Woodblock printing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the use of the technique in art, see Woodcut on the technique, and Old master print for the history in Europe and woodblock printing in Japan
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text or images used widely throughout East Asia and originating in Eygpt and China sometime between the mid-6th and late 9th centuries as a method of printing on paper and cloth. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from Eygpt date to the 6th or 7th centuries. ukiyo-e is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique on paper are covered by the art term woodcut, except for the block-books produced mainly in the fifteenth century.
[edit] Technique
The wood block is prepared as a relief matrix, which means the areas to show 'white' are cut away with a knife or chisel, leaving the characters or image to show in 'black' at the original surface level. The block was cut along the grain of the wood. The content would of course print "in reverse" or mirror-image, a further complication when text was involved. The art of carving the woodcut is technically known as xylography, though the term is rarely used in English.
For colour printing, multiple blocks are used, each for one colour, although overprinting two colours may produce further colours on the print. Multiple colours can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks.
As a relief method, it is only necessary to ink the block and bring it into firm and even contact with the paper of cloth to achieve an acceptable print. The block would of course print "in reverse" or as a mirror-image, a further complication when text was involved.
There are three methods of printing to consider:
Stamping: Used for many fabrics, & most early European woodcuts (1400-40) These were printed by putting the paper/fabric on a table or other flat surface with the block on top, & pressing or hammering the back of the block
Rubbing: Apparently the most common for Far Eastern printing on paper at all times. Used for European woodcuts and block-books later in the fifteenth century, and very widely for cloth. The block goes face up on a table, with the paper or fabric on top. The back is rubbed with a "hard pad, a flat piece of wood, a burnisher, or a leather frotton" .<ref name="Hind">An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, Arthur M. Hind,p64-94, Houghton Mifflin Co. 1935 (in USA), reprinted Dover Publications, 1963 ISBN: 0-486-20952-0</ref>
Printing in a press: Presses only seem to have been used in Asia in relatively recent times. Simple weighted presses may have been used in Europe, but firm evidence is lacking. Later printing-presses were used (from about 1480). A deceased Abbess of Malines in 1465 had "unum instrumentum ad imprintendum scripturas et ymagines ... cum 14 aliis lapideis printis" - "an instrument for printing texts and pictures ... with 14 stones for printing" which is probably too early to be a Gutenberg-type printing press in that location.<ref name="Hind"/>
[edit] Development of Block Printing
The use of round "cylinder seals" for rolling an impress onto clay tablets goes back to early Mesopotamian civilization before 3,000 BCE, where they are the commonest works of art to survive, and feature complex and beautiful images. In both China and Eygpt, the use of small stamps for seals preceded the use of larger blocks. In Eygpt, Europe and India, the printing of cloth certainly preceeded the printing of paper or papyrus; in China it does not seem clear if they arose together or which came first. The process is essentially the same - special presentation impressions of prints were often printed on silk until at least the seventeenth century.
Nor is it clear if the Eygptian printing of cloth was learned from China, or developed separately; the earliest surviving printed cloth is Eygptian, but the dry conditions in Eygpt are exceptionally good for preserving fabric. It does seem clear that the Chinese were the first by several centuries to use the process to print solid text, and equally that in Europe the printing of images on cloth developed into the printing of images on paper (woodcuts). It is also now established that the use in Europe of the same process to print text and images together in block-books only came after the development of movable type.
In India the main importance of the technique has always been as a method of printing textiles, which has been a large industry for centuries. Large quantities of printed Indian silk and cotton were exported to Europe throughout the Modern Period.
The three necessary components for woodblock printing are the wood block, which carries the design cut in relief; dye or ink, which had been widely used even in early China and Eygpt; and either cloth or paper, which was first developed in China, around the 3rd or 2nd century BC.
Woodblock printing is a particularly appropriate technique for a writing system like Chinese, because of the strong incentive to avoid hand-copying every character in a given text. Block printing has advantages over movable type for a language such as Chinese which has a very broad character set. Although the Chinese invented a form of movable type with baked clay in the 11th century, and metal movable type was introduced in Korea in the 13th century, woodblocks continued to be preferred owing to the formidable challenges of typesetting Chinese text with its 40,000 or more characters. Also, the objective of printing in the East may have been more focused on standardization of ritual text (such as the Buddhist canon Tripitaka, requiring 130,000 woodblocks), and the purity of validated woodblocks could be maintained for centuries.<ref name=christensen> Thomas Christensen (2007). Did East Asian Printing Traditions Influence the European Renaissance?. Arts of Asia Magazine (to appear). Retrieved on 2006-10-18.</ref> When there was a need for the reproduction of a text, the original block could simply be brought out again, while moveable type necessitated error-prone composition of distinct "editions".
The difference between East Asian woodblock printing and the Western printing press had major implications for the development of book culture and book markets in East Asia and Europe.
[edit] Early Books
Woodblock printing in China is strongly associated with Buddhism, which encouraged the spread of charms and sutras. The world's earliest dated (868 A.D.) printed book is a Chinese scroll about sixteen feet long and containing the text of the Diamond Sutra. It was found in 1907 by the archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein in Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, and is now in the British Museum. The book displays a great maturity of design and layout and speaks of a considerable ancestry for woodblock printing. The colophon, at the inner end, reads: Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [i.e. 11th May, CE 868 ].
An older woodblock print (dated between 704 and 751 AD) has been found at Bulguksa, South Korea in 1966. Its Buddhist text was printed on a mulberry paper scroll 8 cm wide and 630 cm long in the early Korean Kingdom of Unified Silla.
[edit] Woodblock printing in Eurasia
The technique is found through East and Central Asia, and in the Byzantine world for cloth, and by 1000 A.D. examples of woodblock printing on paper appear in Islamic Egypt. Printing onto cloth had spread much earlier, and was common in Europe by 1300. Woodblock printing on paper of images only began in Europe by 1400, almost as soon as paper became available, and the print in woodcut, later joined by engraving, quickly became an important cultural tradition for popular religious works, as well as playing cards and other uses. <ref name="Hind">An Introduction to a History of Woodcut, Arthur M. Hind,p64-94, Houghton Mifflin Co. 1935 (in USA), reprinted Dover Publications, 1963 ISBN: 0-486-20952-0</ref>
[edit] Block-books in fifteenth century Europe
European Books where both text and images are cut on blocks, normally one per page, are known as block-books. Typically both text and image are cut in the same block. It has now been established that these only appeared in the 1460's after the first books printed by movable type, as a cheaper alternative.<ref>Master E.S., Alan Shestack, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1967</ref> Where only the image, and perhaps a title in text, are in a single block, the term used is woodcut, whether the image was used as a book illustration with text printed using movable type, or was sold as a print (known as a single-leaf woodcut). Many woodcuts served both purposes, being used in books, and then sold separately.
The most famous block-book is the Ars moriendi, though here the images and text are on different pages, but all block-cut. The Biblia pauperum , a Biblical picture-book, was the next most common title, and the great majority of block-books were popular devotional works. All block-books are fairly short at less than fifty pages. While in Europe moveable metal type soon became cheap enough to replace woodblock printing for the reproduction of text, woodcuts remained a major way to reproduce images in illustrated works of early modern European printing - see old master print for this.
Most block-books before about 1480 were printed on only one side of the paper - if they were printed by rubbing it would be difficult to print on both sides without damaging the first one to be printed. Many were printed with two pages per sheet, producing a book with opening of two printed pages, followed by openings with two blank pages. The blank pages were then glued together to produce a book looking like a type-printed one. Where both sides of a sheet have been printed, it is presumed a printing-press was used.
[edit] Colour
European woodcut prints with coloured blocks were invented in Germany in 1508 and are known as chiaroscuro woodcuts.
Colour is very common in Asian woodblock printing; in China the first known example is a book on ink-cakes printed in 1606, and the technique reached its height in books on painting published in the seventeenth century. Notable examples are the Treatise on the Paintings and Writings of the Ten Bamboo Studio of 1633, and the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual published in 1679 and 1701.<ref>L Sickman & A Soper, "The Art and Architecture of China", Pelican History of Art, 3rd ed 1971, Penguin, LOC 70-125675</ref> Some notable artists designed woodblock images for books, but the individual print did not develop in China as it did in Europe and Japan.
In Japan colour technique, called nishiki-e, spread more widely, and was used for prints, from the 1760s on. Japanese woodcut became a major artistic form, although at the time it was accorded a much lower status than painting.
[edit] Japan
Apart from the production of Buddhist texts, which dates to the eleventh century in Japan, the process was only adopted in Japan for secular books suprisingly late, and a Chinese-Japanese dictionary of 1590 is the earliest known example.
Though the Jesuits operated a movable type printing press in Nagasaki, an Asian press brought back by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's army from Korea in 1593 had far greater influence on the development of the medium. Four years later, Tokugawa Ieyasu, even before becoming shogun, effected the creation of the first native moveable type press, using wooden type-pieces rather than metal. He oversaw the creation of 100,000 type-pieces, which were used to print a number of political and historical texts.
It quickly gained popularity among artists of ukiyo-e, and was used to produce small, cheap, art prints as well as books. Japan began to see something of literary mass production. The content of these books varied widely, including travel guides, advice manuals, kibyōshi (satirical novels), sharebon (books on urban culture), art books, and play scripts for the jōruri (puppet) theatre. Often, within a certain genre, such as the jōruri theatre scripts, a particular style of writing would come to be the standard for that genre; in other words, one person's personal calligraphic style was adopted as the standard style for printing plays.
[edit] Further development of woodblock printing in East Asia
In East Asia, woodblock printing proved to be more enduring than in Europe, continuing well into the 19th century as the major form of printing texts, especially in China, even after the introduction of the European printing press.
Jesuits stationed in China in the 16th and 17th centuries indeed preferred to use woodblocks for their own publishing projects, noting how inexpensive and convenient it was. Only with the introduction of more mechanized printing methods from the West in the 19th century did printing in East Asia move towards metal moveable type and the printing press.
[edit] On materials other than paper
Block printing has also been extensively used for decorative purposes such as fabrics and wallpaper. This is easiest with repetitive patterns composed of one or a small number of motifs that are small to medium in size (due to the difficulty of carving and handling larger blocks). For a multicolor pattern, each color element is carved as a separate block and individually inked and applied. Block printing was the standard method of producing wallpaper until the early twentieth century, and is still used by a few traditionalist firms. It also remains in use for making cloth, mostly in small artisanal settings, for example in India.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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[edit] External sources
- Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
- Tsuen-Hsuin, Tsien. Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 5, Part 1: Paper and Printing. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
[edit] External links
- American Printing History Association - Numerous links to Online Resources and Other Organizations
- Fine example of a European block-book Apocalypse with hand-colouring
- Ukiyo-e Caricatures 1842-1905 Database of the Department of East Asian Studies of the University of Viennade:Blockbuch
ja:木版印刷 cs:Štoček de:Druckstock nl:Blokdruk zh:雕版印刷
Categories: Printing | Printmaking | Decorative art | Books | Textiles | Textile arts
