This richly illustrated publication reproduces and describes effectively every early modern German color print held at the British Museum. It is one of the world's most significant collections of these rare milestones of cultural heritage and technology. New photography reveals 150 impressions in jaw-dropping detail, most life-size. Some have never been seen in public or reproduced. It is the first major study of the first wave of German color printing. It spans medieval printing in the late 1400s through the Renaissance and Reformation of the 1500s. Early Colour Printing features masterpieces by leading figures like Erhard Ratdolt, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung Grien, and Hans Burgkmair, as well as unfairly overlooked entrepreneurs and innovators like Erasmus Loy (and his daughter Anna). Their breakthroughs reproduced artworks and simplified astronomical calculations. They created trends in interior design and signalled 'red-letter days'. They helped musicians sight-read and they color-coded metals for goldsmiths. These diverse new functions and markets might seem unrelated. But they are connected, and they cannot be understood in isolation. From artworks to missals, icons to wallpapers, this book breaks new ground by revealing the fascinating underlying technologies that enabled the production of these color-printed objects. The many inventions of color printing in the German-speaking lands began with medieval novel solutions. They were devised long before color printing inks could be formulated. Then, color printing techniques transformed how printed material could be used during the technological and cultural revolutions of the sixteenth century. Later designers and artists around Europe celebrated these techniques' heritage for centuries, from the 'D rer Renaissance' until chromolithography revolutionized the print market in the nineteenth century. Early Colour Printing captures this story in rich detail. It sets the stage for second wave of German color woodcut, which was triggered by the Expressionist revival at the turn of the twentieth century. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, this collection guide will be a standard reference on German graphic art, early modern visual culture, and the history of printing itself. Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum offers significant new research, including previously unidentified examples of early modern color-printing. Some are believed to be unique in the world; others were made decades before the landmark invention of colorful chiaroscuro woodcut in Italy in 1516. By modeling a printer- and technology-based approach to the history of printing, it contributes to scholarship by pinpointing attributions to printers--not just to artists or designers. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a new understanding of the history of print, one that encompasses all forms of printed material. This publication derives from an exhibition at the British Museum curated by Elizabeth Savage.

In Printing Colour 1400–1700, Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage offer the first handbook of early modern colour printmaking before 1700 (when most such histories begin), creating a new, interdisciplinary paradigm for the history of graphic art. It unveils a corpus of thousands of individual colour prints from across early modern Europe, proposing art historical, bibliographical, technical and scientific contexts for understanding them and their markets. The twenty-three contributions represent the state of research in this still-emerging field. From the first known attempts in the West until the invention of the approach we still use today (blue-red-yellow-black/‘key’, now CMYK), it demonstrates that colour prints were not rare outliers, but essential components of many early modern book, print and visual cultures.

Handbook of the Colour Print in China 1600-1800' is a ground-breaking volume of collected research into colour woodblock printed imagery produced in early modern China. The emergence and development of colour woodblock imagery occurred first in book illustrations and then in single-sheet prints. 0Leading scholars of Chinese print culture trace the emergence of a sophisticated and fully developed colour woodblock print technology between the late Ming and mid-Qing. This volume examines the impact of colour prints on Qing visual culture through interdisciplinary studies investigating literary and artistic contexts, social and economic histories, and dating through European inventoried collections. 0Richly illustrated with full-colour reproductions, this volume is an essential contribution to the future study of Chinese print and book culture.

Bamber Gascoigne offers a broad historical survey of developments in colour printing from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.