Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The first comprehensive history of late medieval printmaking, which transformed image production and led to profound changes in Western culture



This highly anticipated and beautifully illustrated book examines the evolution of early printmaking in late medieval Europe. Through their means of production and the evidence of their utility, prints are explored in a broad social and economic context. Key topics include the complex problem of reconstructing the beginnings of the European woodcut; the practice of copying and dissemination of models endemic to the medium; and the varied functions of the print from the spiritual to the secular.

A team of expert authors examines the many ways in which fifteenth-century woodcuts and metalcuts reflect the nature of piety and visual experience. Replicated images helped to structure private religious practice, transmit beliefs, disseminate knowledge about material facts, and graph abstract ideas. Mass-produced pictures made it feasible for people of all stations to possess them, thereby initiating a change in the role of images that eventually helped alter the definition of art itself.

The Origins of European Printmaking is an essential book for art historians, students, and collectors, as well as the general reader with an interest in medieval history and culture.

Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition Schedule:

Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (December 14, 2005 - March 19, 2006)

National Gallery of Art, Washington (September 4 - November 27, 2005)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This gorgeous and substantial catalog, published in association with Washington's National Gallery of Art and accompanying an exhibition at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (Dec. 2005-Mar. 2006) takes a close look at the first images printed on paper in the Western world. It wonderfully melds beauty with scholarship, presenting more than 100 15th-century, single-sheet woodcuts and metalcuts in all their graphic glory along with entries full of scholarly apparatus. These entries often run several pages and include endnotes as well as information about inscriptions, watermarks, provenance, and literature pertaining to the item. Parshall (curator and head, Old Master prints, National Gallery of Art, Washington), Schoch (vice director and head, graphic arts collection, Germanisches Nationalmuseum), and others do a fine job of explaining how these images were produced, the many ways they were used, and how the scholarship of early printed images has evolved over the centuries. This work represents one of the only in-depth studies of the earliest relief prints and is recommended for all libraries with collections related to medieval printmaking.-Kraig Binkowski, Yale Ctr. for British Art Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Parshall and colleagues offer a masterful survey of early relief printed imagery. It is rare material, mostly German in origin, and primarily devotional or didactic in purpose; it also includes playing cards and woodblock printing on cloth. The authors are foremost experts in early printmaking; their erudite scholarship traces the iconography of these prints as well as their connection to other works, including paintings and early printed copies. Through investigations into the watermarks of the paper, the authors demonstrate that the German single-leaf woodcut originated about 1420, not, as has often been asserted, decades earlier. Intaglio printing, on metal plates, began around 1430, in Germany. These prints were acquired by the literate elite as well as by those of modest means and little or no formal learning. Yet the close relationship between the early relief print and text is apparent in several ways. Many prints carried xylographic or manuscript text. Several extant manuscripts contain pasted-in woodcuts as illustrations. These unique documents presage the development of the movable-type printed book with woodcut illustrations, which would be perfected only a few decades later. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty. A. Golahny Lycoming College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Peter Parshall is curator and head of the department of Old Master prints at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rainer Schoch is vice director and head of the graphic arts collection at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg