The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820 by Antony Griffiths (review)

The study of prints has been well served in the last few years, in monographs and in major exhibition catalogues. The foundation of Print Quarterly in 1984 helped enormously in drawing together what might otherwise be viewed as a rather disparate field, as different kinds of work and markets have been explored. Collectors, publishers, and users have been set in the contexts not just of the more important artists and engravers, but also of much wider considerations of cheap prints. The mass-produced can be as worthwhile for study as the most select. Connoisseurship remains, but it has been extended to encompass a search for a fuller understanding of the ubiquity and importance of prints in general. In its way the whole field has changed in ways similar to the developments we have seen in the history of the book.

As Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum between 1991 and 2011 Antony Griffiths has been at the centre of much of this change. The Print before Photography is the result of decades of research and reflection. It is a long book, and it is a generous one. He starts at 1550 for two reasons. First, in 2005–6 there was a landmark exhibition in Washington and Nuremberg of Origins of European Printmaking, devoted to relief prints down to the early sixteenth century. Second, the development in the mid-sixteenth century of trade in intaglio prints burst onto Europe in the hands of a new generation of publishers whose international trading transformed people’s imagination. They were led by names such as Antonio Lafreri, originally from Burgundy, and Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp who, followed by his widow, published an average of a print every fortnight between 1548 and 1600. The half-century gap between the 2005–06 exhibition and the start date of Griffiths’s book still needs to be filled, though in fact there is some overlap between the two. Both, for example, refer to the huge and exceptionally well documented collection assembled in 1515–25 by Ferdinand Columbus, studied in detail by Mark McDonald.

The replacement of woodcut by copper engraving and etching for book illustration in the late sixteenth century is a familiar story, one that is strengthened by the vast expansion of the trade in separate prints. But there was a difference between the high end and the everyday. On the whole, the former has survived much better than the latter, and it is now difficult to grasp the extent to which woodcuts continued to serve a host of purposes for entertainment or instruction, having nothing to do with connoisseurship. One welcome comparatively recent development is attention to cheap prints, to copies, to poor workmanship and to everyday entertainment, topics to which Griffiths is fully alert. In his discussion of book illustration, he is more concerned with intaglio than woodcut, so the continuing use of woodcuts in, for example, diagrams (think of Newton’s Principia) or popular guidebooks plays little part on his account. In a rare lapse, he claims that Ratdolt cast woodcuts in metal for printing Euclid in 1482, and that ‘doubtless’ (p. 520) others followed in his footsteps: in fact, the jury is still out on exactly what Ratdolt did.

He divides his book into three main sections: print production, the European print trade, and the use and understanding of the print. The first, and longest, covers not just technology and the capacity of copper plates, but also lettering, copying, censorship, colouring, book illustration, and the survival and loss of prints. The second deals with financing, patronage, state and private publication, marketing, buyers, and cheap prints and the itinerant trade. The final main section deals with views on the utility of the print, display and storage, collecting, early literature on prints, their use in the art world, and the heirarchy of techniques. A brief coda looks at the print since 1820.

Griffiths...