1st Edition

Prints in Translation, 1450–1750 Image, Materiality, Space

Edited By Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Edward H. Wouk Copyright 2017
    296 Pages 17 Color & 93 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    280 Pages 17 Color & 93 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.

    Contents

    List of Figures
    Preface
    Notes on Contributors
    Abbreviations

    1 Toward an Anthropology of Print
    Edward Wouk

    2 From Print to Paint and Back Again: Painting Practices and Print Culture in Early Modern Antwerp
    Alexandra Onuf

    3 Prints as Paintings: Willem van de Velde the Elder (1611–1693) and Dutch Pen Painting circa 1650–65
    Lelia Packer

    4 Between Paper and Sword: Daniel Hopfer and the Translation of Etching in Reformation Augsburg
    Freyda Spira

    5 Hunting Erotica: Print Culture and a Seventeenth-Century Rifle in the Collection of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
    Jonathan Tavares

    6 Mantegna’s Battle of the Sea Gods: the Material and Thematic Interaction of Print and Sculpture
    Patricia Simons

    7 Making Time and Space: Collecting Early Modern Printed Instruments
    Suzanne Karr Schmidt

    8 The State of the Fashion Plate, circa 1727: Historicizing Fashion Between ‘Dressed Prints’ and Dezallier’s Recueils
    David Pullins

    9 The Concettismo of Triumph: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V and Remembering Spanish Omnipotence in a late Sixteenth-Century Writing Cabinet
    Arthur J. DiFuria

    10 St. Michael the Archangel: Spiritual, Visual and Material Translations from Antwerp to Lima
    Stephanie Porras

    11 Lines of Perception: European Prints and the Mughal Kitābkhāna
    Yael Rice

    Bibliography

    Index

    Biography

    Suzanne Karr Schmidt is George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Newberry Library, Chicago, USA.

    Edward H. Wouk is Lecturer in European Art, 1400–1800, at The University of Manchester, UK.

    Winner of an honorable mention in the 2017 IFPDA Book Award

    "It is a book which should be read by art historians in every field."

    - IFPDA Award Jury

    "This most recent publication is a welcome addition in a continuing reassessment of the value of prints in early modernity. ...These writers’ contributions highlight the abundant opportunities awaiting print scholars—not only for those who examine the reception of European prints in Spain and its territories, as the contributors in this volume have done, but also works produced by Hispanic engravers and artists destined for internal or external markets. As such, this is an edifying collection that offers its readers an expanded perspective of prints in the early modern period."

    - Renaissance Quarterly

    "Altogether these essays provide real and often new and important insights, full of information, on the role of prints as sources of works of art and of new visions within the global mobility of visual knowledge in the period between 1450 and 1750."

    - Print Quarterly

    "The volume boldly expands an existing dialogue in the field about the historical interchange between modern art-historical specializations, intersections between prints and other media: painting; decoration of luxury arms; scientific instrument designs – even their own literal transformation into such instruments."

    - Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews