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The Printed Image 8

The Printed Image 8The Printed Image 8

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HEILBRUNN TIMELINE OF ART HISTORY · ESSAYS

The Printed Image in


the West: Woodcut
(Liber chronicarum) Registrum huius operis libri
Samson
cronicarum
Rending
cum
thefiguris
Lion Woodblock
et for Sa
ymagibus ab inicio mundi Albrecht Dürer Lion
Written by Hartmann Schedel Albrecht Dürer

By Wendy Thompson
Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
October 2003

Known in Japan from the eighth century, the technique of


stamping from woodblocks was used to print textiles before it
was applied to paper. A relief process, woodcuts are produced
by inking a raised surface against which a piece of paper is
pressed, either manually or by running it through a press, to
create an image on the paper. The rubber stamp and potato
print are familiar forms of relief printing. The design of a
woodcut is produced by elimination, cutting away everything
except the lines or shapes to be printed. Some idea of the
technique involved can be gained by looking at the woodblock
(19.73.255) that was used to print Albrecht Durer’s Samson
Rending the Lion (24.63.111).

The first crude woodcuts appeared in Europe by 1400. Given


the difficulties of scraping out the wood between the lines to
be printed, and the danger that lines that were too thin would
break under pressure, early woodcuts consisted mainly of
thick outlines with minimal shading. Resembling coloring
books in their design, they were meant to be colored by hand
or with stencils. Many early woodcuts served as illustrations
for the new printed books, and the demands of book
illustration caused the medium to become more sophisticated
and its subject matter more varied. It was the brilliant German
artist Albrecht Dürer who transformed the medium with
woodcuts like Samson Rending the Lion, such fully realized
works in black and white, complete with subtle gradations of
tone and suggestions of texture, that Durer’s contemporary,
Erasmus of Rotterdam, claimed that to add color would be to
“injure the work.”

In Italy, the woodcut was taken into new territory by the great
Venetian painter Titian, who chose the medium to publicize
his drawn inventions. In his beautiful Saint Jerome in the
Wilderness (22.73.3-119), the bold and fluent linework, as well
as the unity and animation of the entire surface, strongly
suggest that Titian drew directly on the block, and the cutter
followed his marks as closely as possible. It was in the medium
of woodcut that color was first introduced into printmaking, in
the prints known as chiaroscuro woodcuts.

Chiaroscuro Woodcuts
The earliest colored woodcuts were intended to imitate the
appearance of a type of drawing on colored paper known as
chiaroscuro, much sought after by collectors. In these
drawings, the colored paper served as the middle tone, and
the artist worked toward the light (chiaro) by adding
highlights with white gouache, and toward the dark (scuro) by
adding crosshatching in pen or a dark wash with a brush. The
chiaroscuro woodcut, invented in Germany by Hans
Burgkmair around 1509, was created by printing a line block—
which carried the contours and crosshatching, and could
sometimes stand alone as a black and white woodcut—
together with one or more tone blocks. If there were only one
tone block, it would print a mid-tone that would function in the
same way as the colored paper did in the drawings. Where
more than one tone block was used, it was possible to suggest
levels of shading, as in a wash drawing. Where the blocks had
been cut away, the paper would remain unprinted, and these
white areas would serve as the highlights.

One of the great masterpieces of the chiaroscuro print in the


North is Hans Baldung Grien’s eerie Scene of Witchcraft
(41.1.201), in which the gray tone block and flickering
highlights contribute to the oppressiveness of the scene. The
first Italian to create chiaroscuro prints, Ugo da Carpi, is best
known for his Diogenes (17.50.1), in which he does away with
the line block and creates the image entirely through areas of
tones. While the Diogenes is based on a wash drawing by
Parmigianino, Ugo da Carpi’s earliest documented chiaroscuro
woodcut was produced in collaboration with Titian. However,
by the end of the sixteenth century, Titian had lost interest in
having the lines of his drawings duplicated through woodcut;
he sought instead to have the color and effects of light of his
paintings translated into the intaglio technique of engraving.

Book Illustration
Because the printing of movable type, like the woodcut, is a
relief process, once the printing press and movable type were
invented in the mid-fifteenth century, woodcuts provided the
ideal means for illustrating early printed books. The
woodblocks could be placed alongside the type in the flatbed
press and printed at the same time. The same image could be
used to illustrate more than one text or could even be used
more than once in the same text, as in the lavishly illustrated
Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle) (1981.1178.29)
where the same generic view of a city is repeatedly used to
signify cities whose topography was unknown. Six years later,
in Venice, another landmark in the history of the illustrated
book was published, the lovely Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
(Poliphilo’s Dream about the Strife of Love) (23.73.1). Both
books are models of the successful integration of text and
image into the overall layout of the page, yet they evidence
very different aesthetic sensibilities. The pages of the German
book are densely filled with the texture of short, angular lines
that compose both the Gothic script and the lively
illustrations—many pages are enlivened by genealogical trees
in the form of curling vines peopled by half-length figures—to
create an impression of great animation. In the Italian book, by
contrast, the relationship between the rectilinear typeface,
based on ancient Roman inscriptions, and the spare and
elegant woodcut illustrations creates a sense of classical calm
and balance.

By the mid-sixteenth century, engraving had come to be the


preferred medium for book illustration. Since engravings and
type require different kinds of presses, the illustrations had to
be printed independently, usually on separate sheets, and
could no longer be visually integrated with the text.

Citation
Thompson, Wendy. “The Printed Image in the West: Woodcut.” In
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wdct/hd_wdct.htm
(October 2003)

Further Reading
Landau, David, and Peter Parshall. The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Parshall, Peter, and Rainer Schoch. Origins of European Printmaking:
Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public. Exhibition catalogue.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Additional Essays by Wendy Thompson


Thompson, Wendy. “The Printed Image in the West: History and
Techniques.” (October 2003)

Thompson, Wendy. “Lovers in Italian Mythological Prints.” (October


2004)

Thompson, Wendy. “Poets, Lovers, and Heroes in Italian Mythological


Prints.” (October 2004)

Thompson, Wendy. “Poets in Italian Mythological Prints.” (October


2004)

Thompson, Wendy. “Heroes in Italian Mythological Prints.” (October


2004)

Thompson, Wendy. “Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778).” (October


2003)

Thompson, Wendy. “The Printed Image in the West: Etching.” (October


2003)

Thompson, Wendy. “Woodcut Book Illustration in Renaissance Italy: The


First Illustrated Books.” (October 2004)

Thompson, Wendy. “Woodcut Book Illustration in Renaissance Italy:


Venice in the 1490s.” (October 2004)

Thompson, Wendy. “Woodcut Book Illustration in Renaissance Italy:


Venice in the Sixteenth Century.” (October 2004)

Thompson, Wendy. “The Printed Image in the West: Engraving.”


(October 2003)

Thompson, Wendy. “The Printed Image in the West: Drypoint.” (October


2003)

Thompson, Wendy. “Woodcut Book Illustration in Renaissance Italy:


Florence in the 1490s.” (October 2004)

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