Painted Prints

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Painting Prints in Germany and the Netherlands

It is a truism in the history of art that color was applied to the earliest prints to compensate for their technical shortcomings. The traditional account of the development of printmaking asserts that as the expertise of print designers and block and plate cutters improved over the course of the fifteenth century, the need for the addition of color diminished. Interior modeling achieved through fine hatching and cross-hatching created the effects of modeling and shading, which had previously been attained by the addition of color. Descriptions like the following are common: “Throughout the XV century it was quite usual for illustrations, like separate woodcuts, to be colored by hand, at first in flat tints, afterwards with shading, and this practice only gradually gave way after Dürer, at the close of the century, had brought in such reforms in the technique of wood-engraving that the higher class of cuts were accepted as complete in plain black and white.”1 Here adding color becomes a remedy for perceived technical inadequacies rather than an essential aspect of early print production.2 This is curious given the predominance of painted prints in the &supl;fifteenth century.

From the inception of printmaking in the late fourteenth century, colorists painted woodcuts, metalcuts, and engravings. In the case of woodcuts, they applied paints both through stencils and freehand, painting single colors within the distinct fields delineated by the thick contour lines. The coloring of Last Judgment with Apostles (cat. no. 1) from about 1460 by a German artist is typical, using transparent red, green, yellow, and brown and opaque black paints to color discrete compositional elements. The lack of modeling or shading within the painted fields parallels the lack of modeling in the printed design. Typically, portions of the sheet remained unpainted, allowing the white of the paper to show through. The application of the colors is not always precise and in places exceeds the boundaries of the printed lines, suggesting that the colorist swiftly painted a considerable number of impressions. The number of woodcuts colored in this manner demonstrates that the appearance of the color itself was valued over the meticulousness of its application.

Early on, religious institutions produced woodcuts and metalcuts for sale as devotional images, pilgrimage and saint’s-day souvenirs, and talismans against -illness. By the third quarter of the fifteenth century, professional printmakers’ workshops replaced monasteries as the principal site of print production. Approximately ten thousand fifteenth-century northern European woodcuts survive,3 yet we assume, due to the fragility of paper and the use of prints in daily rituals, that this represents only a small fraction of those originally printed. The vast majority of these prints are hand-colored.

The 1490s mark a turning point in the history of the woodcut. Designers, most notably the Nuremberg artist Michael Wolgemut, transformed the medium by creating prints that demonstrated greater articulation of volume, shading, and light effects. Unlike the woodcuts of his fifteenth-century predecessors, Wolgemut’s printed lines provided his compositions with greater three-dimensionality and consequently the appearance of greater naturalism. Yet despite Wolgemut’s innovations to the medium, colorists continued to paint the majority of woodcuts from the late fifteenth century. Needless to say, this hardly lessens the merits of Wolgemut’s advances, but suggests that his contemporaries did not understand his innovations and the addition of color to be mutually exclusive.

The established account of the history of printmaking hinges on Albrecht Dürer, Wolgemut’s premier student. Dürer is credited with dramatically altering the medium of printmaking, releasing it from its need for color. The sophistication of his woodcuts surpassed those of his teacher. Dürer supplemented his contour lines with delicate hatching and cross-hatching, providing his woodcuts with the appearance of light, volume, and, most significantly, a range of tonality from white to black. His talents as an engraver were equally remarkable, creating textures, light effects, and tonality unprecedented in intaglio prints. However, print colorists both during Dürer’s lifetime and throughout the sixteenth century continued to paint impressions of his woodcuts and engravings. Although these painted prints may appear jarring to the modern eye, they were not extraordinary to print patrons of the sixteenth century.

Printmaking was a significant aspect of the artistic production of many of Dürer’s contemporaries. Hans Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach, and Albrecht Altdorfer, among others, are all recognized for their ingenuity and their expansion of the medium’s possibilities. Significant among these advances were attempts to re&supl;ne the addition of printed color to woodcuts. Indeed, it was precisely the desire to add color to prints that drove a creative competition between Burgkmair and Cranach. Their rivalry resulted in the invention of the chiaroscuro woodcut, which is colored by printing multiple tone blocks. In addition to those prints that resulted from innovative methods of color printing, these artists also produced numerous prints that were more traditionally hand-painted. In fact, the woodcuts and engravings of the most distinguished artists continued to be painted throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The primary purpose of this study is to overturn several assumptions: that the addition of color to prints was merely a means to remedy technical deficiencies, that the addition of color obliterated the superior printed matrix, and that the addition of color was separate from the printed design. Rather, color was often integral to the conception and meaning of printed images. If one conceives of hand coloring as an antidote to underdeveloped printmaking techniques, then color should have had no place once the medium matured. Yet, despite this familiar art-historical narrative, color application was practiced and appreciated through the seventeenth century, well beyond the nascent stages of the medium. This study attempts to reevaluate the art-historical bias against color in prints, in large measure by focusing on the extraordinary variety of painted prints from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. In doing so it hopes both to expand upon art history’s account of prints and to examine an important visual component of northern Renaissance art.

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