Block printing
The block printing , and wood block printing called, was the common printing processes until Johannes Gutenberg the letterpress advanced; it was invented in China. It only came to Europe in the 14th century. In block printing - in contrast to woodcuts - the image and text were printed together with a wooden plate.
In block printing, text and images of an entire later paper page were cut out the wrong way round, colored and pressed onto damp paper, "printed". Today we are still familiar with this process through woodcuts or linocut . A bound sequence of related prints of wooden panels executed as a block print is called a block book . Such block books, which only appeared in Europe in the 15th century, were known since the 8th century at the latest. Cut wooden clichés were used in China as early as the Tang Dynasty (615–906 AD), with the drawing and accompanying text cut into the same printing form. This printing technique first spread to Southeast Asia.
The earliest example of a block print on paper was discovered in 1974 during an excavation in what is now Xi'an , the capital of Chang'an from the Tang dynasty. It is a Dharani Sutra printed on hemp paper , which is dated between 650 and 670. A Lotus Sutra that was printed between 690 and 699 was also recovered.
Other noteworthy prints:
- In 1966 in Gyeongju , Korea , formerly the capital of the Silla Kingdom , the oldest surviving block print was found in the Bulguksa Buddhist temple - a canon about the Immaculate Great Dharani Sutra , which contains Buddhist doctrines and printed on an 8 cm wide and 630 cm long roll of mulberry tree paper . The work is dated between 704 and 751.
- Previously, the Japanese Hyakumantō Darani ("1,000,000 pagodas and Dharani - [prayers]") were the oldest wooden panel prints. Empress Shōtoku ordered the printing of a million prayer slips in 764, which were packed in as many wooden pagoda models, with the project already being completed in 770; thousands of copies still exist today.
In Europe , the use of the wooden stamp can be proven from the 12th century : In Italy, fabrics were printed in this way. It is believed that playing card painters also brought this technique to Central Europe in the 14th century . Around 1430, the first block books were created in Europe, in which each page was printed with a contiguous wooden board that could contain both writing and images.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Pan, Jixing. "On the Origin of Printing in the Light of New Archaeological Discoveries," in Chinese Science Bulletin, 1997, Vol. 42, No. 12: 976-981. ISSN 1001-6538. Pages 979-980
- ^ Peter Kornicki: The Book in Japan. A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century . Koninklijke Brill, 1988, ISBN 90-04-10195-0 , pp. 114–116 ( limited preview in Google Book search).