Printmaking in Europe, 1
Printmaking in Europe, 1
Woodcut
The oldest form of printmaking is the woodcut. As
early as the Tang Dynasty (beginning in the
seventh century) in China, woodblocks were used
for prin#ng text onto pieces of tex#le, and later
paper. By the eighth century, woodblock prin#ng
had taken hold in Korea and Japan. Although the
prac#ce of prin#ng wri!en sources is part of a
much older tradi#on in East Asia, the produc#on
of printed imagery using woodblocks was a more
common phenomenon in Europe, star#ng in late
fourteenth-century Germany and subsequently
spreading to the Netherlands and south of the
Swiss Alps to areas of northern Italy.
Early woodcuts o%en show religious subject ma!er. Here we see the
Virgin Mary cradling her dead son, Jesus. Southern Germany, Swabia,
Pietà, c. 1460, woodcut, hand colored with watercolor, 38.7 x 28.8 cm
(Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland)
During the second half of the fi%eenth century
a%er Gutenberg invented his prin#ng press,
woodcuts became the most effec#ve method of
illustra#ng texts made with movable type. As a
result, ci#es in Europe—namely Mainz, Germany
and Venice, Italy—where printmaking ini#ally took
hold developed into important centers for book
produc#on. The European method of making
printed images on paper using a mechanical press
made its way to East Asia by the sixteenth
century, but it was not widely adopted for ar#s#c
purposes un#l a couple centuries later during the
Edo period in Japan when colored woodcuts
(ukiyo-e prints) were produced in great numbers.
Petrus Christus, Portrait of a female donor kneeling before a book with a
print hanging on the wall behind her (detail), c. 1455, oil on panel, 41.8 x
21.6 cm (Na#onal Gallery of Art)