HIST 111: Ruin and Renewal: Europe to 1500 (HC)

In many ways Albrecht Dürer sums up the Renaissance and the print was, without a doubt, his preferred medium. Two of the most important collections of Dürer's works in France join forces to present more than 200 illustrations, highlighting the artist's technical mastery and his role in the aesthetic upheavals of his era.

Contents: Using Renaissance Prints -- Single- and Multi-Sheet Prints --Prints and Books -- Applied Prints -- Religious Prints as Substitute Objects -- Printed Scientific Objects --"Affixed and Ordered" Printmaking -- Physical Qualities of Early Prints.

First in a three-part series (see other titles below) cataloging and reproducing woodblock images printed in Germany in the early modern period. Valuable for the detail it provides on visual culture as well as on the topics that appealed to people including current events, marvels, and the humorous.
See also: The German single-leaf woodcut, 1550-1600: a pictorial catalogue and The German single-leaf woodcut, 1600-1700: a pictorial catalogue.

The suite of forty prints published in Geneva in 1570 depicting the wars, massacres and troubles of the French Wars of Religion may have been the first picture history made in woodcuts or etchings that promised a geenral public a true view of great events of the recent past. This richly illustrated study reconstructs the gradual elaboration of this experimental work, situating it within the previously untold story of the use of the graphic arts to report the news in the fist centuries of European printmaking. Successive chapters explore the pictorial traditions that inspired the printmakers, examine how they gathered their information, assess the reliability of the scenes, and analyze the historical vision informing the series. Part 2 reproduces the full suite with commentary in double page fold-outs. Through the study of a single print series, lost chapters in the history of jorunalism, of the graphic arts, and of Protestant historical consciousness re-emerge.

The invention of the printing press led to an explosion of cheap printed materials in the 16th and 17th centuries including broadsides and ballads. Frequently designed in "blackletter" gothic type and accompanied with distinctive woodcut illustrations, these dynamic forms encompassed the interests and humor of the times. This book highlights some of the most striking examples from the British Library. Frequent topics of illustration include monsters, witches, criminals, drinking, war and politics.

From handwritten texts to online books, the page has been a standard interface for transmitting knowledge for over two millennia. It is also a dynamic device, readily transformed to suit the needs of contemporary readers. In How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak explores how changing technology has affected the reception of visual and written information.

This exhibition catalog surveys Humanism and the Renaissance in Lyon through paintings,pieces of furniture, gold and silver, majolica, enamels, medals and textiles. Books are given special attention since Lyon was an important center of early printing.

Hand-painted illumination enlivened the burgeoning culture of the book in the Italian Renaissance, spanning the momentous shift from manuscript production to print. Renaissance humanism encouraged wealthy members of the laity to become book collectors. Illuminators responded to patrons' developing interest in classical motifs, and celebrated artists such as Mantegna and Perugino occasionally worked as illuminators.

Breydenbach's Peregrinatio, first published in 1486, is especially renowned for the originality of its woodcuts. Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for cultural history. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a trip together to the Middle East. The book they later published ambitiously engaged with the potential of the new print medium to give an account of their experience. The Peregrinatio also aspired to rouse readers to a new crusade against Islam by depicting a contest in the Mediterranean between the Christian bastion of the city of Venice and the region's Muslim empires.

Copper-plate printmaking, developed alongside Gutenberg's invention of moveable type, was a huge business employing thousands of people, and dominating image production for nearly four centuries across the whole of Europe. Its techniques and influence remained very stable until the nineteenth century, when this world was displaced by new technologies, of which photography was by far the most important.

"In this book, Carl Goldstein examines the print culture of seventeenth-century France through a study of the career of Abraham Bosse, a well-known printmaker, book illustrator, and author of books and pamphlets on a variety of technical subjects"-- Provided by publisher.

The print repertoire of the 16th and 17th centuries in England has been neglected historically, and this book rectifies a major oversight in the history of English visual art. It provides an iconographic survey of the single-sheet prints produced during the early modern era and brings to light significant recent discoveries from this visual storehouse. Portents and prodigies, the formal moralities and doctrines of Christianity, the sects of Christianity, visual satire of foreigners and others, domestic political issues, social criticism and gender roles, marriage and sex, as well as visual tricks, puzzles, and jokes, are all examined.

A print is a pictorial image that has been produced by a process that enables it to be multiplied, and many of the best-known works by some of the world's greatest artists are prints. Yet little is understood about this popular art form. Now Antony Griffiths provides an excellent introduction for anyone who wishes to acquire a basic understanding of prints and printmaking.

Contents: Printmaking and knowledge -- Constellations and configurations -- Observing nature -- Observation / Lorraine Daston -- The rhinoceros -- Dürer's indexical fantasy: the rhinoceros and printmaking / Susan Dackerman -- Theater of nature -- Illustrated natural history / Claudia Swan -- Measurement -- Printed instruments -- Georg Hartmann and the development of printed instruments in Nuremberg / Suzanne Karr Schmidt -- Mapping -- Allegory -- Allegories of knowledge / Katharine Park.

Herbals were highly illustrated books that included both the folkloric and medicinal uses of plants, and were critical texts for doctors and lay caregivers. This book explores developments in the understanding of the healthful and healing properties of plants, as Europe moved away from medicinal folklore toward an increased understanding of the natural world.

The Nuremberg physician Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514) is known mainly as the compiler of the World Chronicle which was published by Anton Koberger in a Latin and German version in 1493. The Chronicle is the most lavishly illustrated book printed in the 15th century, famous particularly for the views of European towns it contains.