Italian Renaissance woodcuts

The woodcut technique was notably popular during the Italian Renaissance, when artists would create designs for specialist cutters to transform into woodcuts for printing. This publication explains the regional differences in the production of woodcuts, highlighting the leading schools, designers and cutters, and charts how and why such a flourishing aspect of Italian print production declined so quickly in favour of engraving.

The technical requirements behind cutting into a block of wood and foreseeing what would be printed in relief were formidable, a challenge that attracted first-rate artists. The medium inspired designs of extraordinary ingenuity and beauty across a broad range of subjects, such as landscapes, mythology, devotional images and imagined portraits. Some of the resulting prints were on a spectacular scale, such as Titian’s Submersion of the Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, which is over 2 metres long.

With a few exceptions, woodcuts fell out of favour after the mid-sixteenth century, when the medium became confined to the cheap, popular end of the print market and was neglected by collectors. This change in status means that many works in the Museum’s collection are either the sole surviving examples or one of just a handful.

This generously illustrated book focuses on a little-studied aspect of Italian printmaking, exploring stunning works in generous detail to reveal their hidden depths.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface (David Landau, Laura Aldovini and Silvia Urbini)
Introduction (Sarah Vowles)
Critical fortune (Lisa Battagliotti)
Travelling prints, travelling printmakers (Grant Lewis)
Catalogue section:
1. The origins of Italian woodcut and the Venetian School
2. The Tuscan-Roman School
3. The Emilian School
4. The woodcut in everyday life
Notes and Select bibliography
Credits, Acknowledgements, Index

Laura Aldovini is Director of the Musei Civici in Pavia.

David Landau is an art historian and the founder and former editor of Print Quarterly. He has curated exhibitions including Andrea Mantegna (1992) and authored numerous books, including The Renaissance Print with Peter Parshall.

Silvia Urbini is an Italian art historian. She taught at the University of Bologna and is currently a contracted researcher for the Istituto per i Beni Artistici Culturali e Naturali in Emilia Romagna. She specialises in Renaissance book illustrations and books of fate and is currently working on a publication titled Somnii Explanatio: Italian Histories of Art in Henry Thode.

Grant Lewis is the Milein Cosman Project Curator for the exhibition Michelangelo: drawing the divine at the British Museum.

Sarah Vowles is Smirnov Family Curator of Italian and French Prints and Drawings and curator of the exhibition Michelangelo: the last decades at the British Museum. Previous publications include Piranesi drawings: visions of antiquity (2020) and co-authorship of Mantegna and Bellini (2017).