The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

This essay investigates the way in which technical, historical, and aesthetic information about the chiaroscuro woodcut circulated in the early modern period. It argues that specific directives concerning the design, carving, and printing of these colored, multi-block woodcuts were relatively limited in scope and detail, and that when they were transmitted, such information was presented alongside a double origin story favoring an Italian version over an early, unsung German prototype. The real circulation of knowledge concerning the chiaroscuro woodcut was therefore transmitted with the artifact itself, and it is thus significant that prints frequently gesture to the unseen and often idealized types of wood from which the image was carved. The absence of a single, canonical aesthetic regulating such prints, the simultaneous presence of several unpredictable elements—inks, paper quality, and especially alignment of the blocks—and the constant reuse of older designs all militated against the uniform and linear development of the genre, and contributed to its ongoing association with artistic experimentation. This variety aside, however, the chiaroscuro woodcut does increasingly depend upon a set of strategies designed to conceal the genre’s relative inadequacy as portraiture: such, for example, are the numerous profiles, downcast heads, shielding gestures, hooded visages, and rear-facing protagonists. These compensatory techniques, and the extraordinary challenge posed by the frontal portait of the living subject, also explain the genre’s frequent inclusion of severed heads, scenes of beheading, and skulls. Put differently, the thematic content of the chiaroscuro woodcut is generally legible as an explicit comment upon both the possibilities and the limits of this medium.