The Tatler-Burgess Medieval Manuscript Collection contains woodcut prints from the Renaissance, ranging from 1519 to 1575 A.D. Created by carving illustrations into wooden blocks, woodcut prints were used by early printing presses to mass-produce prints for Europe and the wider world.
The woodcuts include illustrations of biblical scenes, illustrations for a moral satire, a map of a city in the late sixteenth century, and an illustration from a fictionalized biography of a Holy Roman Emperor.
The collection is a fascinating introduction to the history of illustration and woodcut prints. Previous illustrations were only found in hand-made individual art pieces such as carvings, paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and illustrated manuscripts. Woodcut prints allowed for the first mass-produced printed images to be disseminated among a wide audience.
By studying these woodcut prints, researchers may gain appreciation for the art of the period, the artistic abilities of woodcutters, and the culture of sixteenth-century Europe, and better understand how information was spread and interpreted by those living in the first centuries of the printing press.
Victoria & Albert Museum. (2022, June 7). How was it made? Renaissance Playing Card | Woodcut Printing | V&A. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w_n7q92eB0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w_n7q92eB0
Woodcut or woodblock printing is one of the earliest methods of printing technology, with some of the foremost examples credited to the Tang Dynasty in modern-day China. Similar to the practice of using a rubber stamp and an ink pad, woodcut printing is a method of stamping symbols, words, or designs on a surface using a carved block of wood. The process requires an artist to carve away the surface of a wooden block, known as the relief process, so that the remaining raised surface design can be coated with paint or ink and pressed against paper or cloth to impart a print onto the surface of the material. In Europe, some of the earliest woodcuts such as the “Bois Protat” (c. 1380) were used to make prints of religious iconography on cloth. Once the printing press made mass production of books possible, it was a simple matter for artists to create woodcuts that fit the dimensions needed for a printing press. The fact that early printers used the same relief process to create movable letters out of metal, meant that the incorporation of woodcuts was relatively easy as both text and images could be printed on the same page with the same machine using the same process. As a result, woodcuts could be used in early printing presses to supplement text with depictions of what was being communicated for the benefit of the viewer, with the printer Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg using woodcuts to illustrate his books as early as 1461. While a notable alternative, the finer detail of copper engravings were not used extensively until 1550 due to the need for a separate printing process and the overall success of woodcut prints for most applications, apart from the finer detail required in the production of map prints.
