An artist who yearns for immortal fame had better not become an engraver, or any other kind of printmaker. Dürer is the only printmaker in history who reached the very top mainly by that route. (Daumier, some would argue, is another.) A few more have combined printmaking with painting. Would Rembrandt and Goya have the aura they do if their prints carried most of the claim for it? In Rembrandt’s case it is unlikely, in Goya’s a fair possibility, at least to judge by the reproductions of their works in popular books. Today, printmaking is so marginal to tastemaking that the choice hardly comes up. At the most, an artist like Robert Rauschenberg—to take one of the most favorable examples—will, when well established, look into printmaking with a lively curiosity about the technical effects the medium offers and a kindly feeling about the idea of making originals available to people other than the very rich. The art that results is similar to, but less than, the artist’s paintings.

There are some compensations for the printmakers. The easy circulation of the multiple originals helped Dürer and Goya, in their own time, overcome the prejudice that their countries were boondocks. Today exhibition programmers love prints, which lack many of the problems of fragility and cost that are tied to the moving of paintings and sculptures. This popularity barely offsets the absence of prints from the permanent displays of museums. Fortunately, print exhibitions sometimes occasion attractive books in the form of