Page:De Vinne, Invention of Printing (1876).djvu/79

IV

The Image Prints of the Fifteenth Century.

Were Engraved on Wood…Print of St. Christopher…Print of Annunciation…Print of St. Bridget. Other German Engravings on Wood…Flemish Indulgence Print…The Brussels Print…The Berlin Print…All Image Prints from Germany or the Netherlands…How were they Printed? Not by the Frotton…Methods of taking Proof now used by Engravers and Printers…Images copied from Illustrated Manuscripts…Not made by Monks…Images highly prized by the People…The Beginning of Dissent in the Church…Preceded by Ruder Prints.

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Book printing and picture printing have both the same inner cause for their origin, namely, the impulse to make each mental gain a common blessing. Not merely princes and rich nobles were to have the privilege of adorning their private chapels and apartments with beautiful religious pictures; the poorest man was also to have his delight in that which the artist had devised and produced. It was not sufficient for him when it stood in the church as an altar shrine, visible to him and to the congregation from afar. He desired to have it as his own, to carry it about with him, to bring it into his own home. The grand importance of wood engraving and copper-plate is not sufficiently estimated in historical investigations. They were not alone of use in the advance of art; they form an epoch in the entire life of mind and culture. The idea embodied and multiplied in pictures became like that embodied in the printed word, the herald of every intellectual movement, and conquered the world.

Woltmann

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ONE of the purposes to which early printing was applied was the manufacture of engraved and colored pictures of sacred personages. These pictures, or image prints, as they are called by bibliographers, were made of many sizes; some of them are but little larger than the palm of the hand, others are of the size of a half sheet of foolscap. In a few prints there are peculiarities of texture which have provoked the thought that they may have been printed from plates of