Prints and Visual Communication  

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"It is, therefore, worth while to give a short list of some of the things the Greeks and Romans did not know, and that the Middle Ages did know. For most of the examples I shall cite I am indebted to Lynn White’s remarkable essay on Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages. The classical Greeks and Romans, although horsemen, had no stirrups. Neither did they think to shoe the hooves of their animals with plates of metal nailed to them. Until the ninth or tenth centuries of our era horses were so harnessed that they pushed against straps that ran high about their necks in such a way that if they threw their weight and strength into their work they strangled themselves. Neither did the classical peoples know how to harness draft animals in front of each other so that large teams could be used to pull great weights. Men were the only animals the ancients had that could pull efficiently. They did not even have wheelbarrows. They made little or no use of rotary motion and had no cranks by which to turn rotary and reciprocating motion into each other. They had no windmills. Such water wheels as they had came late and far between. The classical Greeks and Romans, unlike the Middle Ages, had no horse collars, no spectacles, no algebra, no gunpowder, no compass, no cast iron, no paper, no deep ploughs, no spinning wheels, no methods of distillation, no place value number systems—think of trying to extract a square root with either the Greek or the Roman system of numerals!"--Prints and Visual Communication (1953) by William Ivins, Jr., page 8


"In 1809 there was published a slender volume of text and wood-engravings under the title Religious Emblems, Being a Series of Engravings on Wood . . .from Designs drawn on the Blocks Themselves by J. Thurston Esq., some copies of which had the peculiarity that the text was printed on book paper while the blocks were separately struck off on sheets of China paper that were then bound up in appropriate places between the text pages. In 1810 a small number of copies of Rogers's Pleasures of Memory was issued in which both the text and the wood-engravings, by Cleirnell after Stothard, were printed on very thin smooth China paper. I can recall no earlier instance of either practice, that used in the Emblems or that used in the Pleasures, both of which have become well-known ways of giving a snobbish appeal to picture books, usually of minor artistic interest. The engravings in the Emblems were rather elaborate essays in the production of tones extending from light greys to the fullest blacks. Those in the Pleasures were called facsimiles of line drawings."--Prints and Visual Communication (1953) by William Ivins

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Prints and Visual Communication (1953) is a book on visual communication and print culture by William Ivins, Jr..

From its current publisher:

"The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results--freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist's prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs.
It is this premise that William M. Ivins, Jr., elaborates in Prints and Visual Communication, a history of printmaking from the crudest wood block, through engraving and lithography, to Talbot's discovery of the negative-positive photographic process and its far reaching consequences."

Bibliographic details

Prints and Visual Communication (MIT Press, 1969, ISBN 0-262-59002-6 (first published 1953 by Harvard University Press)).

See also

visual culture, print culture




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Prints and Visual Communication" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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