In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources – including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs – Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

This essay explores aspects of the biographies and oeuvres of Mattheus Greuter and Philippe Thomassin to undertake an inflected case study of Catholic Counter-Reformation cross-cultural sublimation of the violent physical suffering of actual martyrdom (also called red martyrdom, bloody martyrdom, or martyrdom unto blood) into nonviolent spiritual martyrdom (or white martyrdom, lifelong martyrdom, martyrdom by desire, or martyrdom in intention) by means of somato-sensorial practices of image-making and viewing. Nonviolent spiritual martyrdom was neither new nor exclusive to the Catholic Counter Reformation. Rather, white martyrdom was rooted in the Gospels, expounded in patristic writings, and boasted a robust late medieval heritage. In plotting the paradox of early modern martyrdom against the contemporaneous culture of the convert(ing) imprint, I attend to how the incised line of northern-trained engravers, prized in Italy by 1600 for technical virtuosity and curvilinear aesthetic qualities, acquired new symbolic meanings in discourse surrounding conversion and sensual suffering internal to Catholicism following the Council of Trent (1545–63).

Peter Paul Rubens and the Counter-Reformation crisis of the Beati Moderni (Routledge, 2017), takes up the question of the issues of the implication of imprinted and imprinting images and objects—including engravings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, deathmasks, and wax seals—in the formation of recent saints—or 'Beati moderni' (modern Blesseds) as they were called—in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. A particular focus on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, including Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is a revisionist account of the fate and meaning of altarpiece paintings infamously commissioned and then rejected by the Roman Oratorians from Rubens. The book offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian imprints of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies.

The present paper discusses woodcuts representing King Sigismund I of Poland against contemporary views on literary and picture portraits. Following classical sources, the local men of letters appreciated the depiction of moral qualities in such works more than a physical likeness. Thus literary descriptions were usually believed to outdo painted or printed pictures, but a few authors admitted that a deft visual artist could render the virtues of the sitter adequately. Consequently, royal woodcuts were usually accompanied by a few verses of text which made up for their shortcomings. Two such works, so far unknown in the literature, have been introduced here to art historical studies and several others have been interpreted anew.

Diego Rivera’s mural 'Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central' is a fascinating critique of high society and wealthy elites. It also offers a multitude of other stories that intersect in a web of historical memory. The massive mural, the histories it depicts, and even its physical journey after a devastating earthquake, hold answers to many of the questions readers might ask about Mexico. It also demonstrates how cultural artifacts explain the world around us and expose intersections and entanglements of specific power dynamics.

Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente, a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics.

Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us.

Like caricature itself, this site has rather odd and complicated orgins. From 1972 to 1974, I was living in West Berlin, Germany and working on a dissertation on Jane Austen under the direction of Earl Wasserman at Johns Hopkins University. I had just sent him the first chapter of that dissertation, when I received a letter from the English department informing me that Professor Wasserman had passed away very suddenly and that my dissertation would now be supervised by Professor Ronald Paulson.

I had never taken a course from Professor Paulson while I was on campus at Hopkins, so I began to read some of his work to acquaint myself with his perspective. I found myself fascinated with his books on Hogarth and Rowlandson and with the whole new world of 18th century caricature that had now been opened up to me.

After finishing my dissertation, I returned to the notes I had made about Rowlandson and wrote my first article on caricature: "Distance and Humor: The Art of Thomas Rowlandson" which Professor Paulson was kind enough to regard as "necessary corrective" to his point of view.

As my knowledge and interest in caricature expanded beyond Rowlandson, however, I began to realize that caricature is not a simple or monolithic genre, and that the definition which used Rowlandson or Bunbury as its primary representatives would be very different from one that centered upon Ghezzi or Beerbohm. This led to my second essay called "Four Modes of Caricature: Reflections upon a Genre" which was published after a considerable delay due to New York City funding problems in the Bulletin for Research in the Humanities.

But, alas, it was a difficult time for academics like myself as well as for academic publications, and by the time my second article was published, I had been forced to leave academics to support my family. I became a technical writer and later a Supervisor in the AT&T Labs (formerly Bell Labs) Technical Publications group at AT&T. And it was there in 1992/93 that a member of my group introduced me to a beta version of Mosaic, the prototype for the first web browser. It was a Eureka moment. And it immediately re-set my career in the direction of online publication and web site design and development. Within a few of years, I was no longer managing writers, but coders, graphic artists, and multimedia experts, and my concern was no longer with rhetoric and organization but HTML, code efficiency, and cross-browser compatibility.

Now that I am retired from AT&T, I am returning to my interest in caricature, but using the skills and knowledge I acquired in my work life to reach what I hope will be a more general audience. So the site you see before you is solely designed, produced, and written by me. Its mistakes, limitations, and omissions are likewise my responsibility. But in the spirit of Bell Labs, I hope that it inspires and facilitates further research on an amazing and under-rated artist, James Gillray.

This anthology, the first of its kind, presents thirty-two texts on contemporary prints and printmaking written from the mid-1980s to the present by authors from across the world. The texts range from history and criticism to creative writing. More than a general survey, they provide a critical topography of artistic printmaking during the period. The book is directed at an audience of international stakeholders in the field of contemporary print, printmaking and printmedia, including art students, practising artists, museum curators, critics, educationalists, print publishers and print scholars. It expands debate in the field and will act as a starting point for further research.

Ruth Pelzer-Montada is an artist and Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh. (*Forthcoming June 2018)

I had the pleasure of spending a month working at Mokuhankan Studio in Asakusa, Tokyo from May to June, 2017. One of many new experiences for me was, under the direction of Natsuki Suga (who worked under Kenichi Kubota at the Adachi Institute for 5 years) to make relatively large batches of color using wood board mortars and pestles. This is to assure the pigments’ quality and to create a well-mixed supply of color paste that is ready to use later. Each color requires it’s own sanded cherry board and pestle (pine with cherry faced using epoxy glue) that was made by Lee-san.

Teaching woodblock printmaking to today’s university students is both challenging . . . and surprisingly easy. On the one hand, the student is already immersed in the digital word of handheld devices. On the other hand, students also desire a physical connection and means of expression using other handheld devices, namely barens and chisels.

The secret in our success is to integrate the following strategies within the curriculum: (1) I connect students’ keen interest in Japanese culture and traditions; (2) I train students to use software (primarily Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator); (3) I require students to concentrate on manual dexterity and craftsmanship through carving exercises building on simple skills; and (4) I expect students to print their own color charts which allows for a direct understanding of the printing process.

I will supply the conference participants with lesson plans, examples of student projects, test blocks, and digital process strategies for teaching traditional Japanese style woodblock printmaking within a long-term context

The Bizzarie di Varie Figure is a little known, enigmatic album of etchings that display countless performative bodies, transformed and reimagined to resist definitions and escape categorisations. Human, mechanical, even abstract forms and forces intersect, startling the viewer and opening infinite possibilities of interpretation. These images manipulate their own medium to produce new, unprecedented notions of movement and animation on the printed page, challenging, in this process, traditional concepts of imagination and representation. The first section of this article aims to provide a framework through which the Bizzarie album can be understood not only as a site of experimentation on the production of figures and forms, but also as one where performativity and animation encounter notions of knowledge of nature and production of meaning. The subsequent section focuses on an individual image from the album, an etching depicting the biblical figures of Adam and Eve in the form of trees. In this print, the article argues, the interconnection of nature and humanity complicates early modern ideas on human reproduction, and echoes the potential for infinite generation and creativity in image making.