History

• Made in the 1400s, the first prints used woodcuts. About the same time, other artists began engraving metal to make prints. While these two created prints in different ways, they were essentially stamping a work onto a piece of paper. Well-known for inventing the printing press, which used woodcuts, Johann Gutenberg printed the Gutenberg Bible, one of the first books ever printed.
  
  

Function

• The ability to reproduce the work of an artist was the function of antique prints. This gave the artist the ability to share his work with more people. Before the ability to print, completing a copy of a piece took tedious work from a scribe and chanced the scribe would not make any mistakes or copy something incorrectly. More prints enabled religious writings to be passed along without changes or mistakes made by the person copying.
  
  

Significance

• The significance of antique prints is large. Prior to the ability to make a print, only the very rich were able to have written material or images. Prints gave more people access to the printed word. These people then had to learn to read to gain the full value of the prints. Prints helped literacy and education grow as more people could afford to purchase a copy rather than an original. Printing presses helped set up the rise of the Renaissance, a time of focus on artistic and intellectual endeavors.
  
  

Types

• Woodcuts and metal engravings helped create the first prints. Carved into blocks of wood called woodcuts, images are stamped onto paper. What is printed are the inked raised edges. Metal engravings create a print in the opposite way, as the indentations filled with ink in the metal are what is printed. More detail is available with a metal engraving than with a woodcut. Prints were eventually made with printing presses that used either wood or metal blocks to stamp the paper.
  
  

Features

• Most prints were religious in nature for a long time. People eventually found other uses for prints and began mass-producing political flyers, essays and maps. Prints often contained more images than written words due to the lack of education of the majority of the population. Human hands often colored in an image after printing. Reds are a common color in antique prints as this was a cheap dye to purchase.