News traveled quickly in the early modern era, and printed accounts of the most
recent international disasters fueled this fascination. Book and print collectors
could experience these incidents safely at home with novel, interactive broadsheets
with liftable flaps. The most famous grouping showed the 1618 rockslide that
completely destroyed the Graubünden mining district of Plurs, near Switzerland.
Inspired by Zurich printer Johann Hardmeyer’s 1618 publication, in 1619, Strasbourg
and Nuremberg publishers Jacob van der Heyden and Johann Philipp Walch
produced their own. Such tactile additions helped viewers literally grasp the extent
of the wreckage while they perused the letterpress describing the newsworthy
event. This article examines these unruly printed landscapes, their published
afterlives, and their relationship to existing landscape modes.

Cockaigne, the legendary land of plenty, formed a sub-theme of popular depictions
of gluttony in sixteenth-century prints. These images combined carnivalesque
exuberance and moralising caution, illustrating both excessive consumption
and its ill efffects, from inappropriately lascivious or slothful behaviour to the
physical need to expel from top and bottom. Scatological motifs emphasised the
grotesque nature of Cockaigne, providing laughter while also warning viewers
of the consequences of gluttonous behaviour in the here and now: that spending
on fleeting pleasure will reduce fortunes to shit. These themes are explored here
chiefly through an exceptionally large mid-sixteenth-century German woodcut
now in the New York Public Library, as well as two related woodcuts by Peter
Flötner.

Hieronymus Van Winghe, a canon at the cathedral in Tournai, came from a learned family and actively gathered texts and images that reflect a wide range of interests. Although few of the prints he collected are still preserved, records of his purchases via the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp provide significant data as to how and what he collected. For, not only do they point to his reliance on the Galle family of print publishers for many of his acquisitions, but they also reveal numerous prints that he purchased at the end of his life. These last records provide valuable insights into not only Van Winghe’s own preferences, but also a glimpse of the general market for prints by artists from the Southern Netherlands in the early 17th century.

This essay reinterprets Karl Bodmer’s North American frontier watercolor portraits from the 1830s through their intended future destination and involvement in European print processes. I argue that Bodmer “painted print,” whereby the image separations required by print technologies shaped Bodmer’s working methods. Thus, Bodmer’s North American portraits are not complete representational spaces within themselves. Instead, their uneven completion, visual notations, blank backgrounds, and selected sections of detailed focus reflect their status as ever-moving image-objects within a larger print culture.

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