Decorative details PRINTS

People often talk about prints as affordable artworks. The walls of my own home are hung with countless pictorial prints. Many of these would have been cheap, even throwaway products within the historical context in which they were produced; however, some would have also been technically complicated and ground-breaking artistic manifestos in their own right, carrying important religious and political messages to an ever-increasing audience able to access cheaper and more widely available ‘art’. So it is important to define what a print is.

BLOCKS IN HISTORY

The history of printing is complicated. The earliest forms were achieved with wood blocks and like many inventive techniques, the Chinese were early innovators, printing on paper almost two thousand years ago. The earliest surviving and datable printed book is the Diamond Sūtra, of 868, of which a period copy