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Color Enlivens Black and White Renaissance Prints

© Suzanne Hill

"Painted Prints"
Susan Dacker, curator
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218
Hours: Wed-Fri 11am-5pm, Sat-Sun 11am-6pm
Admission: $7 adults, $5 seniors & students


White paper, lines of black ink. Woodcut art has a stark beauty. I've tried making my own designs, and they end up looking like early medieval woodcuts - crude and simple. It's a challenging art form with little mercy - only white and black. No gray. No shading.

The exhibit "Painted Prints" showcases black and white Renaissance prints with a twist: the prints have been enhanced by the addition of paint. The exhibit is the result of years of groundbreaking research by the curator, Susan Dacker. She stumbled upon this art form during years of traversing Europe and observing art.

It was puzzling to her to find prints enhanced with color, when only black and white were almost exclusively displayed. But it made sense. Color gives the prints depth, meaning, and a beauty entirely different from their black and white beginnings. To quote the curator, "the Renaissance was filled with colorful works of art, such as illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, tapestries, and oil paintings, so why wouldn't prints be enhanced with color?" Yet why don't we know more about this art form?

During the Renaissance, after the invention of the printing press, books were becoming all the rage among an emerging middle class. Woodcuts, being inked in the same way as type, lent themselves well to book illustration.

Additionally, prints were used as wall decoration to recreate the famous oil paintings of the day. What started out as simple crude creations grew to stunning works of art at the hands of artists like Dürer. A collector's market emerged due to the people's growing interest as the artistic status of prints was raised. From about 1550 to 1650, woodcut prints enjoyed a heyday that hasn't been seen since.

"Painted Prints" includes two other types of prints invented immediately after woodcuts, engravings and etchings. In one display case are laid a woodcut, a copper etching plate, and an engraving plate. The display shows the differences among all three more clearly than any I've seen before. A woodcut sits next to the knife used to carve into its soft wood, leaving a network of raised lines looking much the same as a rubber stamp. Thick ink is applied; paper is pressed against the woodcut, leaving the print.

Next on view is the metal plate of an engraving, with a tool called a burin used to cut lines into the metal. It is explained that ink is forced into the lines of the plate. Lying next to it is the resulting print with a style more delicate than that of a woodcut. And the copperplate of an etching is next, with an explanation of how lines are scratched with a needle into its wax coating. Acid bites the lines into the copperplate. The piece of artwork on display is more freehand than either the engraving or the woodcut.