Colored Prints Shed Light on What Unifies Christians

By Nora Hamerman
Special to the HERALD
(From the issue of 11/28/02)

A unique exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts, "Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color," has brought together more than 100 images of the finest colored prints produced in Netherlands and Germany during the Renaissance. Curator Susan Dackerman and paper conservator Thomas Primeau have reopened a forgotten chapter in the history of Christian art.

Most of the objects in the show are images of Bible stories, saints and illustrations of Christian doctrines and moral teachings, even though the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries saw the flowering of secular culture as well.

The exhibition, which will continue in Baltimore until Jan. 6, comes as a bit of a shock at first, because it revises the accepted version of the media revolution that was brought to a high point half a millennium ago by the German artist Albrecht Durer.

It is well known that around 1500, Durer elevated a relatively new form of cheap mass communication — woodcuts and engravings — into high art.

Thanks to Durer, ordinary people could bring into the privacy of their homes images as refined and expressive as those in churches and public buildings. From a single woodblock or metal plate carved by the artist, multiple copies of a design were printed under the artist's supervision. Every one of these prints is a true "original," accessible to many people not wealthy enough to own paintings and spreading to every corner of the European continent.

The Catholic reform thinker Erasmus, writing in the early 16th century, praised Durer's woodcuts and engravings for their capacity to evoke coloristic effects and tonal depth purely through black line on white paper.

But here is the revelation of the Baltimore show: What has been largely forgotten is that talented craftsmen often colored the prints by Durer and other artists from the very beginning. Just as the statues on the outsides of Gothic cathedrals were originally painted in lifelike colors, now weathered to gray, and church interiors were flooded with the rich hues of stained glass, so also prints gained emotional effect (and value) by the addition of color.

The modern western bias against color in prints might have something to do with the iconoclastic frenzy of the 1500s. In a reaction against what they viewed as idolatry, early Protestant Reformers stripped the old Catholic churches in Dutch and German cities where they took power, destroying statues and paintings, whitewashing the walls, and replacing stained glass with clear panes.

But even in the fractious 1500s, craftsmen who hand-colored prints thrived by the hundreds both in cities that turned Protestant, like Nuremberg, Germany and in cities that remained Catholic, like Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands. They were so well regarded that the division between the fine artist, who designed the print, and the artisan who colored it, broke down, and the best of the print-painters added their own signatures to the completed work. Their effort also bridged the rivalry between drawing (associated with intellect) and color (linked to emotion). Although some prints were painted assembly-line style using stencils, a print that was colored freehand became a unique work of art, somewhere between a print and a painting.

One important phenomenon of the 15th and 16th centuries was the development of lay piety, leading to such lovable lay saints as Catherine of Siena and Philip Neri. Having beautiful religious art in one's own home was an important adjunct to the development of personal spirituality, complementing the decor of the churches, just as private devotion, exemplified by the popular "Imitation of Christ" of Thomas a Kempis, complemented the Mass.

As an early example, the "Crucifixion with Angels," (cat. 2) is a woodcut by an anonymous 15th-century artist that fits right into the picture of a popular art used to spread the Gospel. The Precious Blood of Christ, which had great sacramental meaning, is seen being collected by angels from the Corpus. Showing that this print was always intended to be sold in color, Christ's blood is not drawn in the woodcut but only painted freehand.

Moreover, the blood is painted with a different pigment from that used for the red in the figures' garments.

The central focus of the show is, of course, Albrecht Durer. Among the tens of painted prints by Durer are two sets of his engraved series of the Passion of Christ (cat. 39 and cat. 46) painted by two different members of the Nuremberg-based Mack family, and a vibrantly colored page from his Life of the Virgin (cat. 43). If I had to pick one favorite, it would be the "St. Jerome in His Study" of 1513, colored around 1600 by the Augsburg-based Domenicus Rottenhammer, and exhibited near the black and white version.

Durer's famous engraving celebrated the Church Father who lived in the 5th century. Jerome was admired by Christian humanists because he joined love of classical learning with the spirit of penance and because of his life's work of translating the Bible into Latin, the vernacular tongue of Western Europe.

Durer portrays the saint's scholarly side, placing him reading in a room that is a masterpiece of perspective construction, and this is heightened by the delicate transparent colors that Rottenhammer applied so carefully that Durer's hatching lines are clearly visible.

The colored Old Testament engravings from Antwerp (cat. 44) reflect a concern to address all Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, by carefully avoiding areas of theological controversy.

One of the most stunning colored prints from Antwerp, however, does assert Catholic doctrines about images. This is the "Trinity" (cat. 36) by Hieronymus Wierix, colored by Georg Mack the Elder of Nuremberg. The doctrinal contents are discussed in detail in an entry in the excellent exhibition catalogue. To sum up, the artist has drawn attention to the Body of Christ by not coloring it, while all the surrounding images of God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Angels are painted.  The Trinity is the most abstract and most difficult to represent of any Christian image, and the Council of Trent in its reform of the Catholic Church in the mid-1500s took great care to both reaffirm the validity of sacred images closely based on sacred Scripture, and to rule out any representations of the Holy Trinity that might lead to doctrinal error.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is located on Art Museum Drive at North Charles and 31st Streets (Wyman Park), and is three miles north of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. It is open Wednesday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturday-Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. There is an admission fee, but on the first Thursday of each month, the museum is open till 8 p.m. and admission is free.

First Thursdays are also free and open late at Baltimore's Walters Art Gallery. Anyone interested in sacred art would be well advised to plan a trip to Baltimore that includes both museums. The Walters has wonderful medieval art and is currently featuring a special exhibition of one of its glorious illuminated manuscripts, the Book of Kings.

Hamerman is a freelance writer from Leesburg.

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