A woodcut is a print made from a carved block of wood. It is the oldest form of printmaking. The oldest dated printed book, a Chinese copy of the Diamond Sutra from 868, was printed from woodblocks, and woodcuts appeared in Europe by about 1400.
How a woodcut is made
The design is drawn on a flat block of wood. A carver then cuts away everything around the lines with knives and other tools, so the design stands up from the surface. Ink goes onto that raised surface, paper is pressed onto the block, and the cut-away areas stay blank. The print comes out reversed from the block. Often 1 person drew the design and another carved it.
Why early books used woodcuts
Early printers made words from small metal letters with raised surfaces, the same way a woodblock has a raised design. That meant they could set a woodblock right next to the letters and print the words and the picture together, in 1 go. That made woodcut the main way to illustrate printed books for about a century after the 1460s. Blocks were often reused: the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle has 1,809 woodcuts printed from only 645 blocks, and the same invented view often stood in for different cities. By the 1600s, engraving and etching on copper, with their finer lines, had replaced woodcut in most books.
Woodcuts in our collection
The 13 pieces listed below, from our old maps, historical art, and botanical art collections, all began as woodcuts. The Mandrake comes from Rembert Dodoens’s 1583 herbal, whose woodcuts were mostly drawn on the block by Pieter van der Borcht and carved by Plantin’s block cutters.
These pieces all come from woodcut originals:
- Phoenix (Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493)
- Untitled Ptolemaic World Map (Gregor Reisch, 1503)
- Europae Tabula (Sebastian Münster, 1540)
- Typus Universalis (Sebastian Münster, 1542)
- Typus Orbis A Ptol. Descriptus (Sebastian Münster, 1542)
- Ptolemaic World Map (Sebastian Münster, 1544)
- Map of Sea Monsters (Sebastian Münster, 1545)
- Typus Orbis Universalis (Sebastian Münster, 1550)
- Tabvla Evropae V (Sebastian Münster, 1552)
- Asia Secunda in Forma Pegasi (Heinrich Bünting, 1581)
- Clover Leaf World Map (Heinrich Bünting, 1581)
- Mandrake (Rembert Dodoens, 1583)
- Europa Regina (Sebastian Münster, 1588)
