Ancient Illustration

Before movable type, wood cuts were difficult to make, 

but easy to mass produce. See the detail in this carving? 

Unfortunately, there's no way to correct any mistakes!

After seeing the codices held in special collections, and after trying my hand at calligraphy from the perspective of an illiterate, I have a new appreciation for the effort and time it took to create a single book. 

Now that we are moving on to printed knowledge, I want to explore the illustrative printing processes. Before the advent of movable type, printing consisted of wood cuts and engravings. Wood cuts were very difficult to make, but were very cheap to reproduce. Prints made from wood cuts became very widely circulated in Europe during the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries as paper became more common.

To make a woodcut, the image must be carved in relief, inked, and pressed onto the paper. Woodcuts were easy to incorporate into a work printed with movable type, so printers still used them as a cheap way to illustrate their printed books. The most prolific printers were from Germany, most notably Michael Wolgemut and his apprentice Albrecht Dürer.

Dürer was the god of print making. He quickly achieved fame throughout Europe because his woodcuts and engravings were way above the artistic level expected for that medium. Prior to Dürer, print making was not as prestigious as painting, and most serious artists chose to focus on the latter. However, due to the wide circulation of Dürer's works, he was able to achieve fame quickly throughout Europe. Rich patrons commissioned paintings and displayed them in their private homes. Although these paintings may have been more elaborate or beautiful than prints, they didn't get as many views. Soon, print makers everywhere were copying and reproducing Dürer's works, either partially or completely.

The piece on the right is an engraving made by Dürer that portrays the fall of Adam and Eve. You can see from the incredible detail of this work that Dürer was able to portray a wide variety of textures. Also, note the symbolism of the cat, the rabbit, the elk, and the ox: each represents one of the four humors, or bodily fluids. In those days, sickness was thought to be a result of an imbalance of these humors: the choleric (cat), the sanguine (rabbit), the melancholic (elk), and the phlegmatic (ox). The fall of Adam and Eve brought mortality and sickness, which Dürer represents symbolically in this engraving.

This illustration demonstrates the way
woodcuts print the raised portion of the block.

Engravings are made in a process similar to wood cutting, but whereas woodcuts print the positive space of the wood block, engravings print the negative space of the plate. The illustration on the left shows how the ink adheres to the surface of the wood block and then gets transferred to paper. In an intaglio printmaking process like engraving, however, the ink sits in the grooves, and the printer forces the paper to absorb the ink by pressing it with a heavy roller (hence, printing press).

The amount of skill and time it took to produce such a work of art seems daunting, but whereas monks might slave away for months and years producing one single copy of a manuscript, printers and engravers could produce many, many copies of their work once they had finished the initial woodblock or engraving plate. It was also common practice to color in such printed works with water colors, as we see in the works of William Blake. I just can't fathom scratching away at a surface for hours only to have everything I've done ruined by a stray stroke of bad fortune!