From Paper to Print: The Material Origins and Rise of Copperplate Engraving in 15th Century Europe (original) (raw)
Related papers
It is a well-known and established fact that the origins of early print making bare a close relationship with goldsmith workshops, with Albrecht Dürer as the most celebrated representative of this development. Surprisingly, the printed output of these early engravers for goldsmith- and architectural design is a field which gained little attention by print scholars so far. This paper examines the professional position and production of this particular new genre of ornament prints from goldsmith-engravers in the Low Countries such as the architect Alart DuHameel (c. 1460 – c. 1506) or the anonymous Master W with the Key (active c. 1465-85). A major part of these engravers’ output consisted of designs for metalwork such as reliquaries, censors, chalices or crosiers. By providing designs for a wide range of craftsmen - ranging from architects, over wood carvers to goldsmiths – this group of goldsmith-engravers can be interpreted as intermediate players in the dissemination of geometrical designing knowledge to a great variety of media. This paper addresses issues such as the dissemination of design skills, the practical and aesthetic function of design prints, the interdisciplinary crossovers between craftsmen by printed media, and the self-representation of the artist by the use of house marks and monograms.
Tricks of the Trade: The Technical Secrets of Early Engraving
Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, 2013
A n essay on engravings and secrets might be expected to start from a print like Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I (1514) (see in "Introduction"), representative of a new class of objects produced for often solitary, if not wholly private, contemplation, enjoyment, and even deciphering.' lndeed, the very foundations of the iconological hermeneutic might be traced through precisely such an image, in which symbols and ciphers yield their meanings through the painstaking and deliberate work of scholarly decoding. This essay, however, treats the technical secrets of engraving and will begin instead with another of Durer's prints from the previous year} the Sudarium with Two Angels ( .1)2 The legend of the veronica, or sudarium, a miraculous imprint of Christ's visage on cloth, served as the inspiration for countless devotional paintings and prints throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries' The sacrality of this relic was tied not only, or even principally, to the fact that it preserved a record of Christ's features, but rather to the miraculous means by which that image was transferred to cloth without the intermediary of a human craftsperson. Joseph Koerner has provocatively connected the miraculous record of the holy face on the veil to the processes of Renaissance printmaking, observing that "Durer thus fashions the Christian non manufactum to mythicize the process and the product of printing:" Though Koerner's likening of the angels in Durer's later etched Sudarium ( .2) to printmakers hanging their fresh pages to dry has aroused skepticism, the comparison is hardly inapt.'
Traditionally, the history of printmaking has fallen in the space between art history and the history of the book. Often ‘reproductive’ and multiple in nature, prints have long been marginalized in art historical scholarship in favour of the traditional ‘high’ arts. The inherent complexities in the manufacture and sale of print, often involving multi-faceted networks of specialist craftsmen, artists, publishers and sellers, has also led to much confusion. Not knowing how prints are made has affected our ability to understand the medium and its aesthetic qualities. However, recent scholarship has opened up new avenues for placing prints in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. From the techniques applied in the making of prints to the individuals involved in their production, distribution and use, current research is continuing to shape our understanding of this complex field. This two-day conference, in collaboration with Print Quarterly, aims to showcase new developments in the study of prints, challenging and developing traditional approaches. It is organized around a series of panels dedicated to different themes and is accompanied by a pop-up display in the Courtauld's Prints and Drawings Study Room: 'Courtauld Prints: The Making of a Collection'.
Graphic design before graphic designers: the printer as designer and craftsman, 1700–1914. Chapter 5
2013
A rich, visual retelling of history, international in scope, this book charts the evolution of print into graphic design between 1700 and 1914. It is organized into six chapters, each beginning with a short introductory text before immersing the reader in a wealth of delightful and fully captioned examples of printed ephemera handbills, posters, advertisements, catalogues and labels that served the demands of the emerging consumer classes of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and reveal the extraordinary skill, craft, design sense and intelligence of those who created them. A book of great appeal, based on comprehensive, original research, it keys into the new appreciation of craft and hand-rendered graphic design. With around 850 illustrations, many specially photographed from private collections, it will be of immense and lasting interest to graphic designers, design and social historians, as well as collectors of print and printed emphemera alike.
2019
The aim of this COSI seminar is to study European print production roughly during the period 1450-1750, emphasizing technical variance, geographic extent, and range of functionality. The course will specifically address questions of mobility of prints and, connected to it, problem of scale in early modern prints. We will closely examine the smallest and the largest of prints in the collection of the Art Institute’s Prints & Drawings Department: for instance, large-scale woodcuts such as The Triumph of Christ and The Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, both after Titian, or Andreani’s Triumph of Caesar, after Mantegna, as well as small-scale devotional pieces such as the anonymous German engraving of St. Anne, the Virgin, and Child (45mm). Additionally, we will study prints that accompanied books as illustrations, drawn from the collection of the Newberry Library. Along with the major names such as Dürer, Rembrandt, and Piranesi, the course seeks to expose students to a wider range of artists: Barbari, Bellange, Callot, Castiglione, Della Bella, Goltzius, Hollar, Mellan, Seghers, Tiepolo, and others. Readings will be from both primary (in translation) and secondary sources. Requirements will include three papers, last one being a research paper.
Impressum: The History of Ideas in the European Invention of Printing.t description
This is my current statement of my very long-term research project. It will be a book exploring the history of the philosophical ideas that influenced the earliest development of text and image printing in Europe c. 1370-1440. This dynamo of change, including typography and engraving, which is collectively called "printing"-sometimes called the first industrial complex-is conventionally said to have arisen rather abruptly around 1445 and then rapidly spread down the Rhine and through Europe, with little constraint and with no evident conceptual framework from the previous phase of European culture. Early printing has long been studied from the points of view of history of technology, socio-cultural history, and economic history. But an approach through the history of ideas and intellectual history has not been attempted, with a couple of thin exceptions, and so will be almost completely new in the field. Yet we know that ideas, including abstract concepts, are highly dynamic, readily spreading great influence. My researches apply this principle to the period before the deployment of print through the historiographic methods of the history of ideas and intellectual history applied to very late Medieval and very early Renaissance concepts of nature and humankind. Impressum is not a history of the book or printing history or history of technology project; rather, it is an unconventional study of a fresh area in intellectual history and the history of philosophy that can extend and deepen book history, art history, Western cultural history, and the history of communication. The intellectual history questions about the inception of typography include: what conceptions contributed to make the attraction of replicative techniques so powerful in this period as to motivate the invention of new media? What ideas allowed for the experiments in craft technique that initiated the massive infusion of texts and images in Western culture beginning c. 1450? To address these questions, I examine the changes in several central philosophical ideas in this period prior to the first printed texts and how these ideas might have been taken up by the new technology. It is unlikely that many new fragments of early printing or pieces of printing equipment will be discovered, but philosophy and theology in the period is so massively documented that it can be a rich field for study of the invention of printing. Therefore I suggest that we approach this question of "pre-print" by observing the successive and branching ideas in late scholasticism that constellated in the invention and deployment of replicative technologies. Printing involved impress of the original of text, image, and data into copies by a cluster of technologies that ultimately created a system of storage, diffusion, and retrieval. Putting part of the origin of the age of printed communication into the context of philosophical ideas will show that at its start it involved, on the part of the person or persons who invented the craft and on the part of those who developed and used it, general moral and philosophical concepts.
Contents Sonja Drimmer, "Introduction: The Manuscript Copy and the Printed Original in the Digital Present" Aditi Nafde, "Replicating the Mechanical Print Aesthetic in Manuscripts before circa1500" Larisa Grollemond, "Hybrid Luxuries: Manuscript and Print at the French Court of Cognac, circa 1480–1510" Devani Singh, "The Progeny of Print: Manuscript Adaptations of John Speed’s Chaucer Engraving" Anita Savo, "Material Afterlives of the Conde Lucanor: Asynchrony in BNE, MS 17788" Sonja Drimmer, "Post Script"