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Early Woodcut Workshops, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Little is known about the workshops of the earliest print masters. The size of these shops, as well as the names and wages of the individuals involved, has often just not come down to us. Furthermore, division of labor varied so widely from shop to shop that the meanings of specific terms denoting the different professions are sometimes unclear. Yet throughout the first 150 years of the history of the woodcut—ca. 1400 to 1550—its greatest period, the division of labor common in workshop production was also standard for the production of woodcuts. That division included the separation of designer, cutter, …