- 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, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China
in antiquity
as a method of printing on textiles and
later paper. As a method of printing on cloth,
the earliest surviving examples from China date to
before 220, and from Egypt
to the 4th
century. 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.
Technique
The wood block is prepared as a
relief
matrix, which means the areas to show 'white' are cut away with a
knife, chisel, or sandpaper leaving the characters or image to show
in 'black' at the original surface level. The block was cut along
the grain of the wood. It is only necessary to ink the block and
bring it into firm and even contact with the paper or cloth to
achieve an acceptable print. 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.
There are three methods of printing to consider:
- Stamping: Used for many fabrics, and most early European
woodcuts (1400-40) These were printed by putting the paper or
fabric on a table or other flat surface with the block on top, and
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".
- 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
Mechelen
in Flanders 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.
In addition,
jia xie is a method for dyeing textiles
(usually silk) using wood blocks invented in the 5th-6th centuries
in China. An upper and a lower block is made, with carved out
compartments opening to the back, fitted with plugs. The cloth,
usually folded a number of times, is inserted and clamped between
the two blocks. By unplugging the different compartments and
filling them with dyes of different colours, a multi-coloured
pattern can be printed over quite a large area of folded cloth. The
method is not strictly printing however, as the pattern is not
caused by pressure against the block.
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 BC, where they are the commonest works of
art to survive, and feature complex and beautiful images. In both
China and Egypt, the use of small stamps for seals preceded the use
of larger blocks. In Egypt, Europe, and India, the printing of
cloth certainly preceded the printing of paper or papyrus; this was
probably also the case in China. The process is essentially the
same—in Europe special presentation impressions of
prints were often printed on
silk until at least the seventeenth century.
The earliest woodblock printed fragments to survive are from China
and are of silk printed with flowers in three colours from the
Han dynasty (before AD 220 ). The
earliest Egyptian printed cloth dates from the 4th century. The dry
conditions in Egypt are exceptionally good for preserving fabric
compared to, for example, India.
It is clear that woodblock printing developed in Asia several
centuries before Europe. The Chinese were the first to use the
process to print solid text, and equally that, much later, 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
substantial amounts of text together with images in block-books
only came after the development of
movable
type in the 1450s.
It is not
clear if the Egyptian printing of
cloth was learned from China, or elsewhere, or developed
separately. Block printing, called
tarsh in
Arabic was developed in
Arabic Egypt during the 9th-10th
centuries, mostly for prayers and
amulets.
There were different types of print blocks, including ones made
from
metal, wood and other materials. This
technique, however, appears to have had very little influence
outside of the
Muslim world. Though
Europe adopted woodblock printing from the Muslim world, initially
for fabric, the technique of metal block printing was also unknown
in Europe. Block printing later went out of use in Islamic
Central Asia after movable type printing was
introduced from China.
Coloured woodcut Buddha, 10th century,
China
In China, an alternative to woodblock printing was a system of
reprography since the Han Dynasty using
carved stone
steles to reproduce pages of
text.
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 in the ancient world; and either
cloth or
paper, which was first
developed in China, around the
3rd or
2nd century BC. Woodblock printing on
papyrus seems never to have been practised, although
it would be possible.
Because
Chinese has a
character set running into the
thousands, woodblock printing suits it better than
movable type to the extent that characters only
need to be created as they occur in the text. Although the Chinese
had 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.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".
In China,
Korea
, and Japan, the state
involved itself in printing at a relatively early stage; initially
only the government had the resources to finance the carving of the
blocks for long works.
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.
Early books
Woodblock printing in China is strongly associated with
Buddhism, which encouraged the spread of charms and
sutras. In the Tang Dynasty, a
Chinese writer named Fenzhi first mentioned
in his book "Yuan Xian San Ji" that the woodblock was used to print
Buddhist scriptures during the Zhenguan years (AD 627~649).
The oldest
known Chinese surviving
printed work is a woodblock-printed Buddhist scripture of Wu Zetian period (AD 684~705); discovered in
Turpan
, Xinjiang province, China
in 1906, it is now stored in a calligraphy museum in Tokyo
, Japan.
A
woodblock print of the Dharani sutra
dated between AD 704 and 751 was found at Bulguksa
, South Korea
in 1966. [119746] [119747] [119748] [119749] 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. Another
version of the Dharani sutra, printed in Japan around AD 770, is
also frequently cited as an example of early printing. One million
copies of the sutra, along with other prayers, were ordered to be
produced by
Empress Shōtoku. As
each copy was then stored in a tiny wooden pagoda, the copies are
together known as the
Hyakumantō Darani (百万塔陀羅尼,
"1,000,000 towers/pagodas Darani").
The world's earliest dated (AD 868) 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. 11 May, AD 868 ].
Finely crafted books—like the
Bencao (
materia medica) shown here—were produced
in China as early as the ninth century.
In late 10th century China the complete Buddhist canon
Tripitaka of 130,000 pages was printed with
blocks, which took between 1080 and 1102, and many other very long
works were printed. Early books were on
scrolls, but
other book formats were
developed. First came the
Jingzhe zhuang or "sutra
binding", a scroll folded concertina-wise, which avoided the need
to unroll half a scroll to see a passage in the middle. About AD
1000 "butterfly binding" was developed; two pages were printed on a
sheet, which was then folded inwards. The sheets were then pasted
together at the fold to make a
codex with
alternate openings of printed and blank pairs of pages. In the
fourteenth century the folding was reversed outwards to give
continuous printed pages, each backed by a blank hidden page. Later
the bindings were sewn rather than pasted. Only relatively small
volumes (
juan) were bound up, and several of these would
be enclosed in a cover called a
tao, with wooden boards at
front and back, and loops and pegs to close up the book when not in
use. For example one complete Tripitaka had over 6,400
juan in 595
tao.
[119750]
Woodblock printing in Eurasia
The
technique is found through East and Central Asia, and in the
Byzantine world for cloth, and by AD 1000
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 around 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.
Many early Chinese examples, such as the Diamond Sutra (above)
contain images, mostly Buddhist, that are often elaborate. Later,
some notable artists designed woodblock images for books, but the
separate artistic print did not develop in China as it did in
Europe and Japan. Apart from devotional images, mainly Buddhist,
few "single-leaf" Chinese prints were made until the nineteenth
century.
Block-books in fifteenth century Europe
Main article: Block book
Block-books, where both text and images are cut on a single block
for a whole page, appeared in Europe in the 1460s as a cheaper
alternative to books printed by
movable
type. These are different from
woodcuts
illustrated books using images, perhaps with a title, cut in a
single block and used as a book illustration with the adjacent text
printed using movable type. The only example of the blockbook form
that contains no images is the school textbook Latin grammar of
Donatus.
The most famous block-books are the
Speculum Humanae Salvationis
and the
Ars moriendi, though in this
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 movable 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.
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 (as earlier in China). 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.
Colour
The
earliest woodblock printing known is in colour—Chinese silk from the Han Dynasty
printed in three colours.
On paper, 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 on paper; in China the first
known example is a Diamond sutra of 1341, printed in black and red
at the Zifu Temple in modern day Hubei province. The
earliest dated book printed in more than 2 colours is Chengshi
moyuan, a book on ink-cakes printed in 1606 and the technique
reached its height in books on art published in the first half of
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.
In
Japan, a multi-colour technique, called nishiki-e ("brocade pictures"), 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.
In both Europe and Japan, book illustrations were normally printed
in black ink only, and colour reserved for individual artistic
prints. In China, the reverse was true, and colour printing was
used mainly in books on art and erotica.
Japan
The earliest known woodblock printing dates from 764-770, when an
Empress commissioned one million small wooden
pagodas containing short printed scrolls (typically 6
x 45 cm) to be distributed to temples.
[119751]Apart from the production of
Buddhist texts, which became widespread from the
eleventh century in Japan, the process was only adopted in Japan
for secular books surprisingly late, and a
Chinese-
Japanese dictionary of 1590 is the
earliest known example.
Though
the Jesuits operated a movable type printing-press in Nagasaki, printing equipment 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 movable type, 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.
An edition of the
Confucian Analects was printed in 1598, using a Korean
moveable type printing press, at the order of
Emperor Go-Yōzei. This document is the
oldest work of Japanese moveable type printing extant today.
Despite the appeal of moveable type, however, it was soon decided
that the
running script style of
Japanese writings would be better reproduced using woodblocks, and
so woodblocks were once more adopted; by 1640 they were once again
being used for nearly all purposes.
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.
France
Woodblock printing on wallpaper became famous in France at the end
of the 18th century. Manufactures like
Joseph Dufour et Cie (1797 - ca. 1830)
or
Zuber et Cie (founded 1797) used the
woodblock printing for wall paper production. In 1806, in
collaboration with the artist
Jean-Gabriel Charvet, Dufour et Cie
produced a twenty-panel set of scenic wallpaper entitled
Sauvages de la Mer du Pacifique (Savages of the Pacific),
which became very famous. It was the largest panoramic wallpaper of
its time, and marked the burgeoning of a French industry in
panoramic wallpapers. Dufour realized almost immediate success from
the sale of these papers and enjoyed a lively trade with America.
The
Neoclassic spirit currently in
favor was accented handsomely in houses of the
Federal period by the exaggerated
elegance of Charvet's scenes. Like most of eighteenth century
wallpapers, the panorama was designed to be hung above a
dado.
While
Joseph Dufour et Cie was
shut down in the 1830ies
Zuber et Cie
is still existing and claims to be the last factory in the world to
produce woodblock printed wallpapers and furnishing fabrics.
For its production Zuber uses woodblocks out of an archiv of more
more than 100,000 engraved from the XVII and XIX century which are
classified as a "Historical Monument".It offers panoramic szeneries
such as “du Vue de l'Amérique Nord”, “Eldorado Hindoustan” or
“Isola Bella” and also wallpapers, friezes and ceilings as well as
hand printed furnishing fabrics.
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
In countries using Arabic, Turkish and similar scripts, works,
especially the
Qu'ran were sometimes printed
by
lithography in the nineteenth
century, as the links between the characters require compromises
when movable type is used which were considered inappropriate for
sacred texts.
On materials other than paper
Block printing has also been extensively used for decorative
purposes such as
fabric 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
multi-colour pattern, each colour 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
.
See also woodblock printing on
textiles.
See also
References
Further reading
- 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.
- Imma Socias Batet, Les Beceroles tabel·làries de la
Biblioteca de Catalunya. Barcelona: Biblioteca de Catalunya,
1992.
External links
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