Impressions of Colour (Cambridge)

Impressions of Colour
Rediscovering Colour in Early Modern Printmaking, 1400-1700

Convenors: Ad Stijnman & Elizabeth Savage, with Emily Gray

9-10 December 2011
Cambridge University

About

The absence of colour has been long been considered a defining characteristic of early modern printmaking. Colour printing from the hundreds of years between the invention of the printing press and 1700, when Jacques Christophe Le Blon developed the three-colour method we use today, has been thought of as rare and extraordinary. However, new research has revealed that bright inks added commercial value, didactic meaning and visual emphasis to subjects as diverse as anatomy, art, astronomy, biology, cartography, medicine, militaria and polemics in both single-sheet prints and books.

Despite the significance and scale of these discoveries, the bias against colour continues to dominate print scholarship; the colour in colour prints is often ignored. As the technology to disseminate images in their original colour has spread, much important material has suddenly become available to scholars. Now that techniques that were thought to have been isolated technical experiments seem to have been relatively common practice, a new, unified history of, and conceptual framework for, early modern colour printing has become necessary, and significant aspects of early modern print culture now must be reconsidered. This conference aims to explore new methodologies and foster new ways of understanding the development of colour printing in Europe through an interdisciplinary consideration of the production.

This conference aims to explore new methodologies and foster new ways of understanding the development of colour printing in Europe through an interdisciplinary consideration of the production. It features a demonstration of early colour printing techniques in the Historical Printing Room, a display of books with early colour printing at the University Library and a display of early colour prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Programme

Click here to download the full programme with abstracts for Impressions of Colour (PDF; 802 KB)

Day 1: Techniques and Technical Approaches to Early Colour Printing

9.45-10:30      Keynote: Peter Parshall (former Curator of Old Master Prints, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC): On Colour in Printing
Chair: Jean Michel Massing (Professor, History of Art, King’s College, University of Cambridge)

11.00-12.30    Panel: Between Hand and Machine, 1400-1500
Chair: David McKitterick (Librarian and Fellow, Trinity College, University of Cambridge)

  • Lieve Watteeuw (Conservator, Illuminare – Centre for the Study of Medieval Art, Catholic University Leuven) & Jan Van der Stock (Director, Illuminare – Centre for the Study of Medieval Art, Catholic University Leuven): The ‘Virgin and Child with Four Female Saints’ or the So-called ‘Brussels Madonna of 1418’ Reconsidered
  • Thomas Primeau (Director of Conservation and Paper Conservator, Baltimore Museum of Art): Stencil Colouring for the Mass Production of Coloured Prints
  • Kathryn Rudy (Lecturer, Art History, University of St Andrews): The Birgittines of The Netherlands: Experimental Colourists

12.30-14.30    Displays & Demo

  • Fitzwilliam Museum
    Display: Colour Prints before 1700 in the Fitzwilliam Museum
    Craig Hartley (Senior Assistant Keeper (Prints)), Elenor Ling (Documentation Assistant) and Amy Marquis (Study Room Supervisor)
  • University Library
    Demonstration: Historical Colour Printing Techniques, Historical Printing Room
    Nick Smith (former Deputy Head of Rare Books, Cambridge University Library
  • University Library
    Display: Colour-printed Book Illustrations  1485-1700
    Katie Birkwood (Rare Books Specialist)

14.30-15.30    Panel: Technical Approaches to Late Medieval Colour Printing, 1400-1500
Chair: Linda Stiber Morenus (Paper Conservator, Library of Congress)

  • Doris Oltrogge (Institute for Conservation Sciences, Cologne): Colour Printing in the Late 15th and 16th Centuries: Recipes and Analysis
  • Mayumi Ikeda (Postdoctoral Fellow, Japan Society of the Promotion of Science, Keio University): Colour Matters: The Fust and Schöffer Office and the Printing of the Two-Coloured Initials in the 1457 Mainz Psalter

15.30-17.00    Panel: Colour Printing in Workshop Practice, 1500-1700
Chair: Elizabeth Upper (PhD Candidate, History of Art, King’s College, University of Cambridge)

  • Linda Stiber Morenus (Paper Conservator, Library of Congress): Chiaroscuro Woodcut Printing in 16th century Italy: Technique in Relation to Artistic Style
  • Ad Stijnman (PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam):The Development of Colour Intaglio Printing
  • Sarah Lowengard (Associate Professor, Cooper Union, New York): To the Center from the Periphery: Technological and Social Changes in Colour-printing Workshops

17.30-18.30    Panel: Technical Approaches to Chiaroscuro, 1500-1600
Chair: Achim Gnann (Curator of Italian Prints, 14th-19th Centuries, the Albertina)

  • Shelley Langdale (Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Nancy Ash (Senior Conservator of Works of Art on Paper, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Beth Price (Senior Scientist, Philadelphia Museum of Art): Changing Spectrums: Analytical challenges and New Technical Approaches in Examining 16th-century Italian Chiaroscuro Woodcuts
  • Naoko Takahatake (Assistant Curator, Prints and Drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art): The Intention of Color in Sixteenth-Century Italian Chiaroscuro Woodcuts

Dinner (pre-booked only)

Day 2: The Arts of Early Colour Printing

9.00-10.30      Panel: German ‘Chiaroscuro’ Woodcuts, 1500-1650
Chair: Jean Michel Massing  (Professor, History of Art, King’s College, University of Cambridge)

  • Elizabeth Upper (PhD candidate, History of Art, King’s College, University of Cambridge): Blood, Flames and Rubrication: The Functions of Colour-Printed Book Illustrations in Early Modern Germany
  • Alice Klein (PhD candidate, History of Art, University of Paris IV Sorbonne): Hans Wechtlin and the Production of the German Chiaroscuro Woodcuts
  • Anja Grebe (Assistant Professor, Art History, University of Bamberg): Dürer in ‘clair-obscur’: Early Modern Graphic Aesthetics and the Posthumous Production of Colour Prints

11.00-12.30    Panel: Netherlandish Chiaroscuro Woodcuts, 1550-1600
Chair: Nancy Bialler (Senior Vice President, Sotheby’s)

  • Edward Wouk (Chester Dale Fellow, Metropolitan Museum of Art): The Flourish of Colour in Antwerp Printing 1555
  • Marjolein Leesberg (The New Hollstein): Hendrick Goltzius’s Chiaroscuros Revisited
  • Virginie D’Haene (Assistant Keeper, Prints and Drawings, Groeningemusuem, Bruges): ‘Met gronden en hooghsels cluchtich’: On the Grounding and Heightening of Prints and Drawings in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

12.30-14.30    Displays & Demo

  • Fitzwilliam Museum
    Display: Colour Prints before 1700 in the Fitzwilliam Museum
    Craig Hartley (Senior Assistant Keeper (Prints)), Elenor Ling (Documentation Assistant) and Amy Marquis (Study Room Supervisor)
  • University Library
    Demonstration: Historical Colour Printing Techniques, Historical Printing Room
    Nick Smith (former Deputy Head of Rare Books, Cambridge University Library
  • University Library
    Display: Colour-printed Book Illustrations  1485-1700
    Katie Birkwood (Rare Books Specialist)

14.30-16.00    Panel: Individual Approaches to Colour Printmaking, 1550-1650
Chair: Craig Hartley (Senior Assistant Keeper (Prints), Fitzwilliam Museum)

  • Joris van Grieken (Prints and Drawings, Royal Library of Belgium): Intaglio Printing in Colour in 16th-Century Antwerp: The Case of Hieronymus Cock
  • Huigen Leeflang (Curator of Prints, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam): Collecting Hercules Segers’s ‘Printed Paintings’
  • Alexander Dencher (PhD candidate, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (CHAR)): Colour in Printmaking in Early 17th-Century Paris

16.30-18.00    Panel: Intaglio Colour Printmaking and Entrepreneurship, 1650-1700
Chair: Ad Stijnman (PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam)

  • Simon Turner (The New Hollstein): Exploring Colour Prints in the Teyler Manner
  • Marrigje Rikken (PhD candidate, Institute for Cultural Disciplines, University of Leiden) and Elmer Kolfin (Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam): A New Copy Printed in Colour of Carel Allard’s ‘Tooneel der voornaamste Nederlandse huizen en lusthoven’: A Hypothesis Validated or Falsified?
  • Erik Hinterding (Editorial Board Member, Museum Het Rembrandthuis): The Use of Colour in Rembrandt’s Prints

18.00-18.15    Concluding Remarks: Peter Parshall

Wine Reception

Results

Key Results

The conference sold out. 120 delegates from eleven countries presented over the two days. At least 85 attended every panel.

The research that was presented challenges fundamental assumptions about the making and meaning of colour prints, and about the early modern print and book markets in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and England, in terms of relief and intaglio printing, in book illustrations, bound print series and single-sheet prints, from the 1400s through the 1700s.

The project aimed to unite researchers, curators, conservators and scientists addressing the issue of colour printmaking before technical developments allowed for regular colour printing after 1700. Its secondary aim was to emphasise the need to bridge traditionally divided areas of scholarship, such as bibliography and art history, art history and studio practice, and science/conservation and connoisseurship. The conference achieved these aims while introducing researchers to unique resources at the university by including papers from all of these areas of research and incorporating two special exhibitions and a demonstration.

Short-Term Implications

Many presenters were either the world authority presenting research for a significant forthcoming publication or curators developing major exhibitions at prominent museums around the world (seven forthcoming exhibitions on early colour printing were announced at institutions including the Albertina in Vienna, Ashmolean in Oxford, British Museum in London, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Royal Library of Belgium, and the Uffizi in Florence, while reference was made to the recent exhibition on colour printing 1500–1800 in the Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel).

The keynote and panel chairs, who include some of the most respected authorities on early modern print culture, contributed greatly to the discussion.

Although this was only the first conference on colour in early modern printmaking, it seems like the new research is building to a tipping point in graphic art scholarship.

Long-Term Implications

The key points raised include:

  • new approaches to the standard terminology;
  • new working methods based on accessible and portable technologies in development that can be used to glean new kinds of information from colour prints to support their attribution and dating;
  • the recognition that colour printing was more commonplace than rare, as colour prints were produced across all of Europe in a variety of previously unrecognised techniques;
  • that printers often had an artistic if not decisive role in the production of colour prints; that new research is being undertaken around the world on different aspects of early colour printmaking; and
  • that this new research and these new working methods have the potential to transform the field.

Sponsors

Impressions of Colour is sponsored by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, with support from Hes & De Graaf and the Bibliographical Society.