Monks Celebrating High Mass

Collectors could not get enough of old master drawings. Here Maria Catharina Prestel reproduced an Italian Baroque drawing housed in a private collection in Hamburg that is now in Vienna’s Albertina museum. The drawing was executed in pen and ink with white highlights on blue paper. To recreate the effect of the white heightening, Prestel applied stopping out varnish to the plate in certain areas, preventing the acid from biting these passages. When the plate was printed, ink would not adhere to those areas, allowing the white of the paper to show through as highlights.