NIello. – A term derived from the Latin nigellum, denoting a particular type of goldsmith’s work in which a black paste composed of copper, silver, sulfur, and lead (according to some, of silver and lead alone) is inserted into grooves made in a sheet of gold or silver, and sometimes copper. Because of its similar technique, it was often confused with damascening or inlay work.
This technique, known in classical antiquity, was used from the earliest centuries of the Christian era for ecclesiastical furnishings. Few examples of medieval works, however, remain. Production was instead abundant in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially through the work of Florentine goldsmiths and engravers, among whom Maso Finiguerra was pre-eminent. For this reason, and because before completing the work artists often made a cast of the plate, filling its engravings with soot and oil and then taking impressions from it on damp paper, Vasari believed that copper engraving originated in Florence around 1460 from niello, through the efforts of Maso Finiguerra. This is false, since there is evidence of engravings predating that time beyond the Alps as well.
Although less intensively, the technique of niello also developed outside Florence, with Turino, Caradosso, Tagliacarne, Porta, Francia, and his pupil Raimondi, who may be considered the last of the group, continuing to work until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the technique had definitively fallen into disuse elsewhere; indeed, not even Cellini had succeeded in reviving II.
