child beneath an elaborate architectural canopy.

The archivist identified it as Italian, late fifteenth century.

The attribution was plausible.

The paper was old.

The plate impression was clear.

There were traces of hand colouring.

Nothing about it seemed immediately remarkable.

Then I turned it over.

Someone had written three words in brown ink:

Prima figura nostra.

Our first image.

This inscription had been noticed before.

It appeared in two inventories.

Neither commentator explained it.

The obvious interpretation is devotional.

The Virgin functions as an ancestral protector: 'our first image' in the sense of the first sacred print acquired by the family.

But there is another possibility.

The face of the Virgin resembles the Olivardos.

Not strongly.

Not enough to make a claim.

Enough to produce discomfort.

She has the long face.

The eyes.

The slight compression of the mouth.

The resemblance becomes less convincing the longer one looks at it, which is generally a sign that one should stop looking.

I did not stop.

Instead I compared the print with several early family portraits.

Then with later engravings.

Then with photographs.

The resemblance fluctuated.

This is precisely the sort of circumstance in which researchers manufacture patterns through expectation.

Faces are particularly dangerous.

Humans are excellent at seeing kinship.

We see relatives in strangers and familiar expressions in stone.

A responsible catalogue should therefore record the inscription without constructing genealogical mythology around a Renaissance Madonna.

That is what I wrote in my preliminary notes.

Beside it, somewhat less responsibly, I added:

Check the hands.

I had noticed that the Virgin's left hand possessed an unusually elongated second finger.

Several later Olivardo portraits show the same anatomical peculiarity.

This proves nothing.

I repeat this because I was required to repeat it to myself frequently during the next three months.

IV. Copies of Copies

Print culture complicates authenticity.

A painting generally has an origin which scholars attempt to locate.

Prints may have several.

There is the drawing.

The plate.

The impression.

The state of the plate.

The printer.

The publisher.

The subsequent copy.

The reversed copy.

The reproduction of the copy.

The reproduction misidentified as the original.

The Olivardo collection contains examples of all of these.

One seventeenth-century portrait of Álvaro Olivardo survives in no known painted original.

Instead there are eleven engravings.

They belong to at least four states.

Three contain a coat of arms.

Two omit it.

One reverses the composition.

Another adds a curtain behind the sitter.

In three, Álvaro wears a ring.

In the others his hand is conveniently positioned so that the relevant finger cannot be seen.

The catalogue traditionally treats these variations as workshop practices.

Again, perfectly reasonable.

But the inscriptions also change.

In the earliest state he is:

ALVARVS OLIVARDVS

In another:

ALVARVS DE OLIVARDO

Later:

ALVARO OLIVARDO, COMES

And in a particularly fine impression held in a private family album:

ALVARO QUI REDIIT

Álvaro who returned.

Returned from where?

No catalogue explains this.

The family genealogy contains two Álvaros during the relevant period.

One died young.

The other lived to sixty-three.

The engraved face resembles neither of their painted portraits particularly well.

When I raised this with the archivist, he smiled in the tired manner of a man who had already encountered several scholars discovering the same inconvenience independently.

"There are three Álvaros," he said.

I asked where the third appeared in the genealogy.

"He doesn't."

This was the first occasion during my visit when an Olivardo archivist gave me an answer that made the situation less clear rather than more.

It would not be the last.

V. The Missing Names

The graphics collection contains approximately four thousand works.

The precise number depends upon what one counts.

There are individual prints.

Bound albums.

Unmounted sheets.

Illustrated books.

Fragments.

Trial impressions.

Printing plates.

Photographic reproductions of lost prints.

And one box labelled DUPLICATES containing forty-seven images, none of which duplicates anything else I have seen.

Of these thousands of works, approximately one fifth have a clear connection to the family.

They depict Olivardos, Olivardo properties, Olivardo marriages, Olivardo military service or religious institutions patronised by the house.

Another substantial group consists of works acquired conventionally through collecting.

Dürer.

Callot.

Piranesi.

Goya.

A scattering of lesser masters, workshop pieces and anonymous devotional prints.

And then there is the third category.

The unidentified.

These are not anonymous in the ordinary art-historical sense.

Someone has removed the identities.

Names have been scraped from mounts.

Inscriptions have been trimmed away.

Catalogue entries contain phrases such as:

Unknown youth.

Female relation uncertain.

Possibly French cousin.

Child, identity deliberately omitted.

That last phrase appeared often enough to concern me.

No archivist could explain its origin.

The wording first appears in an inventory dated 1888.

Earlier documents identify some of these people.

Later catalogues do not.

At some point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, portions of the printed genealogy were deliberately anonymised.

One must therefore ask:

Why preserve the faces if the names were to be forgotten?

This question eventually became central to my study.

It also returned me to the name of the great portrait gallery upstairs.

The Galería del Olvido.

The Gallery of Forgetting.

Not memory.

Not ancestry.

Not lineage.

Forgetting.

Visitors usually assume the title is poetic.

After three weeks in the archive I began to doubt this.

VI. The Olivardo Face

Art historians have occasionally discussed what they call the 'Olivardo School'.

The term describes a stylistic continuity observable across several generations of artists patronised by the family.

The argument is straightforward.

If one household employs artists trained by previous household artists, visual conventions persist.

Faces become idealised according to inherited expectations.

Certain poses recur.

Lighting becomes formulaic.

Children are painted according to established models.

Grandparents begin to resemble grandchildren because both are being filtered through the same aesthetic tradition.

This explanation is sensible.

It accounts for much.

It does not account for everything.

The prints intensify the problem because their production often occurred away from the estate.

An Olivardo portrait might be painted in Spain, copied as a drawing, transported to Paris, engraved there and printed by craftsmen who had never met the sitter.

Yet the resulting engraving frequently accentuates precisely those traits later considered characteristic of the family.

The engraver is not merely reproducing the portrait.

He appears to know how an Olivardo ought to look.

At first I assumed that engravers were working from established prototypes.

This probably happened.

Then I found a correspondence from 1721.

The letter concerns an engraving commissioned in Lyon.

The painter complains that the engraver has altered the sitter's eyes.

The relevant passage translates approximately as:

He has given the young lady the family's regard, though I did not paint it so.

The phrase is peculiar.

The family's regard.

The original is la mirada de la casa.

The look of the house.

Perhaps simply an artistic convention.

Perhaps flattery.

Perhaps something else.

The engraving survives.

The painting does not.

The young woman's name has been removed from both mount and catalogue.

She is now officially:

Unknown Olivardo female, approximately sixteen years.

Her eyes are extraordinary.

One should never write that sentence in a catalogue.

I wrote it in my notebook.

VII. Reproduction as Genealogy

By the end of the first month I had begun to suspect that earlier scholars had misunderstood the relationship between Olivardo portraiture and Olivardo genealogy.

They assumed the genealogy generated the images.

Family members existed.

Therefore they were portrayed.

But what if, culturally, the process also operated in reverse?

The images established membership.

To be reproduced as an Olivardo was to become an Olivardo.

This would explain several anomalies.

Illegitimate children could be absorbed visually into the lineage.

Distant cousins could be strengthened symbolically through portrait exchange.

Marriage candidates could be made to resemble the house into which they were entering.

Deceased relatives could be retrospectively standardised.

The family would not merely inherit a face.

It would manufacture one.

Such practices are not supernatural.

Dynasties have always constructed visual identities.

Royal portraiture does this routinely.

Coins do it.

Heraldry does it.

Uniforms do it.

Political photography continues to do it.

What makes Olivardo unusual is the persistence and intimacy of the practice.

The family does not merely create an image of authority.

It creates an image of kinship.

This image is then reproduced until visual resemblance begins to substitute for genealogical evidence.

By the nineteenth century, several family albums arrange portraits with almost no accompanying text.

One simply sees faces.

Generation after generation.

The intended reader presumably knew who everyone was.

We do not.

The effect is disturbing.

Especially when the same face appears more than once.

VIII. The Woman in the Green Book

Every serious archive eventually produces an object which begins as an inconvenience and becomes an obsession.

Mine was a green album.

It contained eighty-three lithographs.

Most were mid-nineteenth century.

Portraits.

Landscapes.

Several reproductions of family paintings.

Nothing exceptional.

The album had been assembled around 1860.

On page thirty-seven was the portrait of a young woman.

No title.

No inscription.

No identifying crest.

She appeared perhaps twenty-five.

Dark hair.

Light dress.

A narrow black ribbon at the throat.

The image was competent rather than distinguished.

I turned the page.

On page fifty-two she appeared again.

Different clothing.

Different pose.

Same woman.

This was not especially remarkable.

Then she appeared on page seventy-one.

Again.

The lithographs had been produced by different printers.

According to the paper and printing style they may have been separated by as much as twenty years.

Yet the woman did not appear older.

I began checking other albums.

She appeared in two.

Then three.

Eventually I found nine images which might represent the same person.

'Might' is important.

Portrait resemblance is subjective.

Lithographs simplify features.

Artists copy one another.

Images circulate.

Women of similar age and social background are frequently styled similarly.

All reasonable objections.

Nevertheless, the sequence bothered me.

The earliest possible date was approximately 1834.

The latest approximately 1872.

In every image the woman appears between twenty and thirty.

No name accompanies any of them.

One print contains a handwritten notation:

L.

Another:

Nuestra prima.

Our cousin.

The green album offered one further detail.

Someone had attempted to remove page thirty-seven.

The paper around the binding had been cut.

Then, apparently, whoever began the work changed their mind.

The portrait remained.

I asked whether any female Olivardo relative disappeared from the genealogical record during the nineteenth century.

The archivist asked what I meant by disappeared.

I said:

"Appears repeatedly in the visual record but not in the written one."

He looked at the portrait.

Then he closed the album.

"That happens here," he said.

It was an answer characteristic of Estate Olivardo.

IX. The Catalogue and the Curse

I should address the obvious matter.

The Olivardo portraits are reputed to be haunted.

One cannot spend three months in the estate without hearing this.

Servants tell stories.

Family members tell better ones.

Tourists tell terrible ones.

According to the most popular tradition, the painted portraits preserve some portion of the sitter's essence.

Certain versions claim that the family dead remain aware within the images.

Others say that portraits change.

Others that people who sleep beneath them dream of events they could not have witnessed.

One story maintains that if a portrait is destroyed, another likeness of the same person changes expression.

I found no evidence supporting any of this.

I also found that nobody at the estate would willingly sleep in the Galería del Olvido.

Including those who mocked the stories.

Academics should be cautious about inherited superstition.

We should also be cautious about assuming superstition is meaningless.

A legend need not be factually true to preserve historical information.

If generations of Olivardos believed portraits did something, their behaviour toward portraits becomes evidence.

They commissioned them.

Protected them.

Copied them.

Distributed them.

Recovered them.

Occasionally destroyed them.

The question is not initially whether the portraits contain souls.

The more productive question is:

What did the family believe was transmitted when an image was reproduced?

The graphics collection suggests they believed something was.

Reputation.

Blood.

Authority.

Memory.

Identity.

Perhaps simply resemblance.

Perhaps not.

X. The Plate Room

Near the end of my first month I was shown the plates.

This occurred almost accidentally.

I had asked whether any original copperplates survived.

The archivist said yes.

I asked how many.

He said he did not know.

This seemed unlikely.

We descended beneath the principal archive into a corridor I had previously assumed contained mechanical equipment.

At the end was an iron door.

Behind it stood wooden cabinets.

Inside the cabinets were engraved copperplates.

Hundreds of them.

Some corresponded to known prints.

Others did not.

Copperplates normally deteriorate through printing.

Repeated impressions soften lines.

Collectors therefore value early states.

Yet several Olivardo plates appeared remarkably fresh.

Some may simply have been little used.

Others had clearly been reworked.

Faces especially.

Eyes deepened.

Mouths corrected.

Contours reinforced.

One plate, dated approximately 1690, contained the engraved portrait of a boy.

The printed version was familiar to me.

I had catalogued three impressions.

The plate itself differed.

Someone had altered the face after the surviving impressions were made.

Not dramatically.

The jaw had been narrowed.

The cheekbones strengthened.

The eyes enlarged slightly.

The boy had been made more Olivardo.

No later impression from this altered state appears in the collection.

Perhaps none was printed.

Or perhaps they were printed elsewhere.

I examined the reverse.

There was an inscription scratched roughly into the copper.

Not a printer's mark.

Not an accession number.

Four words:

Sic manet domus nostra.

Thus our house remains.

I copied the phrase into my notebook.

For several minutes nobody spoke.

Then the archivist said:

"You see why we wanted someone interested in more than technique."

I did.

At that moment the project ceased to be a catalogue.

It became a historiography.

And the distinction would occupy the remaining two months of my stay.

Because Estate Olivardo does not merely contain images of a family.

It contains evidence of a family repeatedly editing its own appearance across time.

Whether that editing was aesthetic, political, genealogical, psychological or something considerably stranger remained uncertain.

But by the end of September I was convinced of one thing.

The Olivardos did not regard reproduction as secondary to the original.

For them, the copy possessed its own authority.

Perhaps greater authority.

A painting records what someone looked like.

An engraving can determine how they will be remembered.

And once enough copies exist, memory becomes more durable than the person.

That principle, innocent enough in the history of printmaking, becomes considerably less innocent when applied systematically to a dynasty.

Especially a dynasty whose most famous gallery is devoted, by name, to forgetting.

End of Part I