"An indispensable addition to the literature, this informative publication is not only one of very few books available in English on the subject, but it also reproduces for the first time all the featured prints in full colour. Authors examine the history, marketing, and collecting of these prints, as well as the tools, techniques, and papers used in making them."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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.

Catalog of an exhibition held at Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2012 - Jan. 20, 2013.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 1, 2013-January 5, 2014.