Apart from their particular aesthetic allure, fifteenth century woodcuts and metal cuts reflect attitudes toward the nature of piety and visual experience itself, enabling us in turn to understand the complex role of images in late medieval culture. In this beautifully illustrated book, an international team of scholars examines and reinterprets more than one hundred distinctive works, challenging long-standing assumptions about the beginnings of printmaking and exploring the very origins of a transformation in media that has had a profound impact on Western culture.

In the fifteenth century replicated images made the private ownership of pictures widely feasible for the first time. These mass-produced images helped structure private religious experience, transmit beliefs, disseminate knowledge about material facts, and chart abstract ideas. The authors explore these early relief prints primarily through the evidence of their utility: how those who first manufactured, purveyed, and acquired prints employed and understood them. While most of the prints provided an affordable representation of a favorite saint or an event from the Passion, they also facilitated the circulation and improvement of maps, the instruction of memory, and notification of counterfeit coins.

Central aspects of this study are the complex problem of reconstructing the beginnings of the European woodcut and defining its earliest characteristics, the practice of copying and disseminating models endemic to the medium, and the varied functions of the print from the spiritual to the secular. As the authors reveal, mass-produced pictures made it possible for people of all situations to possess them, thereby initiating a change in the role of images that eventually helped alter the definition of art itself.

Directors'Foreword

Preface

Lenders to the Exhibition

Early Woodcuts and the Reception of the Primitive

Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch

The Early Woodcut: The Known and the Unknown

Richard S.Field

Tbe Multiple Image: The Beginnings of Printmaking,between Old Theories and New Approaches

Peter Schmidt

Catalogue

Techniques of Replication

Traces of an Early Style

Reception and Markets

Passion and Compassion

Intercession and Instruction

The Saints

Appendix: The Papers and Their Watermarks

Shelley Fletcher

Bibliography

Index

Photographic Credits