Most households in early modern Venice and Florence owned different types of religious images in a range of media. While objects such as decorative bronzes and paintings were mostly confined to wealthy homes, due to their low price points and high production numbers devotional woodcuts could be found in all types of domestic settings.  Archival evidence and visual records, as well as surviving examples of the prints themselves, can shed much light as to how these sheets were used and displayed. For example, prints could be:

1. Attached to a wall or a piece of furniture
2. Bound to create a folio or a book
3. Pasted into (or onto) books, manuscripts, and other smaller objects, or carried around as loose sheets

THE DEVOTIONAL PRINT

By the turn of the sixteenth century in Italy religious paintings and sculptures had long been placed outside and inside churches and public buildings. At the same time, portable woodcuts of Christ, Christian saints, biblical narratives, and holy family scenes were increasingly found in the most modest of Italian homes. In some cases the purpose of such prints, as with Church paintings and frescoes, was for veneration, in others to mediate upon, and in some to act as exempla for leading a virtuous life. Religious engravings by well-known artists could also be kept as collectors’ items, valued more for their authorship, design or technique than subject matter.  

EXAMPLES OF PRINTS DISPLAYED ON WALLS

The practice of attaching woodcuts, both large and small, to walls and furniture in domestic interiors was common practice across early modern Christian Europe.[1] A north Italian fresco produced in the mid-Quattrocento titled The Miracle of the Madonna del Fuoco depicts an event in 1428 in which a woodcut of the Madonna and Child survived a fire in a house in Forlì. The large size of this print, which has come down to us today, indicates that it was displayed rather than stored away. A northern painting of c. 1520 shows a much smaller woodcut on a wall, its four pins clearly visible in each corner. Near the end of the sixteenth century, in a now lost drawing of a peasant domestic interior attributed to Annibale Carracci a print of the Madonna and Child haphazardly hangs in a modestly furnished room.

Wills and inventories of private houses and workshops reveal the ubiquity of such printed material in Italy and elsewhere. That devotional woodcuts could so easily be purchased from as early as the first decades of the Quattrocento meant that their absence would have been a conspicuous diversion from the conventions of the time. Religious images that were displayed in even the most threadbare of rooms would have served a venerative purpose. Much like paintings in the chapels of wealthy patrons, devotional woodcuts attached to walls and furniture could be, and were, prayed to daily. These objects would have been stuck to their surfaces using a type of wax, or pins, as seen in the Joos van Cleve Annunciation. The location of display could also signify an additional, non-venerative, role of the image. The woodcut above a fireplace in the Master of Flémalle Annunciation, for example, was likely meant to repel malevolent spirits, thought to enter the home through chimneys.[2]

EXAMPLES OF PRINTS PASTED INTO BOOKS AND OTHER OBJECTS

One of the earliest surviving collections of woodcuts was compiled by the Parmense notary and lawyer, Jacopo Rubieri, mostly in the 1460s and 1470s. Rubieri was a man of middling wealth who travelled to different parts of the Italian peninsula and the Dalmatian coast in his capacity as a magistrate from Rome. He likely collected prints from each of the places he visited, which he then pasted into books filled with personal notes. The prints had no relation to the text they accompanied, save for one woodcut of the Martyrdom of St. Simonino da Trento which prefaced a section on torture. All but one of Rubieri’s prints were religious, and he likely purchased them as mementos of the churches and pilgrimage sites he visited. Rubieri often cut up his prints, drew frames around them, and when he tired of an image, pasted new prints over old ones. Most of his woodcuts would have cost a pittance from pedlars and street hawkers, and were easily replaceable. Rubieri acquired Italian and as well as Northern sheets, reflecting how widely disseminated beyond their place of origin prints had become by the late Quattrocento.

Woodcuts from this early period were also attached to printed books and decorative boxes. Examples of the latter category include small French cofferetes dated to between 1480 and 1530, which contain prints pasted into their lids. Similar small objects were produced elsewhere, and would likely have been carried around by their owners, for example, by being belted at the waist or attached to a saddle.[3] Such sheets were almost always religious in subject matter, serving an “apotropaic purpose such as protecting the contents from theft, or just as likely a reminder of spiritual values in the context of a engagement with material concerns.”[4]

THE LOW SURVIVAL RATE OF DEVOTIONAL PRINTS

Frequent handling, exposure to air, fire, and sunlight, and the process of sticking woodcuts onto other objects and surfaces meant that most cheap devotional prints survive in low numbers.  This is not to suggest that such works were perceived as invaluable by their owners, rather their purpose had been one of frequent use more than preservation. Jan Van der Stock has pointed out that “Devotional print were sometimes even eaten by people or animals to drive off disease, a practice decidedly unhelpful to anyone desiring to build up a fine collection of graphic art. All [early modern] graphic work is governed by the same paradox: the larger the quantity of impressions made and the larger number of people they reached, the smaller was the chance of the material being preserved.”[5] While Van der Stock’s observations are in reference to northern prints, they can just as easily be applied to Italian works of the same period.

[1] For an overview of the display of prints in Renaissance homes see Emily Rosanna Gray, “Early Florentine Engravings and the Devotional Print: Origins and Transformations, c. 1460-85,” (PhD Thesis: Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2012, 2 vols), pp. 78 – 82.  

[2] David S. Areford, “Catalogue Note 94: Saint Christopher” in Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch eds., Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and their Prints (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 299

[3] Peter Parshall, Rainer Schoch, David S. Areford, Richard. S. Field and Peter Schmidt, Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (New Haven, C.T.: Yale University Press, 2005), pp.171 – 172, cat. 42.

[4] Ibid, pp. 171 – 172, cat. 42.

[5] Jan Van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a City: Fifteenth Century to 1585, Beverley Jackson trans. (Rotterdam: Sound and Vision, 1998), p. 179.