red Jackson work at greatly
reduced prices. He refused the offer. With hack woodcutters now stealing
both his designs and his manner of cutting, and working at a far lower
rate than he could afford, he found that the market for his higher
priced work had almost entirely disappeared. He still received
occasional commissions, among others the title page to a translation of
Suetonius' _Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, printed by Piacentini in
Venice in 1738. His splendid design, which shows considerable burin
work, is at odds with the crudity of the remainder of the book. Inferior
hands reproduced in woodcut outline Hubert Goltzius' medallion portraits
of Roman emperors, originally executed in chiaroscuro (see p. 22).
Stimulated, no doubt, by the combination of chiaroscuro and antiquity,
Jackson produced a portrait of Julius Caesar in four tones of brown
after Egidius Sadeler's engraving of a subsequently lost painting
attributed to Titian. This was not the only time Jackson translated a
line engraving and added chiaroscuro modeling of his own. He did not
make line-for-line copies. Jackson was interested in broad effects even
when leaning heavily on the delicate linear conventions of line
engraving. The lines, therefore, are firm and widely spaced, like
photographically enlarged details of copper-plate work. Apparently
Jackson felt that the addition of one or two tones from wood blocks
would supply the intermediate tints and at the same time would prevent
the line system from becoming obtrusive.

The decided influence of line engraving was probably the result of his
association in 1731 with G. A. Faldoni in Venice. Influenced by Claude
Mellan, this engraver made use of swelling parallel lines to create
tonal gradations. Jackson had first become interested in this technical
method through Ecman's woodcuts after Callot, and once Faldoni had
strengthened the attraction he found kindred influences in the
engravings of Villamena and Alberti, particularly the former, from whom
he also acquired design ideas he later put to use in his wallpapers.
Jackson's discovery that he could to some extent use copper-plate
techniques was not a reversion to the style of the Parisian group of Le
Clerc copyists. Jackson used the line system as a means for creating
forms in conjunction with tones; the Parisian woodcutters used it to
imitate the delicate quality of line engraving. He had a formal
aesthetic end in view; their purpose was to render rea