Woodcutting: Printing on a Wooden Board

Woodcutting is native to China and involved the mechanization of the printing process. As a method of printing on canvas, the oldest surviving examples in China date back to the year 220, and in Egypt, from the sixth or seventh century. The ukiyo-e is the type of Japanese printing by means of more known wood stamps.

After the printing press, the woodcut was used for the illustrations. At the end of the 15th  century, it lost strength in front of the intaglio, which is much more precise, but its use lasted in the printing presses of the town. Nowadays, its use as an industrial technique is null, since photogravure already exists; despite this, it is still used by hand, mostly for artistic purposes.

The first book illustrated with this technique was the Diamond Sutra ( 868. London, British Museum). 2 In the West was introduced in the Middle Ages, the first samples of xylography date from the thirteenth century, it is cards made with this technique. Next, it is used for religious prints, the first dates from the late fourteenth century. It is adopted as a technique to illustrate books, in the first years it appears in the so-called xylographic books, from 20 to 30 pages with short texts and outstanding images. In addition, Christianity took advantage of the new technique to accompany his messages of illustrations.

Woodcut book

It is named like this to the book whose pages are printed with fixed plates. The texts are carved at the rate of one plate per page, so a modification on a page requires carving the entire plate. Among the most outstanding examples of European woodcut books is the Apocalypse, published in the Netherlands and Germany in the mid-fifteenth century, and the Bible pauperism or Bible Picta published around 1470 in Germany.

Woodcut books used to be more pictorial than textual. They were done in less time than traditional hand-painted books, but the production process was still laborious and was only satisfactory in the case of short and much-requested books. With the increased interest in knowledge and literature during the Renaissance, there was a demand for denser textbooks. The only way to produce these books quickly and in a relatively cheap way was by using mobile types, so by 1500, this method had almost completely supplanted the xylographic book, which has never been seriously resurrected.

Engravings in woodcut

The use of xylography for artistic engravings reached its peak in Europe in the 15th century and was losing its validity as other engraving techniques on metal were imposed: engraving, etching, etc. Surely it was in today 's Germany where the woodcut achieved greater development, partly because cities like Nuremberg were important centers of production and marketing of paper, which replaced the traditional parchment of the Middle Ages and easier and cheaper production of books and prints.

At the end of the fifteenth century, Michael Wolgemut managed an active workshop, which produced illustrations in woodcut for books such as the Chronicle of Nuremberg, a volume of large volume and more than 1,800 images (although quite repeated). Dürer must have learned the xylographic technique during his stage in this workshop, and already in his stage as an independent teacher, he revolutionized it with his series of the Apocalypse( 1498 ). Already in the following decade, Dürer preferred to record on metal, although he produced highly successful, comparatively cheaper woodcut series, such as La Gran Pasión, La Vida de la Virgen andSmall Passion.

Woodcut, despite its qualification as a primitive technique, was adopting improvements that helped maintain its validity. Hans Burgkmair is considered the inventor of tonal xylography or several colors, a rather laborious method that tried to recreate the colored sheets by hand. To do this, several plates of the same image were made, one for each color, each one carving only the plane of one color. By successively printing the different plates on the same paper, one on top of the other, the tones were combined and the desired color image was formed. This foundation could be understood as an ancestor of modern offset printing.

In Italy, the xylography technique had a comparatively lesser development, although, at the beginning of the 16th century, the engravers of the Renaissance brought the novelty of the xylography of chiaroscuro, which recreated the textures of the watercolor. The foundation is similar to the one of the tonal xylography, although usually the colors are more restricted (one or two) and they do not outline closed planes nor with very showy tones, but they are superposed forming waters like grisaille. Among the pioneers of this technique in Italy, Ugo da Carpi and Antonio da Trento stand out.