The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550

"That is also a major theme in my own History of Art History . It’s no coincidence that Vasari’s art history, which was not illustrated by the way, he did not feature woodcut or engraving images, was nonetheless coming out of a print culture. Everyone, artists and patrons alike were collecting, comparing, poring over prints, often so-called reproductive prints which reproduced paintings. So art historical knowledge disseminated but also accelerated cultural change, in the sense that now people didn’t have to travel to see works of art. You could buy a piece of paper which reproduced famous images, all of which we take for granted now. This institutes a kind of feedback effect within art history. Artists as a result can keep tabs on one another. They are also reading, Vasari’s printed books and others, and so printed books with printed images all initiate this feedback loop which effectively creates the subject matter of art history. That’s a big theme in my book and was a very important phenomenon in the Northern Renaissance. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Parshall and Landau’s was a book that surprised everyone. I remember feeling gratitude because I’m very partial to prints and have worked on them extensively. I was always enamoured of printmaking and resentful of its slightly second-class status in scholarship. It’s rarer than you might think to work on Renaissance art and to work on both prints and paintings. Even today the field pretty much splits into painting people and print people. I can really count on one hand the people even of my generation who are completely comfortable in both. There’s something about the print medium, perhaps that has to do with the way they are stored differently in museums—prints are kept in print cabinets—and so the conditions of viewing are also very different from paintings. You have to make an appointment to see an old print, the experience today is more like going to a library than visiting a white-walled gallery. Having said that, Parshall and Laundau are very much print people, eminent print scholars. Landau works mostly on Italian art, Parshall mostly on Northern European art, they’re not ambidextrous in that way but that doesn’t matter. I was grateful for this book because it synthesises so much information, telling us this story which had really never been told in one big sweep. It’s a kind of monumental survey. I very much admire books that do that. A lot of scholarship is fragmented into article-length, focused studies or even book-length studies which are monographic, i.e., the focus is a single artist or single theme. They’re often argument- or thesis-driven, so they tend toward the tendentious and generally have a short shelf life, because within 10 years or so it’s likely that argument will no longer seem so compelling. More encompassing work can be found in other historical fields, but not that many art historians, eminent scholars in particular, are willing to invest the time required to write a 400-page book which covers so much material without really putting forth an argument. The argument of The Renaissance Print would be that you can’t understand the Renaissance unless you understand this body of material. “Dürer was the greatest of all print makers and the one who brought woodcut and engraving to their maximally eloquent and powerful forms” Prints are important because they disseminate information. They reproduce, fix and standardise information. Maps, diagrams, portraits and so forth, all kinds of pictorial knowledge get established and amplified. Technical information, too. The forerunner of the instruction manual was devised at around this time. The guilds and crafts had controlled a lot of knowledge, prior to the effective invention of the ‘how-to’ book, by passing it on through word of mouth and apprenticeship. Suddenly, print broke that all open. They leaked all this knowledge from the workshops. And that is a story in its own right, and one which meshes with the story that Parshall and Landau tell, which is not so much about information, but about prints as artworks and in particular the tension between prints that make a claim to be independent artworks, not derivative from other works. I’m thinking of the woodcuts and engravings of Albrecht Dürer in particular. Dürer was the greatest of all print makers and the one who brought woodcut and engraving to their maximally eloquent and powerful forms. His prints, although they were multiples, made in editions, were not copies of paintings. They were not in any way dependent on works in another medium. They were ‘medium specific’ we would say as modernists. They took advantage of and exploited the formal properties of woodcut and engraving and etching, the three major media in the Renaissance. These are independent works of art and are in dialectic with reproductive engravings, which were typically engravings, and sometimes woodcuts, which try to convey the properties of another work of art, reproducing a faithful copy of the image, apart from colour. The Northern artists, and Dürer principally, were aspiring to make independent or autonomous prints. Italian artists worked mostly in reproductive engraving. There is a productive tension between these two modes and one of the achievements of Parshall and Landau’s book is that it puts Northern and Italian art on the same footing. In fact when you focus on prints, Northern art actually somehow takes the lead. It’s what appealed to me. If we give prints their rightful place within this story, it levels out the gradient between the two traditions. What was distinctive about prints is that there were far fewer iconographic restrictions on image making than there were in other media during the Renaissance. It was a kind of open field because the work is not sitting on an altar in a church. Anything was possible. So artists were much freer to experiment or to import eccentric or even in some cases subversive material. This is one of the things that makes the field so compelling. It’s wild stuff!"