Printmaking

The history of printmaking is unwieldy to thematize because pictures were necessary components of so many aspects of medieval life when prints appeared in 15th-century Europe. Printed pictures were interchanged with handmade images as pilgrimage souvenirs, the focus of prayer, decoration, manuscript illustration, workshop models, and other situations requiring images. With the development of moveable type, single-sheet woodblock prints, available on fabric and paper, were used for book illustration; maps were collected into atlases; print publishing, printmaking, and print selling flourished; and collecting was encouraged by the publication of print series and pre-compiled albums. Printmaking required access to prepared hardwood blocks and copper plates, specialized tools and training, presses, paper, and labor. Print distribution required publishers, booksellers, and eventually the legal protection of investments through a privilege system. New ways of distributing responsibility for authorship emerged during the Inquisition with print censorship. An active patronage system was adapted to conventions of dedication and rededication as matrices survived their original patronage networks. Prints were rarely the subject of academic research before the twentieth century unless they reflected designs by renowned painters, such as Mantegna, Dürer, Rubens, or Rembrandt. Much of the early writing about prints focused on these recognized masters. The definition of an original print relied on Bartsch’s 19th-century category of peintre-graveurs, artists whose original inventions were registered in the form of prints. Since few painters learned printmaking techniques with the skill of specialized craftspeople, Bartsch’s distinction muddied the question of what an original print is today, also preventing historians from understanding how to value the contribution of the painters, goldsmiths, embroiderers, and cartographers for whom the distinction was irrelevant. In the modern era, early private print collections entered museums, making curators the first interpreters of prints. The encyclopedic Illustrated Bartsch, the New Hollstein, and digitized censuses of prints and their matrices are ongoing projects allowing us to understand better how integral copying and republishing was to the development of printmaking. Scholars studying the role of prints in ritual practice, career formation, theology, medicine, commerce, travel, colonization, and the geographic imagination engaged new opportunities offered by digital cataloguing. The material turn in print studies fruitfully combined the work of academic historians, curators, and conservators who had the most intimate knowledge of prints, showing how the three branches of study demonstrating how printed pictures shaped and were shaped by the aesthetic, social, and material circumstances of early modern life.

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