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An alternative history of Renaissance art from a Netherlandish perspective and focusing on printed images.

Through his treatises, letters, and support of printmaking projects, Bruges-born humanist Dominicus Lampsonius (1532–1599) tested the limits of what it meant to be an artist in the early modern period. This book—the first monographic study of Lampsonius to appear in the English language—investigates the convergence of art history, aesthetics, cultural politics, and theology in Lampsonius’s writings, with a particular focus on his novel theory of the printed image as a work of art.

In Lampsonius’s art history, painting recedes and engraving comes to the fore. This inversion of traditional hierarchies entailed a remaking of the Renaissance image as a graphic and replicable phenomenon. Here was a new way of looking at the image: not as a painted likeness of the sacred or the world, but rather as a graphic representation formed from the attenuated patterns of the engraved surface. In both meaning and making, printed images deflected the threats of iconoclasm precisely because, as manufactured objects, they could never be confused for what they represented—the sacred “prototype” they explicitly did not resemble. Tracing Lampsonius’s evolving views against the religious, political, and cultural upheaval of the Dutch Revolt, Edward H. Wouk considers the lasting implications of his efforts to change the course of art history.

A print-driven history of American art in the long nineteenth century.

Juliet Sperling’s Tactile Sensibilities uses interactive printed objects to uncover culturally instilled ideas about touch’s role in perception and shows how these frameworks were integral to ways of making and appreciating even seemingly untouchable works of painting and sculpture. Crucial to Sperling’s argument is a genre of paper constructions designed to engage the hand and eye in tandem: multilayered and lift-the-flap book plates, pull-tab engravings, foldable playbills, and spinning paper wheels that built expectations of touch as a trained, focused process into their structure and material. Intimately scaled and portable, tactile prints cut across multiple spheres of experience, including spaces in which people learned to view, understand, and create art.

Sperling reverses standard procedures for integrating prints into art history. Rather than working her way outward from canonical artworks toward ephemeral sources within the artist’s orbit, she uses previously unstudied printed materials to open period discourses of tactile sensibility that ultimately lead to art objects, unlocking new meanings behind works of painting and sculpture by artists including Raphaelle Peale, Hiram Powers, William Sidney Mount, and Winslow Homer. In treating sidelined materials as dedicated objects of study in their own right, Tactile Sensibilities reveals that in the long nineteenth century, print was an intellectually dense and powerfully connective medium, vital in mediating the tactile sensibilities that shaped ways of making and appreciating art. 

Written and illustrated by master wood engraver Barry Moser, this primer on the art of wood engraving is filled with valuable knowledge including how to prepare a printing block; how to think in the medium’s properties of line, shape, and ink; and how to transfer a drawing onto a block. It also offers practical advice on which tools to use for a project and which ink works best. A highly illustrated guide to this art form, Wood Engraving will be useful to experienced and beginner engravers alike. This book features stunning examples of Moser’s art and skill to admire and inspire.