Misplaced Pages

#77922

120-432: Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking . An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges —leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that the artist cuts away carry no ink, while characters or images at surface level carry the ink to produce the print. The block is cut along the wood grain (unlike wood engraving , where

240-407: A "flirtation" with etching, but on copper rather than iron. His Dutch successors for some time continued to be heavily under the spell of Italy, which they took most of the century to digest. Albrecht Altdorfer produced some Italianate religious prints, but he is most famous for his very Northern landscapes of drooping larches and firs, which are highly innovative in painting as well as prints. He

360-546: A Parisian illustrative etcher popularized Callot's methods in a hugely successful manual for students. His own work is successful in his declared aim of making etchings look like engravings, and is highly evocative of French life at the middle of the century. Wenzel Hollar was a Bohemian ( Czech ) artist who fled his country in the Thirty Years War, settling mostly in England (he was besieged at Basing House in

480-519: A comparable revival. He was the first Lorraine printmaker (or artist) of stature, and must have influenced the younger Jacques Callot , who remained in Lorraine but was published in Paris , where he greatly influenced French printmaking. Callot's technical innovations in improving the recipes for etching ground were crucial in allowing etching to rival the detail of engraving, and in the long term spelt

600-411: A continuing increase in the volume of commercial and reproductive printmaking; Rubens , like Titian before him, took great pains in adapting the trained engravers in his workshop to the particular style he wanted, though several found his demands too much and left. The generation after him produced a number of widely dispersed printmakers with very individual and personal styles; by now etching had become

720-541: A few impressions could be produced from each plate—perhaps about twenty—although some plates were reworked to prolong their life. Despite this limitation, his prints were clearly widely circulated, as many copies of them exist by other printmakers. This is highly typical of admired prints in all media until at least 1520; there was no enforceable concept of anything like copyright. Many of the Housebook Master's print compositions are only known from copies, as none of

840-605: A few influential etchings, while Annibale's brother Agostino engraved. Both brothers influenced Guido Reni and other Italian artists of the full Baroque period in the next century. The Italian artists known as the School of Fontainebleau were hired in the 1530s by King Francis I of France to decorate his showpiece Chateau at Fontainebleau. In the course of the long project, etchings were produced, in unknown circumstances but apparently in Fontainebleau itself and mostly in

960-545: A great influence on many artists, notably Édouard Manet , Pierre Bonnard , Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , Edgar Degas , Paul Gauguin , Vincent van Gogh , Félix Vallotton and Mary Cassatt . In 1872, Jules Claretie dubbed the trend "Le Japonisme". Though the Japanese influence was reflected in many artistic media, including painting, it did lead to a revival of the woodcut in Europe, which had been in danger of extinction as

1080-452: A great number of religious prints. He became increasingly interested in strong lighting effects, and very dark backgrounds. His reputation as the greatest etcher in the history of the medium was established in his lifetime, and never questioned since. Few of his paintings left Holland whilst he lived, but his prints were circulated throughout Europe, and his wider reputation was initially based on them alone. A number of other Dutch artists of

1200-444: A group of several printmakers, who all produced very small finely detailed engravings for a largely bourgeois market, combining in miniature elements from Dürer and from Marcantonio Raimondi , and concentrating on secular, often mythological and erotic, rather than on religious themes. The most talented were the brothers Bartel Beham and the longer-lived Sebald Beham . Like Georg Pencz , they came from Nuremberg and were expelled by

1320-421: A high artistic standard, and were clearly designed by artists with a background in painting (on walls, panels or manuscripts). Whether these artists cut the blocks themselves, or only inked the design on the block for another to carve, is not known. During the fifteenth century the number of prints produced greatly increased as paper became freely available and cheaper, and the average artistic level fell, so that by

SECTION 10

#1732782982078

1440-585: A high proportion of his intermediate states have survived, often in only one or two impressions. He was clearly very directly involved in the printing process himself, and probably selectively wiped the plate of ink himself to produce effects surface tone on many impressions. He also experimented continually with the effects of different papers. He produced prints on a wider range of subjects than his paintings, with several pure landscapes, many self-portraits that are often more extravagantly fanciful than his painted ones, some erotic (at any rate obscene) subjects, and

1560-469: A major artistic form, although at the time it was accorded a much lower status than painting. It continued to develop through to the twentieth century. This technique just carves the image in mostly thin lines, similar to a rather crude engraving. The block is printed in the normal way, so that most of the print is black with the image created by white lines. This process was invented by the sixteenth-century Swiss artist Urs Graf , but became most popular in

1680-661: A method for them to record the designs on pieces they had sold. Some artists trained as painters became involved from about 1450–1460, although many engravers continued to come from a goldsmithing background. From the start, engraving was in the hands of the luxury tradesmen, unlike woodcut, where at least the cutting of the block was associated with the lower-status trades of carpentry, and perhaps sculptural wood-carving. Engravings were also important from very early on as models for other artists, especially painters and sculptors, and many works survive, especially from smaller cities, which take their compositions directly from prints. Serving as

1800-514: A method using an intaglio line plate (or occasionally a lithograph ), printed in black or a dark colour, and then overprinted with up to twenty different colours from woodblocks. Edmund Evans used relief and wood throughout, with up to eleven different colours, and latterly specialized in illustrations for children's books, using fewer blocks but overprinting non-solid areas of colour to achieve blended colours. Artists such as Randolph Caldecott , Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway were influenced by

1920-435: A number of bravura treatments of classical and pastoral themes, whilst later religious subjects predominate. He also produced a large series of small heads of exotically dressed men, which were often used by other artists. He was technically innovative, inventing the monotype and also the oil sketch intended to be a final product. He, like Rembrandt, was interested in chiaroscuro effects (contrasts of light and dark), using

2040-627: A number of complex niello religious scenes that he probably executed, and may or may not have designed, which were influential for the Florentine style in engraving. Some paper impressions and sulphur casts survive from these. These are a number of paxes in the Bargello , Florence, plus one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York which depict scenes with large and well-organised crowds of small figures. There are also drawings in

2160-402: A number of engravings copying his Triumph of Caesar (now Hampton Court Palace ), or drawings for it, which were perhaps the first prints intended to be understood as depicting paintings—called reproductive prints . With an increasing pace of innovation in art, and of a critical interest among a non-professional public, reliable depictions of paintings filled an obvious need. In time this demand

2280-691: A number of very different approaches. Jusepe de Ribera may have learned etching in Rome, but all his fewer than thirty prints were made in Naples during the 1620s when his career as a painter seems to have been in the doldrums. When the painting commissions began to flow again, he all but abandoned printmaking. His plates were sold after his death to a Rome publisher, who made a better job of marketing them than Ribera himself. His powerful and direct style developed almost immediately, and his subjects and style remain close to those of his paintings. Jacques Bellange

2400-566: A pattern for artists may have been a primary purpose for the creation of many prints, especially the numerous series of apostle figures. The surviving engravings, though the majority are religious, show a greater proportion of secular images than other types of art from the period, including woodcut . This is certainly partly the result of the relative survival rates—although wealthy fifteenth-century houses certainly contained secular images on walls (inside and outside), and cloth hangings, these types of image have survived in tiny numbers. The Church

2520-490: A popular style that many could understand. Artists and activists created collectives such as the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) (1937–present) and The Treintatreintistas (1928–1930) to create prints (many of them woodcut prints) that reflected their socialist and communist values. The TGP attracted artists from all around the world including African American printmaker Elizabeth Catlett , whose woodcut prints later influenced

SECTION 20

#1732782982078

2640-569: A purely linear medium. The other notable artist of this period is known as the Housebook Master . He was a highly talented German artist who is also known from drawings, especially the Housebook album from which he takes his name. His prints were made exclusively in drypoint , scratching his lines on the plate to leave a much shallower line than an engraver's burin would produce; he may have invented this technique. Consequently, only

2760-478: A relatively early age. Lucas van Leyden had a prodigious natural talent for engraving, and his earlier prints were highly successful, with an often earthy treatment and brilliant technique, so that he came to be seen as Dürer's main rival in the North. However, his later prints suffered from straining after an Italian grandeur, which left only the technique applied to far less dynamic compositions. Like Dürer, he had

2880-559: A sense of recession in landscape backgrounds in etching with multiple bitings to etch the background more lightly than the foreground. He also used a special etching needle called an échoppe to produce swelling lines like those created by the burin in an engraving, and also reinforced the etched lines with a burin after biting; which soon became common practice among etchers. Callot etched a great variety of subjects in over 1400 prints, from grotesques to his tiny but extremely powerful series Les Grandes Misères de la guerre . Abraham Bosse ,

3000-487: A serious art medium. Most of the artists above, except for Félix Vallotton and Paul Gauguin, in fact used lithography , especially for coloured prints. See below for Japanese influence in illustrations for children's books. Artists, notably Edvard Munch and Franz Masereel , continued to use the medium, which in Modernism came to appeal because it was relatively easy to complete the whole process, including printing, in

3120-465: A similar aesthetic when it was engraved into wood. An image of the countryside and a traditional farmer appeared similar to the image of a city. This symbolism was beneficial for politicians who wanted a unified nation. The physical actions of carving and printing woodcuts also supported the values many held about manual labour and supporting workers' rights. Today, in Mexico the activist woodcut tradition

3240-586: A single city by prints (and sometimes drawings), for the same reason. Prints therefore are frequently brought up in detailed analyses of individual paintings in art history . Today, thanks to colour photo reproductions, and public galleries, their paintings are much better known, whilst their prints are only rarely exhibited, for conservation reasons. But some museum print rooms allow visitors to see their collection, sometimes only by appointment, and large museums now present great numbers of prints online in very high-resolution enlargeable images. The oldest technique

3360-519: A studio with little special equipment. The German Expressionists used woodcut a good deal. Coloured woodcuts first appeared in ancient China. The oldest known are three Buddhist images dating to the 10th century. European woodcut prints with coloured blocks were invented in Germany in 1508, and are known as chiaroscuro woodcuts (see below). However, colour did not become the norm, as it did in Japan in

3480-525: A very different direction to either Raimondi and his followers, or the Germans, and used the medium for experimentation and very personal work. Parmigianino produced some etchings himself, and also worked closely with Ugo da Carpi on chiaroscuro woodcuts and other prints. Giorgio Ghisi was the major printmaker of the Mantuan school, which preserved rather more individuality than Rome. Much of his work

3600-431: A very different effect, much closer to the chiaroscuro drawings the term was originally used for, or to watercolour paintings . The Swedish printmaker Torsten Billman (1909–1989) developed during the 1930s and 1940s a variant chiaroscuro technique with several gray tones from ordinary printing ink. The art historian Gunnar Jungmarker (1902–1983) at Stockholm's Nationalmuseum called this technique "grisaille woodcut". It

3720-489: Is a matter of scholarly controversy, but there is no question that by the mid-century the rate of original printmaking in Italy had declined considerably from that of a generation earlier, if not as precipitously as in Germany. Although no artist anywhere from 1500 to 1550 could ignore Dürer, several artists in his wake had no difficulty maintaining highly distinctive styles, often with little influence from him. Lucas Cranach

Woodcut - Misplaced Pages Continue

3840-499: Is a time-consuming printing process, exclusively for hand printing, with several grey-wood blocks aside from the black-and-white key block. Woodcut printmaking became a popular form of art in Mexico during the early to mid 20th century. The medium in Mexico was used to convey political unrest and was a form of political activism, especially after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). In Europe, Russia, and China, woodcut art

3960-514: Is concerned with the artistic, historical and social aspects of the subject; the article on printmaking summarizes the techniques used in making old master prints, from a modern perspective. Many great European artists, such as Albrecht Dürer , Rembrandt , and Francisco Goya , were dedicated printmakers. In their own day, their international reputations largely came from their prints, which were spread far more widely than their paintings. Influences between artists were also mainly transmitted beyond

4080-522: Is rarely used in English for images alone, although that and "xylographic" are used in connection with block books , which are small books containing text and images in the same block. They became popular in Europe during the latter half of the 15th century. A single-sheet woodcut is a woodcut presented as a single stand alone image or print , as opposed to a book illustration. Since its origins in China,

4200-651: Is still alive. In Oaxaca, a collective called the Asamblea De Artistas Revolucionarios De Oaxaca (ASARO) was formed during the 2006 Oaxaca protests . They are committed to social change through woodcut art. Their prints are made into wheat-paste posters which are secretly put up around the city. Artermio Rodriguez is another artist who lives in Tacambaro, Michoacán who makes politically charged woodcut prints about contemporary issues. Europe Japan ( Ukiyo-e ) In parts of

4320-466: Is the 1915 Portrait of Otto Müller woodcut print from the collection of the British Museum . Chiaroscuro woodcuts are old master prints in woodcut using two or more blocks printed in different colours; they do not necessarily feature strong contrasts of light and dark. They were first produced to achieve similar effects to chiaroscuro drawings. After some early experiments in book-printing,

4440-597: Is the oldest technique used for old master prints , developing about 1400, by using, on paper, existing techniques for printing. One of the more ancient single-leaf woodcuts on paper that can be seen today is The Fire Madonna ( Madonna del Fuoco , in the Italian language), in the Cathedral of Forlì , in Italy. Initially religious subjects, often very small indeed, were by far the most common. Many were sold to pilgrims at their destination, and glued to walls in homes, inside

4560-429: Is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques used, in order of their introduction, are woodcut , engraving , etching , mezzotint and aquatint , although there are others. Different techniques are often combined in a single print. With rare exceptions printed on textiles, such as silk, or on vellum , old master prints are printed on paper . This article

4680-510: Is woodcut, or woodblock printing, which was invented as a method for printing on cloth in China. This had reached Europe via the Islamic world before 1300, as a method of printing patterns on textiles. Paper arrived in Europe, also from China via Islamic Spain , slightly later, and was being manufactured in Italy by the end of the thirteenth century, and in Burgundy and Germany by the end of

4800-630: The English Civil War , and then followed his Royalist patron into a new exile in Antwerp, where he worked with a number of the large publishers there). He produced great numbers of etchings in a straightforward realist style, many topographical, including large aerial views , portraits, and others showing costumes, occupations and pastimes. Stefano della Bella was something of an Italian counterpart to Callot, producing many very detailed small etchings, but also larger and freer works, closer to

4920-543: The Fernando Leal . After the Mexican Revolution, the country was in political and social upheaval - there were worker strikes, protests, and marches. These events needed cheap, mass-produced visual prints to be pasted on walls or handed out during protests. Information needed to be spread quickly and cheaply to the general public. Many people were still illiterate during this time and there was push after

Woodcut - Misplaced Pages Continue

5040-505: The Han dynasty (before 220), and are of silk printed with flowers in three colours. "In the 13th century the Chinese technique of blockprinting was transmitted to Europe." Paper arrived in Europe, also from China via al-Andalus , slightly later, and was being manufactured in Italy by the end of the thirteenth century, and in Burgundy and Germany by the end of the fourteenth. In Europe, woodcut

5160-531: The Uffizi, Florence that may be by him. Where German engraving arrived into a still Gothic artistic world, Italian engraving caught the very early Renaissance, and from the start the prints are mostly larger, more open in atmosphere, and feature classical and exotic subjects. They are less densely worked, and usually do not use cross-hatching. From about 1460–1490 two styles developed in Florence, which remained

5280-450: The art trade , and there is no easy alternative in English to distinguish the works of " fine art " produced in printmaking from the vast range of decorative, utilitarian and popular prints that grew rapidly alongside the artistic print from the 15th century onwards. Fifteenth-century prints are sufficiently rare that they are classed as old master prints even if they are of crude or merely workmanlike artistic quality. A date of about 1830

5400-496: The ukiyo-e and other forms. In Europe and Japan, colour woodcuts were normally only used for prints rather than book illustrations. In China, where the individual print did not develop until the nineteenth century, the reverse is true, and early colour woodcuts mostly occur in luxury books about art, especially the more prestigious medium of painting. The first known example is a book on ink-cakes printed in 1606, and colour technique reached its height in books on painting published in

5520-442: The 1440s; Vasari typically claimed that his fellow-Florentine, the goldsmith and nielloist Maso Finiguerra (1426–64) invented the technique. It is now clear this is wrong, and there are now considered to be no prints as such that can be attributed to him on anything other than a speculative basis. He may never have made any printed engravings from plates, as opposed to taking impressions from work intended to be nielloed. There are

5640-495: The 1540s, mostly recording wall-paintings and plasterwork in the Chateau (much now destroyed). Technically they are mostly rather poor—dry and uneven—but the best powerfully evoke the strange and sophisticated atmosphere of the time. Many of the best are by Leon Davent to designs by Primaticcio , or Antonio Fantuzzi . Several of the artists, including Davent, later went to Paris and continued to produce prints there. Previously

5760-650: The Elder was only a year younger than Dürer, but he was about thirty before he began to make woodcuts, in an intense Northern style reminiscent of Matthias Grünewald . He was also an early experimenter in the chiaroscuro woodcut technique. His style later softened, and took in the influence of Dürer, but he concentrated his efforts on painting, in which he became dominant in Protestant Germany, based in Saxony , handing over his very productive studio to his son at

5880-767: The Florentine Cristofano Robetta , and Benedetto Montagna from Vicenza are still based in Italian painting of the period, and are also later influenced by Giulio Campagnola . Giovanni Battista Palumba , once known as "Master IB with the Bird" from his monogram, was the major Italian artist in woodcut in these years, as well as an engraver of charming mythological scenes, often with an erotic theme. Prints copying prints were already common, and many fifteenth century prints must have been copies of paintings, but not intended to be seen as such, but as images in their own right. Mantegna 's workshop produced

6000-476: The Italian drawing tradition. Anthony van Dyck produced only a large series of portrait prints of contemporary notables, the Iconographia for which he only etched a few of the heads himself, but in a brilliant style, that had great influence on 19th century etching. Ludwig von Siegen was a German soldier and courtier, who invented the technique of mezzotint , which in the hands of better artists than he

6120-499: The Japanese prints now available and fashionable in Europe to create a suitable style, with flat areas of colour. In the 20th century, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner of the Die Brücke group developed a process of producing coloured woodcut prints using a single block applying different colours to the block with a brush à la poupée and then printing (halfway between a woodcut and a monotype ). A remarkable example of this technique

SECTION 50

#1732782982078

6240-665: The Netherlands continued to produce vast numbers of reproductive and illustrative prints of widely varying degrees of quality and appeal—the two by no means always going together. Notable dynasties, often publishers as well as artists, include the Wierix family , the Saenredams, and Aegidius Sadeler and several of his relations. Philippe Galle founded another long-lived family business. Theodor de Bry specialised in illustrating books on new colonial areas. The 17th century saw

6360-570: The Nude Men (right), the masterpiece of 15th-century Florentine engraving. This uses a new zigzag "return stroke" for modelling, which he probably invented. A chance survival is a collection of mostly rather crudely executed Florentine prints now in the British Museum , known as the Otto Prints after an earlier owner of most of them. This was probably the workshop's own reference set of prints, mostly round or oval, that were used to decorate

6480-459: The Revolution for widespread education. In 1910 when the Revolution began, only 20% of Mexican people could read. Art was considered to be highly important in this cause and political artists were using journals and newspapers to communicate their ideas through illustration. El Machete (1924–29) was a popular communist journal that used woodcut prints. The woodcut art served well because it was

6600-566: The art of social movements in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. The Treintatreintistas even taught workers and children. The tools for woodcut are easily attainable and the techniques were simple to learn. It was considered an art for the people. Mexico at this time was trying to discover its identity and develop itself as a unified nation. The form and style of woodcut aesthetic allowed a diverse range of topics and visual culture to look unified. Traditional, folk images and avant-garde, modern images, shared

6720-450: The artist's drawn design onto the block for the cutter to follow. Either the drawing would be made directly onto the block (often whitened first), or a drawing on paper was glued to the block. Either way, the artist's drawing was destroyed during the cutting process. Other methods were used, including tracing. In both Europe and East Asia in the early 20th century, some artists began to do the whole process themselves. In Japan, this movement

6840-401: The basis of the traditional sets still in use today. By the last quarter of the century there was a large demand for woodcuts for book-illustrations, and in both Germany and Italy standards at the top end of the market improved considerably. Nuremberg was the largest centre of German publishing, and Michael Wolgemut , the master of the largest workshop there worked on many projects, including

6960-401: The block is cut in the end-grain). The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with an ink-covered roller ( brayer ), leaving ink upon the flat surface but not in the non-printing areas. Multiple colours can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks (using a different block for each colour). The art of carving the woodcut can be called "xylography", but this

7080-466: The block on to specialist printers. There were further specialists who made the blank blocks. This is why woodcuts are sometimes described by museums or books as "designed by" rather than "by" an artist; but most authorities do not use this distinction. The division of labour had the advantage that a trained artist could adapt to the medium relatively easily, without needing to learn the use of woodworking tools. There were various methods of transferring

7200-517: The century produced original prints of quality, mostly sticking to the same categories of genre they painted. The eccentric Hercules Seghers and Jacob van Ruisdael produced landscapes in very small quantities, Nicolaes Berchem and Karel Dujardin Italianate landscapes with animals and figures, and Adriaen van Ostade peasant scenes. None was very prolific, but the Italianate landscape

7320-522: The council for atheism for a period. The other principal member of the group was Heinrich Aldegrever , a convinced Lutheran with Anabaptist leanings, who was perhaps therefore forced to spend much of his time producing ornament prints. Another convinced Protestant, Hans Holbein the Younger , spent most of his adult career in England, then and for long after too primitive as both a market and in technical assistance to support fine printmaking. Whilst

SECTION 60

#1732782982078

7440-455: The deaths of this very brilliant generation, both the quality and quantity of German original printmaking suffered a strange collapse; perhaps it became impossible to sustain a convincing Northern style in the face of overwhelming Italian productions in a "commoditized" Renaissance style. The Netherlands now became more important for the production of prints, which would remain the case until the late 18th century. Some Italian printmakers went in

7560-435: The effect he wanted; he said that Cort could not work from the painting alone, so he produced special drawings for him to use. Eventually, the results were highly effective and successful, and after Titian's death Cort moved to Rome, where he taught a number of the most successful printmakers of the next generation, notably Hendrik Goltzius , Francesco Villamena and Agostino Carracci , the last major Italian artist to resist

7680-484: The end of artistic engraving. Previously the unreliable nature of the grounds used meant that artists could not risk investing too much effort in an etched plate, as the work might be ruined by leaks in the ground. Equally, multiple stoppings-out, enabling lines etched to different depths by varying lengths of exposure to the acid, had been too risky. Callot led the way in exploiting the new possibilities; most of his etchings are small but full of tiny detail, and he developed

7800-522: The end of the century. The little evidence we have suggests that woodcut prints became relatively common and cheap during the fifteenth century, and were affordable by skilled workers in towns. For example, what may be the earliest surviving Italian print, the "Madonna of the Fire", was hanging by a nail to a wall in a small school in Forlì in 1428. The school caught fire, and the crowd who gathered to watch saw

7920-569: The energy of Rubens, and are as sensuous in their use of line as he is in paint. At the same time Pieter Brueghel the elder , another Cort-trained artist, who escaped to paint, was producing prints in a totally different style; beautifully drawn but simply engraved. He only etched one plate himself, a superb landscape, the Rabbit Hunters , but produced many drawings for the Antwerp specialists to work up, of peasant life, satires, and newsworthy events. Meanwhile, numerous other engravers in

8040-471: The excellent state of preservation of many pieces of paper over five hundred years old. Again unlike woodcut, identifiable artists are found from the start. The German, or possibly German-Swiss, Master of the Playing Cards was active by at least the 1440s; he was clearly a trained painter. The Master E. S. was a prolific engraver, from a goldsmithing background, active from about 1450–1467, and

8160-649: The famous blockcutter Hans Lützelburger was alive, he created from Holbein's designs the famous small woodcut series of the Dance of Death . Another Holbein series, of ninety-one Old Testament scenes, in a much simpler style, was the most popular of attempts by several artists to create Protestant religious imagery. Both series were published in Lyon in France by a German publisher, having been created in Switzerland . After

8280-409: The first half of the 16th century, high quality woodcuts continued to be produced in Germany and Italy, where Titian and other artists arranged for some to be made. Much of the interest was in developing the chiaroscuro woodcut , using multiple blocks printed in different colours. Because woodcuts and movable type are both relief-printed, they can easily be printed together. Consequently, woodcut

8400-417: The first to sign his prints with a monogram in the plate. He made significant technical developments, which allowed more impressions to be taken from each plate. Many of his faces have a rather pudding-like appearance, which reduces the impact of what are otherwise fine works. Much of his work still has great charm, and the secular and comic subjects he engraved are almost never found in the surviving painting of

8520-535: The fourteenth. Religious images and playing cards are documented as being produced on paper, probably printed, by a German in Bologna in 1395. However, the most impressive printed European images to survive from before 1400 are printed on cloth, for use as hangings on walls or furniture, including altars and lecterns . Some were used as a pattern to embroider over. Some religious images were used as bandages, to speed healing. The earliest print images are mostly of

8640-481: The gigantic Nuremberg Chronicle . Albrecht Dürer was apprenticed to Wolgemut during the early stages of the project, and was the godson of Anton Koberger, its printer and publisher. Dürer's career was to take the art of the woodcut to its highest development. Engraving on metal was part of the goldsmith 's craft throughout the Medieval period, and the idea of printing engraved designs onto paper probably began as

8760-405: The growth of the popularity of ukiyo-e brought with it demand for ever-increasing numbers of colours and complexity of techniques. By the nineteenth century most artists worked in colour. The stages of this development were: A number of different methods of colour printing using woodcut (technically Chromoxylography ) were developed in Europe in the 19th century. In 1835, George Baxter patented

8880-431: The hand-colouring of prints continued for many centuries, though dealers have removed it from many surviving examples. Italy, Germany, France and the Netherlands were the main areas of production; England does not seem to have produced any prints until about 1480. However prints are highly portable, and were transported across Europe. A Venetian document of 1441 already complains about cheap imports of playing cards damaging

9000-414: The inside covers of boxes, primarily for female use. It has been suggested that boxes so decorated may have been given as gifts at weddings. The subject matter and execution of this group suggests they were intended to appeal to middle-class female taste; lovers and cupids abound, and an allegory shows a near-naked young man tied to a stake and being beaten by several women. The other notable early centre

9120-647: The largest centre of Italian engraving. These are called (although the terms are less often used now) the "Fine Manner" and the "Broad Manner", referring to the typical thickness of the lines used. The leading artists in the Fine Manner are Baccio Baldini and the "Master of the Vienna Passion", and in the Broad Manner, Francesco Rosselli and Antonio del Pollaiuolo , whose only print was the Battle of

9240-576: The late 1460s onwards. In the last five years of the fifteenth century, Dürer, then in his late twenties and with his own workshop in Nuremberg, began to produce woodcuts and engravings of the highest quality which spread very quickly through the artistic centres of Europe. By about 1505 most young Italian printmakers went through a phase of directly copying either whole prints or large parts of Dürer's landscape backgrounds, before going on to adapt his technical advances to their own style. Copying of prints

9360-458: The lids of boxes, and sometimes even included in bandages over wounds, which was superstitiously believed to help healing. The explosion of sales of cheap woodcuts in the middle of the century led to a fall in standards, and many popular prints were very crude. The development of hatching followed on rather later than engraving . Michael Wolgemut was significant in making German woodcuts more sophisticated from about 1475, and Erhard Reuwich

9480-748: The local industry. Block-books were a very popular form of (short) book, where a page with both pictures and text was cut as a single woodcut. They were much cheaper than manuscript books, and were mostly produced in the Netherlands; the Art of Dying ( Ars moriendi ) was the most famous; thirteen different sets of blocks are known. As a relief technique (see printmaking ) woodcut can be printed easily together with movable type, and after this invention arrived in Europe about 1450 printers quickly came to include woodcuts in their books. Some book owners also pasted prints into prayer books in particular. Playing cards were another notable use of prints, and French versions are

9600-416: The market and tended to push out original printmaking, which declined noticeably from about 1530–1540 in Italy. By now some publisher/dealers had become important, especially Dutch and Flemish operators like Philippe Galle and Hieronymus Cock , developing networks of distribution that were becoming international, and much work was commissioned by them. The effect of the development of the print-selling trade

9720-485: The matrix is flat, and some areas are treated to create the print image. Planographic techniques include lithography and offset lithography . Normally, relief and intaglio techniques can only be mixed with others of the same family in the same printed page, unless the page is printed twice. Traditional text printing with movable type is also a relief technique. This meant that woodcuts were much easier to use as book illustrations, as they could be printed together with

9840-502: The most productive workshop for engravings of the century between about 1465 and 1503. He produced over 600 plates, most copies of other prints, and was more sophisticated in self-presentation, signing later prints with his name and town, and producing the first print self-portrait of himself and his wife. Some plates seem to have been reworked more than once by his workshop, or produced in more than one version, and many impressions have survived, so his ability to distribute and sell his prints

9960-418: The nineteenth and twentieth century, often in a modified form where images used large areas of white-line contrasted with areas in the normal black-line style. This was pioneered by Félix Vallotton . In the 1860s, just as the Japanese themselves were becoming aware of Western art in general, Japanese prints began to reach Europe in considerable numbers and became very fashionable, especially in France. They had

10080-616: The nineteenth century in most of Europe, and later in some places. The art reached a high level of technical and artistic development in East Asia and Iran . Woodblock printing in Japan is called moku-hanga and was introduced in the seventeenth century for both books and art. The popular "floating world" genre of ukiyo-e originated in the second half of the seventeenth century, with prints in monochrome or two colours. Sometimes these were hand-coloured after printing. Later, prints with many colours were developed. Japanese woodcut became

10200-421: The normal medium for such artists. Rembrandt bought a printing-press for his house in the days of his early prosperity, and continued to produce etchings (always so called collectively, although Rembrandt mixed techniques by adding engraving and drypoint to some of his etchings) until his bankruptcy, when he lost both house and press. Fortunately his prints have always been keenly collected, and what seems to be

10320-425: The only consistent printmaker of stature in France had been Jean Duvet , a goldsmith whose highly personal style seems halfway between Dürer and William Blake . His plates are extremely crowded, not conventionally well-drawn, but full of intensity; the opposite of the languorous elegance of the Fontainebleau prints, which were to have the greater effect on French printmaking. His prints date from 1520 to 1555, when he

10440-437: The paintings done by the School of Fontainebleau were copied in etchings, apparently in a brief organised programme including many of the painters themselves. The Italian partnerships were artistically and commercially successful, and inevitably attracted other printmakers who simply copied paintings independently to make wholly reproductive prints. Especially in Italy, these prints, of greatly varying quality, came to dominate

10560-472: The paper or cloth to achieve an acceptable print. In Europe, a variety of woods including boxwood and several nut and fruit woods like pear or cherry were commonly used; in Japan, the wood of the cherry species Prunus serrulata was preferred. There are three methods of printing to consider: Woodcut originated in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later on paper. The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China, from

10680-736: The period. Like the Otto prints in Italy, much of his work was probably intended to appeal to women. The first major artist to engrave was Martin Schongauer (c. 1450–1491), who worked in southern Germany and was also a well-known painter. His father and brother were goldsmiths, so he may well have had experience with the burin from an early age. His 116 engravings have a clear authority and beauty and became well known in Italy as well as northern Europe, as well as much copied by other engravers. He also further developed engraving technique, in particular refining cross-hatching to depict volume and shade in

10800-673: The practice of woodcut has spread around the world from Europe to other parts of Asia, and to Latin America. In both Europe and East Asia, traditionally the artist only designed the woodcut, and the block-carving was left to specialist craftsmen, called formschneider or block-cutters , some of whom became well known in their own right. Among these, the best-known are the 16th-century Hieronymus Andreae (who also used "Formschneider" as his surname), Hans Lützelburger and Jost de Negker , all of whom ran workshops and also operated as printers and publishers. The formschneider in turn handed

10920-428: The presumed originals have survived — a very high proportion of his original prints are only known from a single impression. The largest collection of his prints is at Amsterdam; these were probably kept as a collection, perhaps by the artist himself, from around the time of their creation. Israhel van Meckenam was an engraver from the borders of Germany and the Netherlands, who probably trained with Master ES, and ran

11040-706: The print carried up into the air by the fire, before falling down into the crowd. This was regarded as a miraculous escape and the print was carried to Forlì Cathedral, where it remains, since 1636 in a special chapel, displayed once a year. Like the majority of prints before approximately 1460, only a single impression (the term used for a copy of an old master print; "copy" is used for a print copying another print) of this print has survived. Woodcut blocks are printed with light pressure, and are capable of printing several thousand impressions, and even at this period some prints may well have been produced in that quantity. Many prints were hand-coloured, mostly in watercolour ; in fact

11160-402: The recessed areas are printed by inking the whole matrix, then wiping the surface so that only ink in the recessed areas remain. Much greater pressure is then needed to force the paper into the channels containing the ink, so a high-pressure press is normally needed. Intaglio techniques include engraving , etching , and drypoint . In the planographic family of printing , the entire surface of

11280-446: The second half of the century the typical woodcut is a relatively crude image. The great majority of surviving 15th-century prints are religious, although these were probably the ones more likely to survive. Their makers were sometimes called "Jesus maker" or "saint-maker" in documents. As with manuscript books, monastic institutions sometimes produced, and often sold, prints. No artists can be identified with specific woodcuts until towards

11400-631: The seventeenth century. Notable examples are Hu Zhengyan 's Treatise on the Paintings and Writings of the Ten Bamboo Studio of 1633, and the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual published in 1679 and 1701. In Japan colour technique, called nishiki-e in its fully developed form, spread more widely, and was used for prints, from the 1760s on. Text was nearly always monochrome, as were images in books, but

11520-448: The spread of etching. Goltzius, arguably the last great engraver, took Cort's style to its furthest point. Because of a childhood accident, he drew with his whole arm, and his use of the swelling line, altering the profile of the burin to thicken or diminish the line as it moved, is unmatched. He was extraordinarily prolific, and the artistic, if not the technical, quality of his work is very variable, but his finest prints look forward to

11640-561: The technique include Hans Baldung and Parmigianino . In the German states the technique was in use largely during the first decades of the sixteenth century, but Italians continued to use it throughout the century, and later artists like Hendrik Goltzius sometimes made use of it. In the German style, one block usually had only lines and is called the "line block", whilst the other block or blocks had flat areas of colour and are called "tone blocks". The Italians usually used only tone blocks, for

11760-492: The text. Intaglio illustrations, such as engravings, had to be printed separately. The first relief-printed publication in the US, the multi-page newspaper Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick , was published on September 25, 1690. Old master print An old master print (also spaced masterprint ) is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition. The term remains current in

11880-521: The true chiaroscuro woodcut conceived for two blocks was probably first invented by Lucas Cranach the Elder in Germany in 1508 or 1509, though he backdated some of his first prints and added tone blocks to some prints first produced for monochrome printing, swiftly followed by Hans Burgkmair . Despite Giorgio Vasari 's claim for Italian precedence in Ugo da Carpi , it is clear that his, the first Italian examples, date to around 1516. Other printmakers to use

12000-654: The woodcut engravings of the iconic skeleton ( calaveras ) figures that are prominent in Mexican arts and culture today (such as in Disney Pixar's Coco ). See La Calavera Catrina for more on Posada's calaveras . In 1921, Jean Charlot , a French printmaker moved to Mexico City . Recognizing the importance of Posada's woodcut engravings, he started teaching woodcut techniques in Coyoacán 's open-air art schools. Many young Mexican artists attended these lessons including

12120-401: The world (such as the arctic ) where wood is rare and expensive, the woodcut technique is used with stone as the medium for the engraved image. Relief printing Relief printing is one of the traditional families of printmaking techniques, along with the intaglio and planographic families, though modern developments have created others. In the relief family of printing, the matrix

12240-788: Was Ferrara , from the 1460s, which probably produced both sets of the so-called " Mantegna Tarocchi " cards, which are not playing cards, but a sort of educational tool for young humanists with fifty cards, featuring the Planets and Spheres, Apollo and the Muses , personifications of the Seven liberal arts and the four Virtues, as well as "the Conditions of Man" from Pope to peasant. Andrea Mantegna who trained in Padua , and then settled in Mantua ,

12360-400: Was Dürer's pupil, and was left in charge of the Nuremberg workshop during Dürer's second Italian trip. He had no difficulty in maintaining a highly personal style in woodcut, and produced some very powerful images. Urs Graf was a Swiss mercenary and printmaker, who invented the white-line woodcut technique, in which his most distinctive prints were made. The Little Masters is a term for

12480-621: Was a court painter in Lorraine , a world that was to vanish abruptly in the Thirty Years War shortly after his death. No surviving painting of his can be identified with confidence, and most of those sometimes attributed to him are unimpressive. His prints, mostly religious, are Baroque extravaganzas that were regarded with horror by many 19th century critics, but have come strongly back into fashion—the very different Baroque style of another Lorraine artist Georges de La Tour has enjoyed

12600-615: Was almost to smother the old master print. Dürer never copied any of his paintings directly into prints, although some of his portraits base a painting and a print on the same drawing, which is very similar. The next stage began when Titian in Venice, and Raphael in Rome, almost simultaneously began to collaborate with printmakers to make prints to their designs. Titian at this stage worked with Domenico Campagnola and others on woodcuts, whilst Raphael worked with Raimondi on engravings, for which many of Raphael's drawings survive. Rather later,

12720-445: Was already a large and accepted part of the printmaking culture but no prints were copied as frequently as Dürer's. Dürer was also a painter, but few of his paintings could be seen except by those with good access to private houses in the Nuremberg area. The lesson of how he, following more spectacularly in the footsteps of Schongauer and Mantegna, was able so quickly to develop a continent-wide reputation very largely through his prints

12840-510: Was among the most effective early users of the technique of etching , recently invented as a printmaking technique by Daniel Hopfer , an armourer from Augsburg . Neither Hopfer nor the other members of his family who continued his style were trained or natural artists, but many of their images have great charm, and their "ornament prints", made essentially as patterns for craftsmen in various fields, spread their influence widely. Hans Burgkmair from Augsburg , Nuremberg 's neighbour and rival,

12960-456: Was being used during this time as well to spread leftist politics such as socialism, communism, and anti-fascism. In Mexico, the art style was made popular by José Guadalupe Posada , who was known as the father of graphic art and printmaking in Mexico and is considered the first Mexican modern artist. He was a satirical cartoonist and an engraver before and during the Mexican Revolution and he popularized Mexican folk and indigenous art. He created

13080-500: Was called sōsaku-hanga ( 創作版画 , creative prints ) , as opposed to shin-hanga ( 新版画 , new prints ) , a movement that retained traditional methods. In the West, many artists used the easier technique of linocut instead. Compared to intaglio techniques like etching and engraving , only low pressure is required to print. As a relief method, it is only necessary to ink the block and bring it into firm and even contact with

13200-651: Was evidently sophisticated. His own compositions are often very lively, and take a great interest in the secular life of his day. Printmaking in woodcut and engraving both appeared in Northern Italy within a few decades of their invention north of the Alps, and had similar uses and characters, though within significantly different artistic styles, and with from the start a much greater proportion of secular subjects. The earliest known Italian woodcut has been mentioned above. Engraving probably came first to Florence in

13320-401: Was historically made subtractively , by removing material from the surface of areas not intended to be printed. The remaining surface would then receive ink. The relief family of techniques includes woodcut , metalcut , wood engraving , relief etching , linocut , rubber stamp , foam printing, potato printing, and some types of collagraph . By contrast, in the intaglio family of printing,

13440-537: Was much better at retaining its images. Engravings were relatively expensive and sold to an urban middle-class that had become increasingly affluent in the belt of cities that stretched from the Netherlands down the Rhine to Southern Germany, Switzerland and Northern Italy. Engraving was also used for the same types of images as woodcuts , notably devotional images and playing cards , but many seem to have been collected for keeping out of sight in an album or book, to judge by

13560-573: Was not lost on other painters, who began to take much greater interest in printmaking. For a brief period a number of artists who began by copying Dürer made very fine prints in a range of individual styles. They included Giulio Campagnola , who succeeded in translating the new style Giorgione and Titian had brought to Venetian painting into engraving. Marcantonio Raimondi and Agostino Veneziano both spent some years in Venice before moving to Rome , but even their early prints show classicizing tendencies as well as Northern influence. The styles of

13680-611: Was reproductive, but his original prints are often very fine. He visited Antwerp, a reflection of the power the publishers there now had over what was now a European market for prints. A number of printmakers, mostly in etching, continued to produce excellent prints, but mostly as a sideline to either painting or reproductive printmaking. They include Battista Franco , Il Schiavone , Federico Barocci and Ventura Salimbeni , who only produced nine prints, presumably because it did not pay. Annibale Carracci and his cousin Ludovico produced

13800-590: Was seventy, and completed his masterpiece, the twenty-three prints of the Apocalypse. Cornelius Cort was an Antwerp engraver, trained in Cock's publishing house, with a controlled but vigorous style, and excellent at depicting dramatic lighting effects. He went to Italy and in 1565 was retained by Titian to produce prints of his paintings (Titian having secured his "privileges" or rights to exclusively reproduce his own works). Titian took considerable trouble to get

13920-440: Was slightly older than Dürer, and had a parallel career in some respects, training with Martin Schongauer before apparently visiting Italy, where he formed his own synthesis of Northern and Italian styles, which he applied in painting and woodcut, mostly for books, but with many significant "single-leaf" (i.e. individual) prints. He is now generally credited with inventing the coloured chiaroscuro (coloured) woodcut . Hans Baldung

14040-551: Was the first to use cross-hatching (far harder to do than engraving or etching ). Both of these produced mainly book-illustrations, as did various Italian artists who were also raising standards there at the same period. At the end of the century Albrecht Dürer brought the Western woodcut to a level that, arguably, has never been surpassed, and greatly increased the status of the "single-leaf" woodcut (i.e. an image sold separately). He briefly made it equivalent in quality and status to engravings, before he turned to these himself. In

14160-495: Was the main medium for book illustrations until the late sixteenth century. The first woodcut book illustration dates to about 1461, only a few years after the beginning of printing with movable type, printed by Albrecht Pfister in Bamberg . Woodcut was used less often for individual ("single-leaf") fine-art prints from about 1550 until the late nineteenth century, when interest revived. It remained important for popular prints until

14280-488: Was the most influential figure in Italian engraving of the century, although it is still debated whether he actually engraved any plates himself (a debate revived in recent years by Suzanne Boorsch ). A number of engravings have long been ascribed to his school or workshop, with only seven usually given to him personally. The whole group form a coherent stylistic group and very clearly reflect his style in painting and drawing, or copy surviving works of his. They seem to date from

14400-487: Was the most popular type of subject; Berchem had a greater income from his prints than his paintings. Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione grew up in Genoa and was greatly influenced by the stays there of Rubens and van Dyck when he was a young artist. His etching technique was extremely fluent, and in all mediums he often repeats the same few subjects in a large number of totally different compositions. His early prints include

#77922