Book and Paper Commons^™

The Birth Of Mass Media: Printmaking In Early Modern Europe, Alison Stewart

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

In the digital age, when images and films can be streamed with lightning speed onto computers at the press of a button, it is hard to fathom the society-altering impact the new printed image had when it first appeared in Europe around 1400. The introduction of printed images or repeatable pictorial statements irrevocably changed the practice of manually producing images one by one, by making them available in identical form, as multiple examples printed onto paper, a material that was newly available in Europe. Such multiples appeared first as independent images, then as book illustrations, but either way, this process …