Catalogue and Book Reviews
Daniel Hopfer
Mitchell Merback
Christof Metzger et al., Daniel Hopfer: Ein Augsburger
Meister der Renaissance. Eisenradierungen, Holzschnitte, Zeichnun-
gen, Waffenätzungen, exhibition catalogue, Munich,
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung,  November  – 
January , Berlin and Munich, Staatliche Graphische
Sammlung and Deutscher Kunstverlag, ,  pp., 
col. and  b. & w. ills., €./SFr.
Within that small confraternity of artists credited with
the invention of new techniques for making pictures,
Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg (–) holds what we can
only imagine to be a most unenviable position. The con-
trasts drawn with predecessors and successors can be
sharp. Unlike Jan van Eyck – whose discovery of ‘many
things about the properties of colours recorded by the an-
cients’ was extolled as early as  by Bartholomeus
Facius, and whose pioneering work in oil glazes, according
to Giorgio Vasari, spurred Italian artists to take up the
technique in droves – Hopfer would not live to see his sig-
nature technique of printing from etched iron plates
praised by humanists, immortalized by biographers and
widely embraced by peers north and south of the Alps.
Unlike Hopfer’s latter day confrère Louis Daguerre, who
in  sold the rights of his new process for conjuring im-
ages on chemically treated plates to the French govern-
ment, Hopfer would never lend his name to a new
medium, even though modern historians of armour
would dub the effect of brushy white silhouettes against a
dark patterned field the ‘Hopfer style’ (Hopferstil). Or com-
pare him to Guilio Campagnola, whose technique of stip-
ple engraving marshalled the graphic power of the
medium’s degree-zero signifier – the dot – to recreate the
sfumato effects sought by the luminaries of Venetian paint-
ing. But unlike Giulio, Hopfer – accused at times of pla-
giarism, middling draughtsmanship and a warped
iconographic sensibility – was not destined to be remem-
bered by art lovers, print experts and collectors as the artist
who realized his invention’s richest aesthetic potential.
That achievement, in the view enshrined in art history,
would be left to later centuries, when Rembrandt and oth-
ers made etching de rigueur for painters interested in lend-
ing richer nuance to free-hand drawing.
To make matters worse, reputation-wise, modern
 , , , 
scholarship has characterized the intaglio revolution that
Hopfer initiated as a star-crossed failure. Although Hopfer
himself produced over  etchings and woodcuts and
successfully passed his signature style down to the sons he
trained, Hieronymus (who worked in Augsburg) and Lam-
bert (who continued his career in Nuremberg), he re-
mained alone among contemporary peintre-graveurs in
exploiting etching over the course of an entire career.
Other northerners who found experimental excitement in
the technically demanding medium – Dürer and Altdor-
fer, Burgkmair and Lucas van Leyden, to name a few – ei-
ther wrestled passionately with the newcomer for a period
of time, as Sebald Beham did around –, or termi-
nated the romance after only the briefest flirtation. As
David Landau and Peter Parshall described it in The Ren-
aissance Print (), during this early period of exploration
etching became stranded on the shoals of aesthetic dissat-
isfaction among those artists most intent on developing
the tonal refinements and linear precision offered by en-
graving. Hopfer’s innovation led most of the early six-
teenth-century peintre-graveurs who tried it to ‘a series of
false starts that never quite found resolution’. Frustration
seems to have finally trumped fascination.
None of these modern misgivings and shortcomings,
one suspects after reading Daniel Hopfer: Ein Augsburger
Meister der Renaissance, would have much bothered old
Hopfer himself. To be sure, primacy in innovation mat-
tered to Renaissance printmakers, as the battles over the
‘invention’ of chiaroscuro woodcut technique make clear.
Albrecht Dürer signed his earliest known etching, a Man
of Sorrows, and dated it , presumably in that same year
(the work still stands in modern scholarship as the earliest
iron etching to bear a verifiable date). It was probably
around the same time that the wily Urs Graf attached the
date  to his iron etching of a young girl washing her
feet (now in Basel), placing it alongside a lavishly calli-
graphic version of his dagger monogram, in order to
claim the new technique for himself. Yet Hopfer had, by
this time, already demonstrated his primacy in the
medium. The large Hopfer workshop in Augsburg, de-
voted to woodcut book illustrations as well as to single-
sheet etchings and sets, was venturing into its third decade
of commercial enterprise with an ambitious line of prod-
 catalogue and book reviews 81

. Daniel Hopfer, Maximilian of Austria’s Rout of French Forces Outside the Fortress at Thérouanne on  August , etching,  x 
mm (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe).

ucts aimed at the collector’s market. This success enabled
Daniel’s ascent into the city’s patrician hierarchy (he
served as treasurer to Augsburg’s Holy Cross Church from
 and would be granted his family coat of arms, with
imperial honours, ten years later). And surely it was by the
mid-s, if not earlier, that Hopfer had assured his rep-
utation as a go-to subcontractor in the arms and armour
industry, where demand for skilfully etched designs on iron
and steel, particularly those done all’italiana, outstripped
all other forms of luxury metal decoration.
All in all, one has to suppose that the multifaceted
Hopfer was already too successful – and probably also too
busy – to trifle with petty rivalries. Outpacing competitors
in the development, production and marketing of etched
82 catalogue and book reviews
designs in nearly every subject area known to the Renais-
sance, including a number of novel themes brought off
with a flashy eccentricity, Hopfer staked out a market po-
sition that even allowed him to profit from the ‘failure’ of
etching in the hands of others. When Dürer, Beham and
Burgkmair discontinued their product lines, etching’s
stature as a fetish among collectors received an important
boost. Experiments in mixed technique – made possible
by the development of mordants that worked on copper
– undertaken first in Italy by Marcantonio Raimondi,
around , and soon after by Lucas van Leyden – surely
teased the appetites of collectors further still.
Has the time come, then, to move scholarship beyond
the traditional preoccupations with the Hopferian pri-
macy in iron-etching’s early history or with the connec-
tions between Daniel’s practices as a printmaker and his
career etching armour? Not yet, it would seem. One of
the central concerns of Daniel Hopfer, the first modern cat-
alogue raisonné for this artist, is making sense of Met-
zger’s sensational, oeuvre-stretching discovery of six
hitherto unpublished etchings in a Hopfer-family Klebeband
(album) now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna.
Among these is a battle scene measuring  by  mm,
apparently depicting Maximilian of Austria’s rout of
French forces outside the fortress at Thérouanne (in the
upper valley of the Lys) on  August  (fig. ). Though
the unicum is undated and the impetus for its creation un-
certain, Metzger dates it on technical and stylistic grounds
to the very earliest stage of Hopfer’s career, ‘around or
shortly after ’, thus making it – along with a presumed
lost pendant – contemporaneous with the launch of the
Augsburg workshop. As if to mark this professional mile-
stone the printmaker, in a gesture unique in his career,
spelled out his name in full, in block letters that run along
the bottom edge.
Prior to Metzger’s discoveries, modern print scholarship
had allowed that printing from etched iron plates probably
emerged earlier than could actually be documented; ex-
perts such as Max Loßnitzer () and Erika Tietze-Con-
rat () had been willing to push the so-called primitive
group of Hopfer’s early etchings back as far as . But
the proposals here recast this chronology more decisively.
New discoveries, of course, often create more problems
than they solve. Should the dating of the ‘primitive group’
itself now be moved back, for example, and if so, how far?
Though Metzger mounts the strongest case possible for the
Battle of Thérouanne etching (given the available evidence),
one suspects there will be dissent from his proposals. Nei-
ther is his scholarship entirely free from partisanship. This
emerges in an attribution problem collateral to the discov-
eries in Bologna, resolved here in Hopfer’s favour. It con-
cerns the authorship of a scene depicting The Battle of
Lechfeld (), engraved on the reverse side of the Ulrich-
skreuz, a gold reliquary cross made for the Church of Sts
Ulrich and Afra by the Augsburg smiths Nikolaus and Jörg
Seld in . Previous scholarship had attributed the design
to lost sketches by Hans Holbein the Elder, Thoman
Burgkmair, Jörg Beck and Jörg Seld himself, but Metzger
now sees the scene’s pictorial conception anew in the mir-
ror provided by Hopfer’s Thérouanne, and casts them as
products of the same designer. The proposal makes a lot
of sense, though the close correspondences of the etching
to Israhel van Meckenem’s Battle of Bethulia engraving,
which Metzger acknowledges as the Urbild behind the reli-
quary as well, may come back to haunt these affiliations.
Considerably less attention is devoted in the catalogue
to that other bugbear of Hopfer scholarship, the question
of whether the Augsburg printmaker’s famed ‘invention’
was the byproduct of his practice of etching armour. Ar-
guments in favour of a tandem and complementary de-
velopment of the two crafts – such as the one advanced
by Landau and Parshall in  – have lately risen to a
level of broad acceptance among scholars, displacing an
older generation’s worries about which heart beat stronger
in Hopfer’s breast and how, exactly, the ‘discovery’ of
printing from iron plates had proceeded from the metal-
worker’s craft and design processes. Freyda Spira’s inform-
ative and sensible essay on Hopfer’s armour designs (the
third in the catalogue) generally skirts these questions,
however, concentrating instead on the artist’s two major
documented works, the signed lattice-shield of Emperor
Charles V () in Madrid, done in collaboration with
the Helmschmid family of smiths in Augsburg, and the
so-called Ottheinrich sword, now in Nuremberg, deco-
rated with text-image excerpts from Hopfer’s Proverbs of
Solomon etchings of . What emerges from Spira’s
overview is a fresh picture of the armour-etcher’s agency
– choosing from a vast selection of models, altering and
redeploying them creatively – in a process formerly seen
as merely reproductive or derivative.
One of the virtues of Spira’s embrace of the new con-
sensus that Hopfer’s career trajectory began in graphics
and then branched out into metalwork, is that it allows for
a more clear-headed assessment of the manifold ways that
major printmakers, Hopfer in particular, were drawn into
the collaborative processes of armour production. Yet it
is difficult not to wonder what else is being tossed out
when the two craft practices for which Hopfer has long
been renowned are no longer viewed as mutual catalysts
within the same artisanal laboratory. An embodied en-
gagement with the ‘living’ properties of matter and the el-
emental forces brought to bear on their transformation
were hallmarks of early modern artistic experimentation,
something Pamela Smith (The Body of the Artisan, ) and
others have recently shown. That engagement took place
across craft techniques, and it produced new forms of
knowledge – part of a veritable ‘artisanal epistemology’
to use Smith’s phrase – that were, to use a modern phrase,
medium-specific. Hopfer may not have written of an al-
chemistic quest for better mordants and grounds in the
 catalogue and book reviews
same way that Benvenuto Cellini would later dramatize
the ebb and flow of his own life-force during the casting
of his bronze Perseus, or as the potter Bernard Palissey
would later allegorize his own tortured efforts to draw the
Earth’s secrets into his glaze formulas; but surely the
awareness of etching as an extension of Nature’s own
image-making power, something Dürer thematized in his
works of –, could not have escaped the notice of
the medium’s greatest early explorer.
Perhaps I reveal here a too-American expectation that
a catalogue raisonné might be the place to explore such
issues; or the fascinating world of Hopferian iconography,
its grotesque realisms and carnivalesque manners; or the
problem of Daniel’s Protestant-leaning themes, their au-
dience and their philosophical foundations. But alas, there
are no interpretative essays here. Metzger’s valuable,
ground-clearing introduction, devoted in large part to the
numerous print campaigns (Druckkampagnen) and modern
editions that have allowed for such a complete reconstruc-
tion of Hopfer’s oeuvre, takes the bird’s-eye view. Matters
thematic are assigned to three short paragraphs. It is the
same with Achim Riether’s survey of Hopfer’s drawings
(though the essay’s brevity is belied by a lavish colour sec-
Jan Gossaert
Larry Silver
Maryan W. Ainsworth, Stijn Alsteens and Nadine M.
Orenstein, Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s
Renaissance. The Complete Works, exhibition catalogue, New
York, Metropolitan Museum,  October  –  January
; London, National Gallery,  February– May
, New Haven and London, Yale University Press,
,  pp.,  col. and  b. & w. ills., $/£.
In what must be taken as an exemplary exhibition of
Early Netherlandish art (reprised in London as ‘Jan Gos-
saert’s Renaissance’ between February and May ),
Maryan Ainsworth and her fellow curators at the Metro-
politan Museum have restored the complete oeuvre of an
unjustly neglected artist. Jan Gossaert (c. –) is one
of the few Flemish painters who deserve the epithet of
‘Northern Renaissance’ (even if, based upon several sig-
natures, the new spelling of his name as ‘Gossart’ instead
of ‘Gossaert’ might not be sustained and was rejected for
 , , , 
83
tion that reproduces the most important surviving exam-
ples). These three essays are followed by a fourth: Tobias
Güthner’s profile of Hieronymus and Lambrecht Hopfer,
whose highly commercialized reproductive practice makes
the elder Hopfer’s imagery seem a rampage of creative
invention by contrast. Catalogue entries range from thor-
ough to overly concise, and are usefully divided into cate-
gories: the iron etchings, woodcuts (with a subdivision for
false attributions), goldsmithery (this devoted solely to the
Ulrichskreuz), arms and armour etching (both signed and
unsigned works) and, finally, the remaining works of rele-
vance disgorged by the Bologna Gabinetto. Reproductions
of all the catalogued works are of a uniformly high qual-
ity; their assembly into a gallery at the centre of the book
makes both for pleasurable browsing and troublesome
cross-referencing with the catalogue. Printed on smooth,
low-contrast paper, the thick paperback catalogue, subsi-
dized by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung, is both lux-
urious and sturdy. By recasting the objective foundations
from which all future work will necessarily proceed, Met-
zger’s work both consolidates Hopfer’s place in the history
of medial innovations and liberates him from a few of its
more anachronistic demands.
the London venue). His work at the court of Admiral
Philip of Burgundy included a number of the mytholog-
ical subjects suggested by the title, in addition to depictions
of Adam and Eve which also allowed Gossaert to indulge
a taste for heroic, often erotically intertwined nudes. His
religious scenes include creative adaptations of traditional
religious subjects with visual allusions to such Flemish
masters of the previous century as Jan van Eyck, Rogier
van der Weyden and Hugo van der Goes; at the same
time, his full-bodied Renaissance figures of the adult
Christ and Virgin Mary threaten to replace perfect spiri-
tuality with Renaissance physical ideality. Also striking are
Gossaert’s court portraits, which present exquisitely ren-
dered costume pieces of aristocratic sitters at bust length.
The appendix with reattributions provides several
provocative surprises. Most notably, Ainsworth reassigns
a pair of early panels to a collaboration with Gerard
David (on whom her earlier close examination gives her
84 catalogue and book reviews

. Jan Gossaert, Charles V, , etching from iron plate, hand-coloured by Dirck Jansz van Santen,  x  mm (Braun-
schweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum).
 catalogue and book reviews
considerable authority). She bolsters her arguments with
technical analyses that range from X-rays and infrareds
to dendrochronology and microscopy.
A considerable part of the catalogue is given over to
the more than 40 drawings, in addition to some demoted
works in an appendix by Alsteens. But for readers of Print
Quarterly, Gossaert’s nine prints (four woodcuts, two en-
gravings and three etchings, of which one is attributed)
will hold greatest significance, and here the authoritative
essay by Nadine Orenstein, doyenne of Netherlandish
prints history, provides the essential account of a sporadic
but important output. Most of these works are familiar
from the great  Gossaert retrospective in Bruges and
Rotterdam. But Orenstein has offered a fresh examination
which includes two newly added woodcuts after Gossaert
designs in addition to both engravings and etchings, pre-
sumably by his own hand.
Orenstein’s essay begins with a contemporary quote of
 from court humanist Gerard Geldenhouwer, enquir-
ing on the artist’s behalf about the ‘fluid’ used for making
etchings, still a novel medium, devised in Switzerland and
Germany less than a decade earlier. Gossaert encountered
Dürer, whom he had previously studied from prints, dur-
ing the German artist’s – journey through the
Netherlands, and Orenstein returns to the larger subject
of Dürer’s influence on Netherlandish printmakers and
his effect on the ‘IMS’ monogram signature by Gossaert.
It stands for ‘Johannes Malbodius sculpsit’, the artist’s Lat-
inized name, combined with a particularly early use in the
history of prints of sculpsit to mean the ‘carving’ of an en-
graving, although later Goltzius, for one, would use the
term on such works as his Pygmalion and Galatea, of .
Orenstein also pushes the search for visual models to in-
clude Italian (Donatello, Mantegna, Marcantonio) as well
as antique sources, visible to Gossaert when he visited Italy
with his patron in .
Besides two small engravings of the Virgin (one dated
), already familiar from earlier exhibitions, Gossaert
appears to have been a pioneering etcher in the Low
Countries. An impressively heroic etching, Mocking of
Christ (c. ), was printed from an iron plate, probably
to reduce the risk of false biting from early experimenta-
tion with acids, but as a result the extant impressions show
rust effects. Orenstein also introduces a new print, an
etched portrait of a youthful Emperor Charles V (fig. ),
dated to the year of his coronation in  and hand-
. Christian von Heusinger, ‘Karl V. von Gossaert: Eine
unbeschriebene Inkunabel der niederländischen Radierung im
85
coloured by Dirck Jansz van Santen (the impression on
display is from Braunschweig, Herzog Anton-Ulrich Mu-
seum; it was first published in  by Christian von
Heusinger). Orenstein considers the rare, Gossaert-influ-
enced etching Hercules and Deianira to be a print finished
(at the very least) by another hand, so it remains in the ‘at-
tributed’ category (no. ).
Another Hercules and Deianira, this time a woodcut, was
surely designed by Gossaert but also executed in collab-
oration with an anonymous cutter (c. ; no. ). In
the fully mature disposition of Gossaert’s Northern Ren-
aissance idiom, it displays the powerfully heroic male
body of the demigod intertwined intimately with his
buxom female paramour within a dense setting of classi-
cal column bases. Surely a different cutter worked to pro-
duce the fratricidal action of Cain Killing Abel, because
wider linework enlivens the energetic struggle (no. ).
Orenstein discerns the same cutter working with Jan
Swart (her fig. ) through tell-tale tree branches and
other contours. Of course, due to the collaborative nature
of the woodcut process, differentiating the contributions
of designer and cutter remains a difficult exercise. Oren-
stein’s effort to find such commonalities, however, should
prompt closer examination of Flemish and Dutch six-
teenth-century woodcuts, a neglected field only occasion-
ally put on display (and the revisiting of Wouter Nijhoff’s
classic two-volume survey, Nederlandse houtsneden, –
, of – remains a major lacuna in modern
scholarship).
The last entry on prints relates to Gossaert’s magnifi-
cent drawing of King Christian II of Denmark, then in
exile (c. ; Paris, Frits Lugt Collection). Jacob Binck en-
graved that portrait and made copies as well of the pen-
dant profiles of King Christian and his Habsburg wife,
Isabella of Austria, which also appeared as anonymous
woodcuts (dated ; Copenhagen). Thus some graphics
by Gossaert also emerged from his painted portrait activ-
ity, one of the highlights of his career displayed in this ex-
hibition.
Overall, Gossaert’s print production can be taken as
emblematic of his larger art historical contribution during
his extended career as a painter. Even if the artist will not
be remembered primarily for his small graphic output, he
nevertheless participated in a progressive fashion with all
media and subjects available in the Netherlands of the
Northern Renaissance, which he did so much to shape.
Braunschweiger Kupferstichkabinett’, Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur
Kunstgeschichte, LX, , pp. –.
 Athanasius Kircher
Irina Oryshkevich
Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World,
London, Thames & Hudson, ,  pp.,  b. & w.
ills., £.
The seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius
Kircher, has assumed something of a cult status in recent
years. The author of  books and a self-proclaimed au-
thority on everything from Egyptology to seismology,
Kircher enjoyed great fame, but was ridiculed and more
or less forgotten during the Enlightenment. The current
revival of interest in his work has been fostered in part by
the general academic trend to resurrect obscure historical
figures and thus redress the disproportionate amount of
attention paid to the canonical heroes of Western civiliza-
tion. Yet Kircher’s prolific corpus has proven equally at-
tractive to a somewhat less scholarly audience, captivated
by his writings on hermeticism, his extraordinary mechan-
ical inventions and his peculiar synthesis of scientific
method and Jesuit spirituality. His popularity in both
camps has generated re-editions of his works, a rich array
of publications, conferences, websites, exhibitions and
even a section in the Museum of Jurassic Technology in
Los Angeles.
Joscelyn Godwin’s Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World
is the most recent homage to Kircher, and not the first by
this author. A musicologist at Colgate University, in
Hamilton, New York, Godwin has already devoted several
books and articles to the German priest. His aim in this
case is to demonstrate that contrary to what historians of
science would have us believe, Kircher was ‘doing real sci-
ence, pushing at the frontiers of knowledge whether of hi-
eroglyphics, vulcanism or microscopy, but [was] limited
by the tools and restraints of his time and place’. As its
title implies, Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World focuses
on the myriad interests of its protagonist, which are or-
ganized more or less chronologically in the order of his
publications. After a brief overview of Kircher’s life and
a discussion of the frontispieces and illustrations of his
many books, the chapters are devoted to his works on an-
tiquity, magnetism, the elements, the heavens, music, me-
chanical and optical contraptions, maps, the Far East, the
New World, non-Christian religions and didactic dia-
grams. Each chapter contains a wealth of illustrations and
– invariably – a tabular insert with a list (for instance, ‘The
Machines in Kircher’s Museum’), a digression (Are Protes-
tants all Damned?), a lengthy quote drawn from Kircher
(‘The Arrangement of Noah’s Ark’), or some other rele-
vant primary source (‘Goethe’s Nod to Kircher’).
Generally speaking, Godwin’s approach is descriptive
 , , , 
rather than analytical. In his biographical chapter, for ex-
ample, he relies heavily on Kircher’s posthumously pub-
lished autobiography, noting with a touch of affected
candour that ‘for present purposes’ he has ‘not distin-
guished between verifiable events and those for which we
have only Kircher’s word’. When dealing with Kircher’s
frontispieces, he limits himself to ‘decoding’ their symbols
one by one in order to reach clear but simplistic interpre-
tations of their iconographical programmes, rarely con-
sidering their stylistic features, cultural references and
citations from other works of art. When faced with an
anomaly or an unconventional symbol, he either gives up
(‘I cannot explain the presence of the cat’), or shirks
deeper analysis (‘With some ingenuity, one might find cor-
respondences between the flanking elements of the picture
and the six Sephiroth, but I am reluctant to force an in-
terpretation for which there is no corroborating evidence’).
True, Godwin is not an art historian by profession, yet
he could put a bit more effort into mastering some of the
discipline’s skills. In his summary of the frontispiece of
Volume II of Ars Magna Sciendi (fig. ), for example, he
states that the figures at the base of the page are the Muses
contemplating their respective arts. The figures below are
not Muses, in fact, but labelled personifications of various
disciplines (Theology, Mathematics, Rhetoric, Medicine,
Physics, etc.). They bear a variety of attributes (which
Godwin does not bother to explain) and are set in what
appears to be a circular temple reminiscent of the Roman
Pantheon (a feature he fails to notice) with a strange as-
sortment of letters and pictograms inscribed on its entab-
lature as well as on the shields of nine putti perched on its
cornice, which he identifies as Kircher’s contribution to
the ‘Alphabet of Art’. After describing the composition,
Godwin makes no attempt to analyze Kircher’s choice of
disciplines, their hierarchy within the semicircle, or their
interaction.
More egregious is his treatment of the frontispiece of
China Illustrata () on the preceding page (fig. ), which
he claims shows two Jesuits (Matteo Ricci and Adam
Schall) displaying a map of China with the help of a putto
‘on a stage, before a portico of Corinthian columns, which
might equally be in one of Rome’s most theatrical
churches’. The architecture here is not a theatre, a proper
portico or a church interior (it is open air), but rather a
non-functional structure meant to frame the unfurled
map. What is fascinating about the frontispiece, and what
completely eludes Godwin, is the way in which the classi-
cal architecture encloses and dwarfs the map of China,
which, in fact, reveals nothing of the country’s scale. Fur-
 catalogue and book reviews
. Frontispiece to Ars Magna Sciendi, , engraving
(Ithaca, Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library).
thermore, despite bearing the title China illustrata, the
image illustrates nothing Chinese beyond the costume
worn (one might say, appropriated) by Ricci. It is thus a
fitting prelude to the volume, which describes how enlight-
ened Jesuits brought science and the true faith to a deca-
dent civilization steeped in Satanism.
These are not isolated cases of Godwin’s careless and
superficial readings of Kircher’s illustrations; the book
abounds in them. More surprising is his frequent inability
to pay attention to the images before him. Thus, for ex-
ample, in the frontispiece to Arca Noë (his fig. .), which
clearly shows God in heaven hovering over six earthbound
figures (three of each gender), Godwin sees Noah, his
spouse and their three sons with their wives. Elsewhere in
the descriptive caption to one of the frontispieces to
Musurgia universalis (), which shows Orpheus (or a
sculpture of him) on a pedestal looking towards the sky
while strumming a lyre with Cerberus at his feet, Godwin
87
. Frontispiece to China Illustrata, , engraving (Ithaca,
Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library).
writes, ‘Orpheus, having tamed Cerberus, has entered
Hades to rescue Eurydice, but unwisely looks back at her’
(his fig. .).
Godwin also has a difficult time with attributions. He
does not venture to make any in cases where the identity
of an artist is unknown, although he does profess to detect
Kircher’s own hand in some of the illustrations. In Chap-
ter  Godwin compiles a list of all the names that appear
in Kircher’s engravings or woodcuts and dutifully links
these to biographies in Thieme-Becker. Granted, many of
these figures are so obscure that the German biographical
dictionary provides the sole modern record of their exis-
tence. Yet there are certainly fuller studies of Gérard de
Lairesse, Crispijn van de Passe and Romeyn de Hooghe
available these days. Godwin also seems a bit unclear
about the division of artistic labour in printmaking con-
veyed by the terms ‘invenit’, ‘fecit’ and ‘delineavit’ that ac-
company signatures in engravings or woodcuts.
88 catalogue and book reviews
More importantly, however, Godwin fails to explain
Kircher’s actual involvement in the preparation of the
frontispieces. Although he touches on the matter here and
there, he leaves the reader wondering whether the priest
was responsible for the choice of artists, whether he dic-
tated the design and iconography to them and whether he
instructed them to copy or modify available visual sources.
It would also be helpful to have some discussion of why
so many of the frontispieces were redesigned for later edi-
tions of Kircher’s books. Was this evidence of the author’s
(or public) dissatisfaction with the previous design? A mar-
keting ploy? A copyright issue (if he changed publishers)?
An attempt to increase or decrease the price of a particu-
lar book? Godwin, in fact, does not give the prices of the
different editions or even of the books in general, a detail
that would provide the reader with a better sense of their
intended audience. And though he speaks extensively of
and even includes an insert on Jesuit censorship, he does
not mention the degree to which images were subject to
its vigilance. The question is all the more intriguing in
view of the fact that many of Kircher’s books were pub-
lished in Protestant Holland.
Godwin does point out that a number of Kircher’s il-
lustrations and maps were based on earlier ones that had
first appeared elsewhere. Yet in no case does he actually
reproduce the originals, leaving the reader to guess the ex-
tent to which Kircher’s artists adhered to or deviated from
their sources. Elsewhere, however, Godwin fails to recog-
nize the prototype. Thus in an engraving in Oedipus Ægip-
tiacus that depicts various forms of idolatry practiced by
ancient Hebrews (his fig. ., figure A (Theraphim in usum
horologiorum) is clearly (and ironically!) drawn directly from
representations of The Raising of Lazarus in the Roman cat-
acombs, which were easily accessible to any mid-seven-
teenth-century artist in Antonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea
(–). Godwin also notes that Coenrat Decker’s huge
engraving of the Tower of Babel ‘obviously borrows’ from
the paintings of the subject by Jan Bruegel; the two works
to which he refers are obviously those of Jan’s more fa-
mous father, Pieter Bruegel.
In the end, although it is nice to have so many of
Kircher’s illustrations in one book, it would be better still
to have a guide more comfortable in art history to lead
one through them. It would also be helpful (at least to his-
torians of art) to have the images organized in catalogue
fashion, along with comparative visual material. Similarly,
it would be beneficial to have an index of illustrations, in-
cluding their dimensions. Finally, while the reproductions
are generally of good quality, some seem slightly cropped,
or too reduced in scale, making it difficult to discern the
finer details and/or inscriptions.
. Peter Miller, ‘Copts and Scholars: Athanasius Kircher in
Peiresc’s Republic of Letters’ in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man
Godwin uses the image as a platform from which to
plead Kircher’s case as a scientist. In doing so, however,
he plays down the priest’s reactionary views and skims
lightly over the ideological motives that may have nurtured
his universal interests. Inasmuch as he summarizes the
content of each of Kircher’s works, and emphasizes the
publicity they received, he does not discuss who actually
bought or read them. Did they owe their popularity to
their magnificent plates? To the fame of their self-promot-
ing author? To Jesuit sponsorship? Were they purchased
by scholars who pored over their contents, or by wealthy
patrons who paraded their erudition by the conspicuous
display of the luxury volumes in their libraries or cabinets
of curiosities? How often, in fact, were they presented as
gifts by Kircher or his fellow Jesuits to important and in-
fluential personages?
More importantly, how often did those who read
Kircher’s ‘scientific’ tomes try to reproduce his experi-
ments or reconstruct his mechanical devices? Godwin
brings up the subject of Kircher’s critics here and there,
but more often than not sidesteps the problem a bit too
deftly. When addressing the relationship between Kircher
and the famous French scholar and antiquarian Nicolas
Fabri de Peiresc, for example, Godwin does point out the
latter’s reservations about the Jesuit’s ability to interpret
hieroglyphs and even reproduces his letter to Cassiano dal
Pozzo, in which the Frenchman voices his critique. Ulti-
mately, however, he glosses over the tension between the
two men and utterly disregards the possible motives (dis-
cussed so well by Peter Miller) that may have prevented
Peiresc from breaking all ties with his erstwhile protégé.
In much the same way that Godwin fails to provide com-
parative visual material, so too he fails to explain how
other scientists and scholars dealt with the problems that
Kircher attempted to resolve. This lacuna in both domains
is rather disconcerting, given the author’s intention to
prove that Kircher was not ‘a bad scientist’, but merely a
product of his age. If his ‘errors’ were due to the limita-
tions of seventeenth-century knowledge, then one needs
to know the extent to which these limitations affected his
peers. How, for instance, did Peiresc or his colleagues go
about reading hieroglyphs? In addition, it would be help-
ful for the reader unacquainted with the history of science
to know which of Kircher’s theories were original and
which were drawn from his predecessors or contempo-
raries. Godwin does occasionally deal with this problem,
but never at sufficient length. In one instance (that only
an art historian might catch) he is wrong; it was Caravag-
gio and not Kircher who first claimed that the cave in
Syracuse known as the ‘Ear of Dionysios’ derived its name
from its resemblance to a human ear.
Who Knew Everything, edited by Paula Findlen, London, , pp.
-.
 catalogue and book reviews
The question of originality also emerges with regard
to Kircher’s machines. How many were his own inven-
tion? How many were simply modifications of or varia-
tions on others’ inventions? How did those depicted in the
illustrations of his various books compare to those on view
in his museum at the Collegio Romano? Were all of them
built? How often were they duplicated for wealthy patrons
or Jesuit institutions elsewhere? Were any tested outside
of Kircher’s domain? Finally, what ulterior purpose may
these machines have served? What was the point of a hy-
draulic contraption with ‘a figure vomiting up various liq-
uids for guests to drink? Of a speaking statue of the
Delphic Oracle? Of a ‘crystalline globe full of water rep-
resenting the resurrection of the Saviour in the midst of
the waters’? Were such devices designed to introduce the
masses to the marvels of scientific engineering? To attract
important guests to the Collegio Romano? To amuse
wealthy patrons and thus gain their financial and political
support? To advertise the ingenuity of Jesuit-trained schol-
ars and their willingness to embrace scientific principles
provided they posed no threat to the old world order? Or
simply to distract viewers and readers from more serious
scientific discoveries that were taking place elsewhere in
Europe?
Here and there Godwin does hint at Kircher’s ideolog-
ical motives. He notes, for example, that the Jesuit scholar
deliberately excluded all discussion of natural phenomena
in England because it was a Protestant country. He admits
that Kircher’s approach to the study of comparative reli-
gion – based on the notion that all religions stemmed from
one source – was biased, since he insisted that Catholicism
was the only one to have remained untainted by corrup-
tion. Nevertheless, Godwin would have us believe that
Kircher’s prejudices were typical of his age, and indeed
less pronounced than those of many of his contempo-
raries. He sees evidence of the priest’s open-mindedness
in his switch to a Dutch Protestant publisher, Joannes Jans-
son van Waesberge, in . But was this a case of Kircher
making peace with an enemy whom he had categorically
condemned to hell in the Itinerarium exstaticum ()? Was
it a business decision? An attempt to disseminate Jesuit
teachings more effectively and insidiously among the
heretics? Moreover, contrary to Godwin’s claim, Kircher
did not invent the discipline of comparative religion; there
were plenty of antiquarians and historians before him –
Onofrio Panvinio, Alfonso Chacón, Isaac Casaubon, to
name but a few – who had already broached the subject
and, despite the limitations of their age, had taken a less
condemnatory view of ancient and non-Western religions.
There is likewise nothing rare in Kircher’s concern to
preserve the medieval monastery of Sant’Eustachio in
. ‘Kircher and His Critics: Censorial Practice and Pragmatic Dis-
regard in the Society of Jesus’, in Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man
89
Mentorella. To begin with, he does not seem to have been
particularly interested in the medieval fabric of the com-
plex but in the location, which marked the site of its titular
saint’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century.
Second, he was following the trend – so common in sev-
enteenth-century Rome – of renovating medieval
churches to meet new aesthetic criteria, while preserving
their ancient appearance in drawings or prints.
All in all, the image of Kircher that Godwin offers is
that of an eccentric and inventive genius – a sort of
Counter-Reformation Leonardo – with an insatiable thirst
for knowledge, but whose ingenuity is hampered, by the
restrictive atmosphere of Rome. This Kircher is a
poignant, even tragic figure, who earnestly uses science to
hold together a world that is rapidly bursting at the seams,
and tries to see hidden concordances where others are al-
ready seeing irreconcilable breaks.
Throughout the book Godwin implies that Kircher’s
ideas were always on the brink of orthodoxy, and that
deep down inside he believed in heliocentrism and was as
committed as a Galileo or Newton to scientific method.
Were it not for the vigilant eye of the Jesuits, who censored
and even tried to bar the publication of some of his books,
he would have become a great scientist. Simply put, this
is an absurd claim. First, anyone who joined the Order in
the seventeenth century did so of his own volition. Given
the support that he received from the Jesuits, one may
safely assume that Kircher subscribed to their beliefs and
spiritual agenda. Second, the Jesuits did educate a signif-
icant number of scholars, including physicists and math-
ematicians, who were considerably more open-minded
and rigorous in their application of empirical method
than was Kircher. Third, although the Order tried to sup-
press four of Kircher’s works, it did so for reasons that had
nothing to do with orthodoxy. As Harald Siebert has
shown, the Jesuit censors found fault with Kircher’s gen-
eral boastfulness, his lack of medical knowledge (in the
case of Scrutinium pestis), the inconsistency and careless er-
rors in his text, the redundancy of his examples and his
faulty reasoning. In short, the books were censored not be-
cause they were dangerous but because they were insuffi-
ciently rigorous, and did not meet the standards of Jesuit
publications. Significant too is that ultimately all but one
were published, since Kircher enjoyed such good relations
with the General of the Order. In the one exception, Iter
Hetruscum, the censor extraordinary found so many errors
on the history, architecture and geography of Lucca that
he concluded that Kircher had more or less invented it!
Kircher and the Jesuits seem to have had a highly pro-
ductive, symbiotic relationship: he used them to win fame
and status; they used his fame and status to secure the
Who Knew Everything, edited by Paula Findlen, London, , pp.
-.
 catalogue and book reviews
favour of important patrons. His appropriation of scien-
tific method to uphold the old world order of papal Rome
– that is, to turn science against science – was a Jesuit tac-
tic par excellence. Even the universality of his interests served
the Order’s agenda, since it provided explanations for ab-
solutely everything and left no openings for heretics and
atheists. Contrary to a scientist who questions the known
on the basis of empirical observation, Kircher used
pseudo-empirical methods to reconfirm the known, to halt
further questioning and thus to thwart the further devel-
opment of science.
In the end, therefore, Godwin’s characterization of
Kircher fails to convince. Despite the casual, anecdotal
quality of the text and the impressive visuals, there is not
The Illustrated Catalogue as a New Genre
Ingrid R. Vermeulen
Astrid Bähr, Repräsentieren, bewahren, belehren: Galeriewerke
(–). Von der Darstellung herrschaftlicher Gemäldesamm-
lungen zum populären Bildband, Olms, Hildesheim, Zurich
and New York, ,  pp.,  b. & w. ills., €.
Claudia-Alexandra Schwaighofer, Von der Kennerschaft
zur Wissenschaft: Reproduktionsgraphische Mappenwerke nach Ze-
ichnungen in Europa –, Deutscher Kunstverlag,
Berlin and Munich, ,  pp.,  col. and  b. & w.
ills., €..
The art of reproductive printmaking thrived in two
new kinds of art publications between the second half of
the seventeenth and the middle of nineteenth century: the
illustrated catalogue of paintings and of drawings. The
best known of these is probably the Recueil d’Estampes
(–) of Pierre Crozat, a rich banker who fostered an
international circle of artists and art lovers in his house in
Paris. Initially begun as a catalogue of the Duc d’Orléans’s
collection of paintings, the project developed into a com-
prehensive – at that time understood as exclusively Euro-
pean – illustrated history of artistic schools. The
catalogue, however, was never completed. None the less,
the high quality of the  prints after paintings and draw-
ings from the Roman and Venetian schools that did ap-
pear, by no fewer than  printmakers, left a lasting
impression on art scholarship. In combination with the
. Karl Heinrich von Heinecken, Idée général d’une collection complette
 , , , 
much in the book to hold the reader’s attention. The
book is certainly not analytical enough to meet the needs
of historians; the lacunae in the bibliography alone reveal
this. On the other hand, it presupposes a familiarity with
seventeenth-century figures and events that do not belong
to common knowledge in the less erudite crowd. The pe-
riodic ‘inserts’ on contextual issues, the prolix (and often
redundant) captions to the illustrations, and the reader-
friendly language grant the book the guise of a modern
college textbook. One wonders, however, how much use
this book would be to a post-modern undergraduate au-
dience that already has a difficult enough time recollect-
ing the contributions of Galileo, Kepler and Newton to
modern science.
erudite connoisseurship of the accompanying texts, the
prints were to define what was henceforth considered an
illustrated catalogue.
Since Francis Haskell’s widely noted Painful Birth of the
Art Book, of , devoted to Crozat’s Recueil d’Estampes, art
historiography has spawned a range of publications on re-
lated topics, but illustrated catalogues of paintings and
drawings have hitherto not been studied as an independent
genre of art literature. Two recent books by Astrid Bähr
and Claudia-Alexandra Schwaighofer aim to fill this lacuna.
Bähr examined catalogues of painting collections, which in
German are referred to as ‘Galeriewerke’ and were first de-
fined in  by the director of the Dresden Gallery, Hein-
rich von Heinecken. Claudia-Alexandra Schwaighofer
focused on catalogues of drawings, which she terms ‘Re-
produktionsgraphische Mappenwerke nach Zeichnungen’
(portfolios of graphic reproductions of drawings) and which
comprise monographs and collection surveys.
Without doubt, the first painting catalogue to be
printed was David Teniers’s Theatrum Pictorium of ,
which was based on the collections of Archduke Leopold
Wilhelm in Brussels and Vienna. Shortly thereafter the
royal French paintings collection provided the basis for the
Tableaux du Cabinet du Roy ( and ). Bähr demon-
strates that these works furthered two crucial aims that
were to determine the genre until the end of the eigh-
teenth century: the prestige of the collector and the illus-
d’estampes, Leipzig and Vienna, .
 catalogue and book reviews
tration of art history. The appeal of the lavish and expen-
sive ‘Galeriewerke’ was such that they were soon produced
at court in Berlin, Florence, Dresden, Paris and Vienna,
were used as diplomatic gifts and offered for sale. Yet the
illustrated catalogue was also within reach of private col-
lectors. In the seventeenth century the Amsterdam mer-
chant Gerard Reynst was the only private collector to
publish his paintings (c. ), yet, from the middle of the
eighteenth century onwards a whole group of them, such
as the Duc de Choiseul, Andrea Gerini and Robert Wal-
pole, issued their collections with the help of leading com-
mercial publishers, such as Pierre-François Basan,
Giuseppe Bardi & Niccolò Pagni and John Boydell. The
impressive splendour of the catalogues was enhanced in
an art-historical sense by the chronological arrangement
of prints according to schools and the informed commen-
taries based on art theory and connoisseurship. In this re-
spect Bähr’s suggestion that Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun
regarded the chronological arrangement according to
schools as ‘old-fashioned and impractical’ cannot be sus-
tained, as he was to insist on these organizing principles
for the newly founded Louvre in . Bähr ends her
study with the advent of the national museums.
After thorough research in art libraries in Germany,
Paris, London and Vienna, Bähr presents admirably de-
tailed studies on individual ‘Galeriewerke’ in separate
chapters. Attention is paid to the collector and the paint-
ing collection, as well as to the editors, printmakers, print-
ing techniques, prints – whose quality is remarkably often
criticized – and texts, which are sometimes placed within
the context of contemporary art literature. Her lucid
analysis of the selection of the reproductive prints reveals
the changing tastes of the period. Besides several indexes,
Bähr’s book also includes a rich catalogue of  publica-
tions with exhaustive entries on each, and as such is an in-
dispensable reference. The entries list each print in the
‘Galeriewerke’, naming painter, title, printmaker and in
many cases the present location of the painting illustrated.
Differences in edition and even copy are noted, which can
be substantial in the period under discussion. Examples
of valuable case studies are the ones dedicated to the
Tableaux du Cabinet du Roy ( and ), which restore
the work to its deservedly prominent place in the history
of the genre, and the failed project to publish the royal
Prussian collection of paintings in Berlin (c. ), the ups
and downs of which are documented in exhaustive detail
by unpublished correspondence.
. Bähr, pp. –, based on an annotation by Lebrun in his copy
of the  auction catalogue of Poullain’s collection of paintings.
See J.-B.-P. Le Brun, Réflexions sur le Muséum national  janvier ,
edited by E. Pommier, Paris, .
. A complete catalogue of Western European ‘Galeriewerke’, how-
ever, was not intended, see for example the reference to Spanish
catalogues which are mentioned in the text, but not included in
91
Although the prestige of drawings did not equal that of
paintings, it none the less was also a significant motivation
for the production of drawing catalogues. Schwaighofer,
however, sees drawing catalogues primarily as the products
of art lovers’ desire to use drawings and their reproductions
as an instrument to acquire connoisseurship, which devel-
oped into the discipline of art history in the course of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among the pre-
requisites for the appearance of these catalogues,
Schwaighofer lists the example of painting catalogues, the
theories on connoisseurship and the increased appreciation
and collecting of drawings. The author regards the Recueil
Jullienne (–), which reproduces numerous drawings
by Watteau from the collection of the connoisseur Jean de
Jullienne, as the first work of this kind. The drawing cata-
logues turned into ‘scientific’ publications when both the
images and the texts were professionalized. Thanks to the
improvement of reprographic techniques, the faithfulness
of the images increased to such an extent that they were
called facsimiles, a term first adopted by William Young
Ottley. The texts were initially built up from comments
based on connoisseurship, such as may be seen in Crozat’
s Recueil d’Estampes (–), and extended with critical-
historical discussions of art sources, as in Rogers’s Collection
of Prints (), until a full ‘scientific analysis’ was attained
in Ottley’s Italian School of Design () in which both meth-
ods were combined. A keen debate on the value of print-
making versus photography in the middle of the
nineteenth century marked the beginning of the end of
the use of printmaking to reproduce drawings in cata-
logues. It in no way hindered, however, the ongoing prac-
tice of connoisseurship. Thus, rather than discussing the
catalogues as part of the history of collecting and muse-
ums, as Bähr does, Schwaighofer places them in the his-
torical context of reproduction and connoisseurship.
Like Bähr, Schwaighofer assembled a catalogue of the
relevant publications, which profited from Rudolph
Weigel’s Die Werke der Maler in ihren Handzeichnungen ().
With a total of  entries, this is three times as big as Bähr’s
compilation, indicating the relative richness of the genre.
The precise details of each publication are accompanied
by an explanatory text, which, however, neither lists the in-
dividual prints nor identifies them with extant drawings. It
is remarkable that Schwaighofer begins only with the Re-
cueil Jullienne, of , even though seventeenth-century
drawing catalogues are discussed in the main body of her
publication and feature in Weigel’s survey. Among these
the catalogue; Bähr, p. .
. A consultation of Florence’s libraries should solve the problem
of the date of the first edition of Andrea Gerini’s Raccolta, which
is assumed to have been published in , but is dated  in
the present study, which, however, was when Bardi & Pagni reis-
sued the work. Bähr, pp. –. The catalogue of the Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale di Firenze lists a copy published in .
92 catalogue and book reviews
are the reproduced drawings from the Arundel collection
(from  onwards), the Diverse Figure after almost  draw-
ings by the Carracci () and the Paesi, disegni featuring
drawings by Guercino (c. ). The reproduction of at
least  drawings from Jabach’s collection began in ,
but Schwaighofer dates them  when they were reissued
with a title page. Jan de Bisschop’s Paradigmata Graphices Var-
iorum Artificum () should also have been added, which
would moreover have raised the neglected issue of the ori-
gins of drawing catalogues in artists’s sketch- and model
books. Had the author taken into consideration all of
these examples, she would have had reason to examine the
question if the appearance of the drawing catalogue as a
genre predates that of the painting catalogue.
If a new revised edition is imagined of Julius
Schlosser’s Die Kunstliteratur: Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde
der Neueren Kunstgeschichte ( and ), the books by Bähr
and Schwaighofer provide a strong argument for including
sections on painting and drawing catalogues. After all,
both demonstrate that these catalogues are not simply ve-
hicles for images, but art-historical publications uniting
images with texts. Although both authors mention
Schlosser in the bibliography, they do not remark upon
the fact that he entirely ignored these two genres. His focus
on philological works in Die Kunstliteratur, which was moti-
vated by the goal of making art history into a discipline
independent of the historical sciences, apparently did not
include books in which images predominate. This might
explain why the initial interest in these catalogues in the
twentieth century did not so much come from the camp
of art historiography, as from that of printmaking. Among
the many relevant studies and exhibitions that Bähr and
Schwaighofer cite – from Bilder nach Bildern to Francis
. J. G. van Gelder and I. Jost, Jan de Bisschop and his Icones & Paradig-
mata: Classical Antiquities and Italian Drawings for Artistic Instruction in
Seventeenth-Century Holland, Doornspijk, , pp. –. Weigel .
Between Invention and Reproduction
Eckhard Leuschner
Druckgraphik: Zwischen Reproduktion und Invention, edited
by Markus A. Castor, Jasper Kettner, Christien Melzer,
Claudia Schnitzer, Berlin and Munich, Deutscher Kunst-
verlag, ,  pp.,  col. and  b. & w. ills., €/
SFr.. (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte/Centre
allemand d’histoire de l’art, Passagen/Passages, vol. XXXI).
 , , , 
Haskell, Evelina Borea and Norberto Gramaccini –
Christopher Lloyd’s Art and its Images: An Exhibition of
Printed Books containing Engraved Illustrations after Italian Paint-
ing, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, of , should also
have been included. Lloyd discusses the collection cata-
logues separately from other forms of illustrated art liter-
ature, such as general surveys and monographs. He states
that reading William Ivins’s Prints and Visual Communication
() had raised his interest in reproductive printmaking,
and that John Fleming and Hugh Honour had proposed
the idea for the exhibition, which had been conceived
under Haskell’s guidance.
Moreover, it seems not too bold to state that the paint-
ings and drawings catalogues discussed by Bähr and
Schwaighofer contributed largely to the new notion of a
history of art in the eighteenth century, for the simple rea-
son that they included illustrations. Originating with the
Vasarian model of artistic growth and decline, the concept
of a history of art profited from the empirically motivated
study of the artistic past which began in the seventeenth
century. Early art literature, however, was essentially unil-
lustrated and travel and access to relevant works of art all
over Europe was by no means easy to achieve. Illustrations
in the form of prints or drawings became therefore indis-
pensable tools in the acquisition of knowledge about the
artistic past. They were kept as part of collections of works
on paper formed by collectors such as Leopoldo de’
Medici or Pierre-Jean Mariette, as well as published in il-
lustrated art publications, among which the paintings and
drawings catalogues rank among the finest in terms of
size, number and quality. The books by Bähr and
Schwaighofer provide ample evidence for the inextricable
link that connects art history and its illustrations.
. I. R. Vermeulen, Picturing Art History: The Rise of the Illustrated His-
tory of Art in the Eighteenth Century, Amsterdam, .
Druckgraphik is a publication of  conference papers
by scholars from the German-speaking countries and a
few ‘guest stars’ from France and elsewhere. As the editors
explain in their introductory note, the texts stem from two
different conferences, one held in Paris in the summer of
 (‘La multifoncionalité de l’art graphique: La Gravure
 catalogue and book reviews
et les mécanismes de la transformation’), the other in
Dresden in the autumn of the same year (‘Druckgraphik
zwischen Reproduktion und Kunst – Zur Institutional-
isierung eines künstlerischen Mediums bis ’). The re-
sulting volume offers a remarkably broad range of themes
and a chronological spectrum from the late fifteenth to the
mid-twentieth century. This combination is called ‘fruitful’
by the editors, but one wonders if other fields of art his-
torical study would be treated in the same way – in other
words, if the proceedings from two or more conferences
on painters of different eras and genres would be thrown
together to create a similar broad volume on ‘Painting’.
The editors have divided the book into three sections:
‘Processes of Transformation’, ‘Tendencies in the Estab-
lishing of an Artistic Medium’ and ‘Varying functions’.
Only some of the essays can be discussed here. In the first
section, Christian Tico Seifert explores ‘Drawings after
Prints’, notably Federkunststücke – Netherlandish pen draw-
ings intended to deceive (and entertain) the eyes of early
modern collectors by imitating the technical effects of en-
gravings. Stephan Brakensiek examines a painting by Jo-
hann Michael Bretschneider at Schloss Rheydt,
Mönchengladbach, of a collector’s cabinet in which every
single picture on the wall follows a print rather than an oil
painting. Brakensiek stresses the fact that several of the
images in the painting reverse the composition of the
prints they are based on, arguing that the artist must have
known that most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century en-
gravings reproduce paintings in reverse.The
author’s hypothesis is supported by the fact that
the non-reproductive prints were untouched by such con-
siderations; as a consequence, the pictures in Bretschnei-
der’s painting that are based on etchings (by Rembrandt
and others) are in the same direction as their printed mod-
els. Leaving unmentioned the date of the Mönchenglad-
bach painting (c. –?), Brakensiek also fails to address
the larger question of whether such a systematic use of
printed models can be detected in other paintings of col-
lectors’ cabinets created in the Netherlands in the first
decades of the seventeenth century. In a discussion of
prints related to the major art exhibitions of the
Napoleonic age in Paris, Eva Knels points to the irritating
fact that the previously popular ensemble views of the an-
nual Salon ceased to be produced precisely at the begin-
ning of the First Empire, while there was a rise of – purely
linear – reproductions of selected paintings presented at
the same events. Declaring herself unable to fully account
for this shift, she takes the emergence of such prints as an
indication that the reception of contemporary pictures
was increasingly less based on viewing the originals at a
public art show or on written descriptions, and was partly
replaced by indirect viewing through reproductions.
In the second section of the book, ‘Tendencies in the
Establishing of an Artistic Medium’, Anne Röver-Kann
elaborates on the  exhibition ‘Mit der Schnellen
93
Nadel Gezeichnet’ that she organized at the Kunsthalle
Bremen. Her stylistic analysis of several early etchings
from the Bremen collection (some of which are unpub-
lished) draws attention to the different uses artists made
of the new medium. They were the result, for instance, of
private experimentation, or represent quick reactions to
the market’s demand for new subject matter. Christien
Melzer deals with the prints mentioned in Gabriel
Kaltemarckt’s treatise of  on the formation of an ideal
Kunstkammer (manuscript preserved in the Dresden State
Archive). Melzer points out that Kaltemarckt described
the formation of an art collection as indispensable to a
ruler’s claims to prestige and strongly advocated that it be
organized according to artistic media. Kaltemarckt rec-
ommended searching out good impressions and, although
stressing the documentary value of prints, added a list of
major artists whose engravings should form the basis of a
print room, among them Dürer, Raimondi, Solis and
Goltzius. Unlike his discussion of painters and sculptors,
which resembles Vasari’s chronological approach,
Kaltemarckt did not trace a historical development of the
printmaking medium. Nevertheless, his canonical list of
engravers prepared what Melzer, citing Michael Bury, calls
the ‘theoretisation of printmaking as a historic medium
and an autonomous art form’.
In a study of engraved images of engravers prior to the
publication of Abraham Bosse’s Traicté des maniers de graver
…, of , Ad Stijnman defines three categories, namely
individual portraits of printmakers with their tools; repre-
sentations of artists’ workshops including printmakers; and
allegories of the arts in which copper plates and chisels are
represented next to the brushes of painters and the ham-
mers of sculptors. According to Stijnman, these images
imply that the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
turies, at least north of the Alps, saw no subordination of
engravers to other art forms but, rather, considered them
as equally important. Stijnman’s argument, needless to say,
is conclusive only insofar as much of what he considers to
be evidence for the general appreciation of printmakers
was related to the latters’ own artistic self-fashioning and
self-promotion. In a study of the ‘Cabinet gravé’ of the
Chevalier Louis-Antoine le Vaillant de Damery, Véronique
Meyer and W. McAllister Johnson analyse the engraved re-
productions of paintings and drawings in an eighteenth-
century French private collection. Elaborating on their
previous publications on the topic, they conclude that the
bulk of reproductions from Damery’s collection were made
after Northern – in the sense of contemporary French and
seventeenth-century Netherlandish – works. Their findings
are entirely in line with the choices of other contemporary
collectors and their engravers, even though these engrav-
ings represented only one facet of generally quite diverse
collecting activities.
In the book’s third and smallest section, ‘Varying func-
tions’, Tanja Wessolowski studies the glass windows in the
94 catalogue and book reviews

. Jean-Joseph Balechou after Hyacinthe Rigaud, King August III of Poland, , engraving, second state,  x  mm
(Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kupferstich-Kabinett).
 catalogue and book reviews
so-called Galerie des Charniers – a space adjacent to the
abbey church of Ste Geneviève in Paris that was used as
an assembly room and sometimes for religious functions
– in relation to the prints that served as their models. The
windows were made in the early seventeenth century; sev-
eral of them were based on the typological engravings by
Léonard Gaultier published in  in Guillaume de
Réquieu’s Conférence des figures mystiques de l’Ancien Testament
avec la vérité Évangélique. Wessolowski underlines the anti-
heretical implications of the painted windows and notes
certain deviations from the Gaultier prints whenever more
precise or updated messages were intended.
Thomas Wilke discusses the ‘Interior views’ engraved
by Jean Lepautre and finds it difficult to subsume them
under a particular artistic genre, as they appear too op-
ulent to have served as mere Vorlagegraphik, or model
prints, for interior decorators or architects. Several of
Lepautre’s interiors, in fact, include figure groups enact-
ing scenes from mythology, although they are mostly rep-
resented in a way that does not impede the reading of
the architectural details. Wilke interprets the scenes as
part of Lepautre’s strategy to enhance the prestige of his
works by introducing elements from history painting
while, at the same time, trying to retain the prints’ use-
fulness for the applied arts. A difficulty of this approach,
however, consists in Wilke’s application of twentieth-cen-
tury terminology, specifically the use of the word Vorlage-
graphik contrasted with Künstlergraphik. He assumes neatly
separated functions of prints, although it is unclear if the
Baroque era distinguished between prints as collectible
works of art and prints serving as models for interior dec-
orators or artisans – seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century stock-lists, inventories and print collections
preserved in their original state can still tell us more
about this.
My selection of contributions can only outline the
scope and variety of the volume’s contents. As one of the
conferences took place in Paris, where the publishing in-
stitution is located, it is hardly surprising that most essays
are devoted to printmaking in France, whereas Italy is rep-
resented by just two-and-a-half texts (the ‘half’ being a
brief comparison of Vasari’s and van Mander’s views on
95
printmaking by Thomas Ketelsen). The majority of the
authors are graduate students or at an early stage of their
career, so that the scholarly quality of the contributions
inevitably varies. The editors have done their best to lend
unity to this difficult potpourri, but because Germany has
no printmaking periodical such as Print Quarterly, books
like this one will probably remain the preferred means of
communication among scholars in the field.
One of the most interesting aspects of the volume is
the insight it offers into current methodological trends in
printmaking studies in Germany and beyond. There is
great interest in the interaction of printmaking with other
art forms, and in theory and the ‘order of knowledge’
(making some of the texts smack of thinned-out Foucault).
Due to the focus on functions of prints and the ‘institu-
tionalization’ of printmaking as an art form, many con-
tributions deal with the reception, collecting and early
historiography of prints. Somewhat disturbingly, only a
handful of texts actually put their focus on the aesthetic
means of single (or small groups of) prints, and even fewer
manage to find a convincing equilibrium between the
close observation of the original prints, the consultation
of secondary sources such as archivalia and their contex-
tualization in contemporary culture, politics and economic
necessities. Perhaps the finest achievement in this direction
is Claudia Schnitzer’s study of Jean-Joseph Balechou’s en-
graved portrait of King August III of Poland after the
model of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s painted life-size represen-
tation of the – then much younger – monarch prior to his
accession to the throne (fig. ). The print was commis-
sioned from Balechou by August III himself; the painting
was even sent over from Dresden to Paris in order to fa-
cilitate its reproduction. Schnitzer traces the various states
of the print, many of which were motivated by the famous
lawsuit against Balechou, in which the artist had to defend
himself against the accusation of having produced and
sold unauthorized impressions. By carefully defining and
connecting the changes to the plate with the aesthetic as
well as with the political reasons that caused them (and by
publishing several new documents concerning the affair),
Schnitzer has delivered a good specimen of what such a
methodological equilibrium might look like.
 Blake
Philippa Simpson
William Blake: Le Génie visionnaire du romanticisme anglais,
edited by Michael Phillips, exhibition catalogue, Paris,
Petit Palais,  April– June , Paris-Musées, , 
pp.,  col. ills., €.
Mei-Ying Sung, William Blake and the Art of Engraving,
London, Pickering & Chatto, ,  pp.,  b. & w. ills,
£.
It is a courageous scholar who is prepared to enter into
the debate over Blake’s printing methods. It is therefore
understandable that Mei-Ying Sung should feel it neces-
sary to adopt a defensive attitude in her new publication,
William Blake and the Art of Engraving, in which she issues
repeated reminders that she is exploring as yet uncharted
territory. Sung’s focused investigation into the facture of
the plates for Blake’s Job prints carries with it a challenge
to those who have so long concentrated on the moment
of printing itself. She acknowledges as much herself in
her insistence that, by neglecting these autograph objects,
scholars have overlooked a vital source of information
not only about the prints, but about the artist. These as-
surances of the originality and importance of her re-
search are unnecessary, for this reader at least, as the
potential of her work to debunk much of what has pre-
viously been written on Blake’s methods quickly becomes
apparent. Although her book stretches far beyond matters
of facture, at heart it takes issue with the way in which
the archaeology of technique has, in the case of Blake,
become a means of perpetuating essentialist myths about
the artist.
For around a decade, Michael Phillips, editor of
William Blake (–): Le Génie visionnaire du romantisme
anglais, has been at the centre of this debate. His ‘two-pull’
theory – which proposes that Blake passed sheets of paper
through the press twice in order to create coloured prints
– has been the subject of sustained criticism by Robert Es-
sick and Joseph Viscomi, who insist on a ‘one-pull’
method. The detailed technicalities upon which this op-
position rests mask a far more significant ideological battle
over the nature of the artist himself. Essick and Viscomi
have declared that the extraordinarily careful alignment
of plate and paper necessary for Blake to have printed his
pages twice does not correspond with the Blake they know.
Theirs is a Blake of creative abandon, who allows his im-
ages to appear on the paper at haphazard angles, and
whose loose application of ink leads to spills and spots.
There is not time here to rehearse fully the way in which
Essick and Viscomi mobilize quotes from the artist’s own
 , , , 
writings to support these assertions, but it is their elision
of conception and construction, resting on Blake’s state-
ment that ‘Invention depends altogether upon Execution
or Organisation’, that provides Sung’s point of entry into
the field.
From the start, Sung systematically sets about disman-
tling the terms of the Phillips/Essick/Viscomi dispute, by
calling for a refocused attention on the physical evidence
of plates made by Blake, and specifically those that he en-
graved for his Job series. Flagging up the physical and tem-
poral demands of engraving, as opposed to the easier and
freer act of etching, Sung argues for a renewed apprecia-
tion of effort and industry in making art, and performs an
important act of historiography, in reconstructing the web
of friendships, artistic allegiances and personal preoccu-
pations that gave rise to the image of Blake as an artist
whose work was based upon an immediacy of creative ex-
pression. Specifically, she lays bare the investment of the
early Blake scholar Ruthven Todd in Surrealist practice,
and particularly the process of automatic drawing or writ-
ing (this narrative finds an echo in Daniel Marchesseau’s
discussion of French responses to Blake and the role
played by the Surrealists in championing his work, in
Phillips’s publication). In this way, Sung shows how the
idealized notion of the inspired artist has been historically
and socially constructed at different moments, and offers
an incisive critique of the modernist trend of reclaiming
the past as precedent, which reads artistic greatness as syn-
onymous with prescience.
Sung then provides a detailed account of the Job plates,
paying close attention to the evidence of repoussage on the
back of each piece. This method of correcting mistakes
by beating the copper through from the other side forms
the basis of her thesis, which insists upon Blake’s meticu-
lous attention to detail, and the painstaking manner in
which the plates for his images were produced. Long lists
of the precise locations of these tiny indentations may
seem tediously dry at first, but they have a powerful cu-
mulative effect of impressing upon the reader’s mind the
laborious process involved in constructing a delicate image
of apparent creative spontaneity.
Of course, the evidence of repoussage suggests two par-
adoxical interpretations; either that Blake was not con-
cerned with execution as an immediate iteration of
conception, or that the speed with which he attempted to
capture his visions directly in metal led to compositional
mistakes that then had to be corrected. To an extent, it
doesn’t matter which of these attitudes the reader adopts.
What is at stake is the labour involved in creating the final
 catalogue and book reviews
object. In reconstructing technical details, Sung throws
the field open for a more measured, considered analysis
of Blake’s activities as an artist, which are so often con-
strued as sealed moments of pure expressivity.
Naturally, having discredited the wrangling over the
one-pull/two-pull issue, Sung conscientiously avoids com-
ing down on either side. Nevertheless, her writing is un-
deniably closer in spirit to that of Phillips than of Essick
and Viscomi. Not only are both Sung and Phillips con-
cerned with the exacting nature of Blake’s craft, they both
make the case that slow execution is not antithetical to cre-
ative freedom. The two authors have a shared investment
in asserting that an appreciation of the hard graft of mak-
ing a print does not put the artist’s reputation at stake, or
undermine the integrity of the image, a point which is
neatly reiterated by Phillips in his exhibition catalogue.
Phillips first outlines the details of Blake’s studies and ap-
prenticeships, then looks to contemporary descriptions
and technical handbooks on printmaking in order to situ-
ate the artist’s practice, drawing a clear line between the
conventional and the innovative and revealing the educa-
tion and experimentation that made the latter possible.
Blake’s creations are celebrated as very human achieve-
ments, not a matter of inspiration so much as the triumph
of perseverance and imaginative concentration.
A similar effect is achieved by Sung’s text, but by con-
centrating on a very tightly circumscribed aspect of
Blake’s practice she is in some ways able to sketch a more
intricate picture of the web of relationships and social
practices within which this artist worked. Her discussion
of the printmaking activities of J. M. W. Turner (and the
fact that he and Blake shared a source of copper plates)
brings home the points of contact between vastly different
artists, and asserts Blake’s place in broader systems of
artistic, philosophical and economic exchange. It is by
achieving this historical texture that Sung manages to
maintain the interest of the reader, who is faced at times
with imposingly long passages of bald primary material.
A directory of copper plate manufacturers seems at first
to be little more than evidence of Sung’s scrupulous re-
search, but it soon becomes apparent that the interlinked
religious beliefs and activities of manufacturers and artists
supplies rich material for considering the complicated en-
meshing of the philosophical and the material in Blake’s
work. It also allows her to discuss the price of copper, and
to make a potent contrast between the idea of artistic ex-
perimentation and the economic constraints that placed
Blake under a high degree of pressure not to waste his ma-
terials.
Despite raising a number of significant issues, however,
Sung’s book does at times appear somewhat narrow in
focus. This is in part a result of its ambition, and the need
for precision in staging a challenge to what has been an
emotive (and defensive) dispute, but there are times when
it might have been productive to have expanded the dis-
97
cussion to bring the plates and the prints into closer con-
tact, or to look at related drawings. It is this union between
different stages of conception and execution with which
Phillips was concerned in his exhibition at the Petit Palais.
Hanging different versions of prints alongside each other,
with preparatory sketches and reworked compositions, the
curators created a clear viewing structure, giving visitors
the opportunity to reflect upon the slow, considered, often
protracted development of Blake’s esoteric images, dis-
cussed in Phillips’s essay.
This clarity of approach, however, is not reflected
throughout the catalogue which, in an effort to provide a
French audience with a broad introduction to unfamiliar
visual territory, attempts to cover far too much ground.
Although the  essays construct a fascinating and com-
plex framework of social, political, artistic and biograph-
ical contexts for Blake’s pictures, as well as a history of his
reception in France, they look in too many different direc-
tions, with the result that the book feels fragmented and
potentially confusing for newcomers to the field. A tighter
focus, perhaps one that excluded discussion of his poetry
in order to concentrate on the images, would have encour-
aged the reader to explore the pictures in more depth.
Furthermore, most of the texts are extremely short, and
often the authors simply don’t have space to analyse their
subject fully. David Alexander, for example, describes
Blake’s tense relations with his patrons without consider-
ing the advantages to be gained by the artist in perpetuat-
ing these narratives of individual struggle, while Elizabeth
Denlinger’s too brief discussion of Catherine Blake’s in-
volvement in printmaking feels insubstantial and token.
These problems are compounded by the difficulty experi-
enced in locating relevant images, which are inconsistently
numbered and illogically positioned.
This is not to say that the book is without valuable con-
tent; many of the essays make a significant contribution
to our understanding of the forces involved in shaping
Blake’s output. Of note are Bethan Stevens’s discussion
of the correspondences between Visions of the Daughters of
Albion and contemporary anti-slavery rhetoric, in which
the relationship between the writings of Blake and Mary
Wollstonecraft is considered, and Saree Madiski’s investi-
gation of Blake’s attitudes towards ideas of unity and dif-
ference. Andy Loukes’s nuanced examination of Blake’s
relationship with William Hayley draws out beautifully the
difficulty involved in reading the patron/artist relationship
against and/or within the myth of the independent ‘cre-
ator’. The delicate balance between artistic autonomy and
engagement with cultural trends is negotiated by Martin
Myrone, in terms of Blake’s place within a canon of
‘Gothic’ artists, which reads as a nice complement to
William Pressly’s analysis of Blake’s relationship with his
British artistic predecessors.
These insightful investigations are supported by
Phillips’s groundwork. His detailed description of the
98 catalogue and book reviews
making of the works functions to remind the reader of the
time available to Blake to reflect upon, revise and revisit
his images, providing a foundation for the close readings
they are then subjected to by the other authors. Phillips
also draws out the metaphorical dimension of Blake’s
printmaking processes, with well-selected references to
Blake’s own writings on the subject. In this way, manual
labour becomes part of the process of artistic inspiration,
not merely its product or method of communication.
Carving into metal, for instance, is described as an act that
reveals something existing within the material, a process
related to Blake’s belief in the innate nature and knowl-
edge of man. This marriage of philosophy and process,
product and picture is a significant achievement, and is
something that Sung’s book is, at times, lacking. Her con-
centrated analysis of the Job plates (and at the end, the
British Railway Posters
Martin Hopkinson
Art for All: British Posters for Transport, edited by Teri J.
Edelstein, exhibition catalogue, New Haven, Yale Center
for British Art,  May– August , Lyon, Musée de
l’Imprimerie,  October – February , Miami
Beach, Wolfsonian-Florida International University, 
April– August , New Haven, ,  pp.,  col.
and  b. & w. ills., $.
The great generosity of Henry S. Hacker since  has
created a significant collection of twentieth-century British
transport posters in the Yale Center for British Art in New
Haven. This gift has enabled the gallery and its curator,
Teri Edelstein, to create a splendid exhibition, which will
also be seen at the Musée de l’Imprimerie in Lyon and at
the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami
Beach, famous for its glorious Art Deco architecture. The
accompanying publication, which breaks the rather staid
mould of British poster studies includes essays by Edelstein
and four other authors. It also provides a complete checklist
of all the posters that are now in the collection of the Yale
Center for British Art. Although the vast majority of these
relate to railways, the collection includes significant exam-
ples of works commissioned by Shell and the Empire Mar-
keting Board and other companies. The golden age of the
British transport poster – the inter-war period – is at the
heart of the Center’s holdings, which, however, extend to
include individual works as late as .
 , , , 
Virgil woodcuts) fails to incorporate a wider look at the
conceptual factors involved in their production, so that
their facture is strictly segregated from issues of subject
matter or aesthetics. These, though, are limits born of ne-
cessity, as Sung reminds us when she points out the inno-
vative nature of her research. Her book is one attempt to
redress the balance of a former neglect of Blake’s copper
plates, and as such deserves sympathetic reading, despite
its restrictions. Indeed, notwithstanding their very different
scope, both she and Phillips have produced books that ef-
fect a fundamental revision not only of Blake’s work, but
of the figure of the artist, without losing sight of the limits
of their sources. Both rescue Blake from a state of isola-
tion, where his works are treated as anomalies in the his-
tory of British art, and move some way towards
re-establishing him as a product and an agent of his times.
Very rarely have previous publications on British posters
touched on how they were made. Attention has focused on
their place in social history and what they reveal about con-
temporary life. Michael Twyman’s lucid account of poster
production, which includes much information about the
practicalities, therefore opens up a completely new area for
investigation. We learn that chromolithographers sat at
desks with the stone sloped in front of them. Larger stones
were supported on wheeled tables or upright beer barrels.
When one artist, Gerald Spencer Pryse, wanted to work in
his own studio on a large vertical stone, the Baynard Press
devised a special easel with lifting equipment for him. Pryse
and Frank Brangwyn belonged to the older tradition of de-
signers who worked directly on the stone, in contrast to
some of the younger artists, such as Barnett Freedman,
who first drew on the stone. Indeed, relatively unusually,
Freedman was keen to remain in control of all aspects of
production. More commonly a designer provided a modello
from which the professional printers could work with a cer-
tain measure of independence, even if changes were un-
doubtedly preceded by discussions with the designers.
As very few proofs for transport posters have survived
much has to be inferred. We learn that a colour bar in the
form of a tablet of ink would be drawn on the stone in
the margins of a design, so that the printers had some
guidance as to the sequence in which the colours were to
be printed as well as their veracity. Where there were a
 catalogue and book reviews 99

. Tom Purvis, East Coast: The Adventuress, , lithograph,  x  mm (New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Gift
of Henry S. Hacker, Yale College, Class of ) © National Railway Museum/SSPL.

large number of colours to be printed, several printers
were involved. In France it is well known that a chromiste
headed a chromolithographic studio. In Britain an equiv-
alent or a studio manager controlled the artists who
worked on the stone. Sometimes colour proofs were taken
before the other colour stones were even drawn. These
progressive proofs would normally be kept as long as the
work was preserved on the stones, as they would be an es-
sential guide should further editions be required. The only
known surviving set for a London Underground poster,
McKnight Kauffer’s  St Albans by Motor, is reproduced
here together with the artist’s same-size gouache modello.
In this case it is evident that the grey originally selected
was replaced by a warmer tone during the course of the
work. It was usual for opaque colours, especially light ones
such as yellow, to be printed first, followed by darker ones,
while a neutral colour such as grey, which enabled modi-
fications in tone, would be the final colour to be printed.
However, one of the leading printers, Thomas Griffits,
first of Vincent Brooks, Day & Sons, and later of The
Baynard Press, operated more intuitively in the printing
of colours. Twyman makes great use of the valuable in-
formation provided by Griffits’ writings on many aspects
of poster production, including on the print runs. The
larger Underground posters were printed in editions that
ranged from , to ,. Mainline railway posters
might have longer runs. Smaller posters destined for the
insides of carriages could be printed in much larger num-
bers, and, as with contemporary colour printing for art
books, four images could be printed on the same sheet of
paper. Although improvements in technology made it pos-
sible in the s for as many as , posters to be printed
in an hour, clients rarely required production on this scale.
The norm was to print , impressions in an hour.
Several significant changes took place in colour litho-
graphic printing in the first half of the twentieth century.
100 catalogue and book reviews
Firstly, zinc plates gradually replaced stones as matrices.
Stones were retained for a remarkably long period despite
their costliness, weight and bulk, for artists often valued
their qualities as a printing surface, but after  it be-
came much harder to find stones of sufficient size. Sec-
ondly, rotary printers increased printing speeds
immeasurably. Ultimately, however, even more important
was the adoption of offset lithography, by which, with the
help of an intermediate cylinder, one could print the de-
sign in the same direction as the artist had originally
drawn it. Lastly, photographic methods were increasingly
applied to printing, particularly the half-tone screen. As
Twyman said, photographically produced images can be
distinguished from handmade ones, whereas, without ex-
ternal evidence, one cannot distinguish direct from offset
lithographic printing. The paucity of the evidence is one
of the main reasons why poster historians have seldom in-
vestigated the details of production of individual works.
Occasionally another type of print served as the modello
for the lithograph. Linocuts by Edward Bawden and Wal-
ter Spradbery were converted into lithographs by the Cur-
wen Press. This may also have been the case with some
screenprints. F. A. Baker’s  manual, Silk Screen Practice
and the Roller Process, illustrated Historic Romantic Exeter, a work
by Leslie Carr, as a screenprint. This work is either the
poster published by Great Western Railway c.  or the
modello for it. Carr, a painter of maritime and architec-
tural subjects, designed posters for the Great Western Rail-
way, the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) and
the Southern Railway, impressions of which are in the col-
lection of the National Railway Museum, York. Judging
from photographs, several of these, among them Old Gate-
way, Bruges, of , designed for the Southern Region, and
Silloth and Dovercourt, two posters made for the LNER, are
indistinguishable in style and technique from Historic Ro-
mantic Exeter. It is unlikely that Carr, not known as a great
innovator, was the only poster artist making screenprints.
Most striking are the outstanding works of Tom Purvis,
who used exceptionally bold designs and flat colours, par-
ticularly in his suite of six posters, East Coast Joys, made for
the LNER in –, which John Hewitt has described as
screenprints in Journal of Design History (VIII, , pp. –
; fig. ). One also wonders about the posters of his
great rival Fred Taylor, such as Whitby, Captain Cook Embark-
ing, and Bridlington, of , also works designed for the
LNER. Screenprinting was certainly used by artists in
Britain in the s. The first examples known to me out-
side the world of publicity are the illustrations by Laurence
Irving, grandson of Sir Henry Irving, to Methuen’s 
edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea: Memories
and Impressions. I am engaged in research on other early
screenprints made by British artists before World War II.
Not much work has been published on the printers of
the posters before Twyman’s essay. We learn that over 
firms are known to have been involved. Four London
firms were especially prolific: Waterlow & Sons, Danger-
field Printing Co., Johnson Riddle & Co. and Vincent
Brooks Day & Co. Two others, the Curwen Press and the
Baynard Press, deserve to be remembered for their inno-
vatory work, as noted by Twyman, who presents their his-
tories and contributions. Sometimes designers
collaborated regularly with particular printers. Twyman
highlights the partnerships of Emilio Tafani with Ernest
Nister & Co., and of Fred Taylor with two studios, John-
son Riddle & Co. and T. R. Way. He goes on to note that
Thomas Robert Way himself was a poster designer.
Edelstein sets the scene for twentieth-century British
poster designs by placing them in the context of Jules
Chéret, Alphonse Mucha and the poster movement of the
s, and introduces Frank Pick, the single most signifi-
cant figure for the twentieth century. She refers to the
words of William Crawford, one of the most successful
figures in British advertising: ‘The real power of advertis-
ing is not to sell goods, but to form habits of thinking.’ It
took some time for patrons to absorb this. The mistake of
the London Midland and Scottish Railway, who commis-
sioned paintings from Royal Academicians to be copied
as posters by professional lithographers rather than asking
artists to design posters, however, was quickly realized.
Edelstein amply cites the contemporary writings of critics,
architects and the designers themselves, noting that Ger-
man artists had preceded British in arguing that it was es-
sential to integrate the lettering with the image. She also
comments that the London Underground was more rad-
ical than the overground railway companies in its accept-
ance of modernist, abstracted designs, but that many
mediocre artists adopted similar simplified forms and non-
naturalistic colour.
The LNER was the most radical commissioner above
ground. On occasion, it even employed leading foreign
artists such as Ludwig Hohlwein. From  the LNER
guaranteed five artists, Fred Taylor, Frank Newbould,
Tom Purvis, Austin Cooper and Frank Mason, a mini-
mum stipend provided that they designed exclusively for
that line. These five still would be considered among the
finest artists to be working on posters at the period. Im-
portant too was that they were treated as gentlemen rather
than artisans, as evidenced by the fact that they were paid
in guineas instead of in pounds. The LNER saw commer-
cial advantage in the exhibition and sale of their posters,
first in their boardroom in King’s Cross Station and later
in New Burlington Gardens at the heart of London’s
gallery district. In the s they extended this policy to
the provinces, and held exhibitions in museums in York,
Newcastle and the small town of Barnard Castle, all of
which were destinations on their railway.
Artists turned their knowledge of painting of the past
to good use. Kathleen Stebbing, for instance, imagina-
tively combined images of above and below ground by
treating a composition of travellers on a platform as a pre-
 catalogue and book reviews
della panel. Newbould’s North Berwick, as Edelstein points
out, is a contemporary reprise of Manet’s Déjeuner sur
l’herbe, Frederick Herrick quotes from Michelangelo’s Sis-
tine Ceiling, Pryse’s bathing beauties at Hastings & St
Leonards echo both Puvis de Chavannes and Impression-
ism, and Clive Gardiner treats the bars of a dungeon and
a mediaeval suit of armour in the Tower of London in a
manner derived from Cubism and the work of McKnight
Kauffer. Brangwyn’s ‘picturesque’ designs, while contem-
porary, aim at a timeless grandeur found in some of the
best historic murals.
America played a very significant part in the creation
and modernization of the London Underground system
through Charles Tyson Yerkes of Chicago and Albert
Stanley, later Lord Ashfield. The latter was brought up in
America, and ran transit systems in New Jersey and De-
troit before becoming the head of Yerkes’s creation, the
London Underground Electric Railways. So it is entirely
appropriate that Neil Harris contributed an essay com-
paring the promotion of mass transit in London with that
in New York and Chicago. It is probably little known that
European posters were frequently shown in exhibitions in
the United States in the s and that they were regularly
commented on in the American journal, The Poster. Shows
of French, Swiss and British posters are mentioned and
German designs were also admired. The interaction be-
tween European and American design deserves a separate
study and exhibition. The work of Oscar Rabe Hanson
for the Chicago South Shore Line, to judge by the exam-
ple illustrated here, deserves comparison with contempo-
rary British posters. Harris quotes a comment in Printers’
Ink Monthly of  that these Chicago posters seemed
‘more European than Midwestern in design and coloring’,
while The Poster thought that some American designers
were ‘directly inspired by the British’. Not discussed here
is the likelihood that some of the more innovative Amer-
ican poster artists were influenced by colour woodcuts.
One suspects that the teachings and art of Arthur Wesley
Dow had some impact, and the art of two British artists
working in North America, Frank Morley Fletcher and
Walter J. Phillips, may have been important. Colour
woodcuts could also have provided models for some
British artists such as Gregory Brown, and one cannot
help feeling that the art of Dow was in the back of McK-
night Kauffer’s mind when he designed In Watford, his
early poster of . Harris, perhaps unfairly, regards most
Chicago work as fairly conservative. He thinks that con-
temporary Canadian Pacific posters were more successful.
The situation in New York seems to have been rather dif-
ferent, with the Interborough Rapid Transit pasting quite
small posters on the windows of their carriages. Much
greater use was made of text, presumably because it was
deemed that travellers had more time to read them. These
posters were generally designed by newspaper cartoonists
and illustrators. In Britain artists like Fougasse (also known
101
by the name Cyril Kenneth Bird) and H. M. Bateman
were their counterparts. There was a humour in these
posters, found much less often in the large-scale designs in
Chicago or in Europe. Were there any fully pictorial
posters above ground? This we do not learn.
Oliver Green discusses how posters were displayed on
the Underground and on main line railway stations, and
outside. The establishment of advertising departments led
to standardization of sizes of posters and the wooden
hoardings that encased them. According to Green, these
helped to meet the vocal criticisms of the Society for
Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, which had
been formed in  in response to the chaotic and bewil-
dering arrangements of images and printed material on
late Victorian railway platforms. Green stresses the impor-
tance of Frank Pick’s realization that presentation was as
significant a factor for the impact of posters as their de-
sign. Individual posters had to be sufficiently interesting
to stand out from a distance to encourage travellers to
draw near and read the information conveyed. Photo-
graphs of the exteriors and interiors of stations under-
score the resultant great improvement in the display of
publicity material. John Elliot, the first public relations of-
ficer of Southern Railway, followed Pick’s lead. Under the
leadership of William Teasdale and Cecil Dandridge, the
LNER became celebrated for its powerful and evocative
posters, which often promoted travel to holiday destina-
tions. On occasion, designers were commissioned to make
a series of related posters that could be displayed together
on or outside a station.
Women who designed posters have probably received
less scholarly attention than they deserved. Edelstein goes
some way to correct this bias, noting that the numbers that
can be identified are quite high, considering the general
failure to fully appreciate the merits of female artists before
World War II. She notes that Frank Pick in particular was
not afraid to employ them. However, for unknown reasons,
although it was recommended that Freda Lingstrom
should be paid an annual retainer by the LNER, alongside
five men, this suggestion was not followed. Certain themes,
such as shopping and family outings, were seen to be par-
ticularly suited for women designers, suggesting that con-
sideration of what would appeal to the female market had
some influence on the choice of women artists. Their con-
tributions resulted in some outstanding works by Sybil An-
drews (under the name Andrew Power), Margaret Calkin
Jones, Kathleen Stebbing, Heather (Herry) Perry and oth-
ers illustrated here.
Peyton Skipwith discusses the work of the American
Edward McKnight Kauffer, the most celebrated and indi-
vidual poster designer in Britain between the wars. Trained
in San Francisco as a painter at the Mark Hopkins Insti-
tute, he had the good fortune to see a selection of works
from the Armory show on display at the Art Institute of
Chicago, and a few months later encountered the posters
102 catalogue and book reviews

. Edward McKnight Kauffer, Great Western to Devon’s Moors, , lithograph,  x  mm (York, National Railway
Museum) © National Railway Museum/SSPL.
 catalogue and book reviews
of Ludwig Hohlwein in Munich. Kauffer’s subsequent ca-
reer showed him to have an intelligent magpie’s ability to
absorb lessons from the avant-garde artists whom he en-
countered. Involvement in London with X Group in 
brought him into direct contact with Wyndham Lewis. The
style of his  Berkshire Landscape suggests knowledge of
the work of the Scottish painter, J. D. Fergusson. The
American must also have encountered the London-based
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and may well have known the
architect’s package labels. Skipwith compares the Ameri-
can’s  poster Winter Sales with Russian Constructivist
ceramics. A year later, Winter Sales are Best Reached by the Un-
derground shows Kauffer building on the work of Kupka and
Orphism. Kauffer’s versatility is exemplified by his repre-
sentation of Stephenson’s Rocket in a chapbook style akin
to Claude Lovat Fraser, whose memorial exhibition at the
Leicester Galleries in  he is likely to have seen. As Skip-
with notes, Kauffer also found inspiration in the theatre
designs of Gordon Craig. Kauffer’s pochoir frontispiece to
T. S. Eliot’s A Song for Simeon could almost be mistaken for
The History of Prints as Propaganda
David Kunzle
Colin Moore, Propaganda Prints: A History of Art in the
Service of Social and Political Change, London, A & C Black,
,  pp.,  col. and  b. & w. ills., £.
The wording of Colin Moore’s title might have been
better reversed, in so far as much of this book deals with
the idea of propaganda in the broader sense. The ‘prints’
enter the picture only on p. , logically associated with the
invention of printing, and are discussed thereafter with a
mix of other, mostly visual, propaganda media. The bigger
picture is never far away and a succinct historical context is
provided throughout. Considering the stream of books over
the last two generations specifically dedicated to the poster,
this attempt to historicize the development of the genre
marks some of the originality of Moore’s enterprise. At less
than two hundred pages, many of which are filled or part-
filled with illustrations, he achieves a kind of potted world
history, with an emphasis on the revolutions characterized
by great propaganda efforts, which is to say most of them.
This will surely be welcomed by students and teachers
who need to be introduced to, or reminded of, a history
that shows the many ways in which opinion has been ma-
nipulated: via sculpture, embroidery (Bayeux), architec-
ture, painting, festivals, coins and of course print media.
Missing here is tapestry, ignored by much history of art
 , , , 
103
the work of a French artist from the circle of Juan Gris.
His  poster for Shell’s International Aero Exhibition
would not have seemed out of place had it been exhibited
alongside the contemporary work of Felix Del Marle. Ap-
preciation of the principles of German photomontage
surely lies behind Power The Nerve Centre of London’s Under-
ground of . The glowing  Great Western to Devon’s
Moors (fig. ), compared by Skipwith to Magritte, looks
back to the work of the Belgian’s late Symbolist compatri-
ots as well to the work of his great French contemporary,
Cassandre. It must be remembered that several of the
finest Belgian artists of the period found refuge in Britain
during World War I, and that there were exhibitions of
their work in London and the provinces in the s. Kauf-
fer was also familiar with the work of Arp, and his part-
nership with the textile designer Marion Dorn drew him
occasionally towards a Bauhaus aesthetic. Undoubtedly he
was an exceptionally gifted translator of other artists’ in-
novations. Sometimes, however, one is left questioning who
the real McKnight Kauffer was.
but potent in its public exposure, and at one time the most
expensive form of visual art. In its very abbreviated way,
I daresay Moore’s volume ranks as a worthy successor to
Max Gallo’s The Poster in History. The historian’s seven-
league boots are polished anew.
We are reminded that the term ‘propaganda’ had a
more or less positive, or at least neutral, cast at the time of
its coinage in , when the Catholic Church established
the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of Faith
(Propaganda Fide). Since then the concepts of propaganda
and (mere) propagation have gone rather separate ways.
All the great conquerors from Alexander the Great to
Napoleon – nominated in this review as one of the greatest
masters of propaganda – and great conquering nations
have utilized the ‘softer’ weapons of communication and
display in their drive for power and territory. We are now
leery of the welter of propaganda devices at the disposal
of governments and their corporate lackeys as they strive
to ‘manufacture consent’, to paraphrase the title of a book
by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, perhaps the
greatest demystifiers of the process. Propaganda, as we
have seen in regard to the Iraq War, can become indistin-
guishable from lying to the people. But then governments,
especially democratic ones, have always lied, particularly
when engineering war. Moore too is a bit leery, anxious but
104 catalogue and book reviews
never angry or discomposed, at the way in which civiliza-
tion (so-called, ‘it would be a good idea’ as Gandhi said)
has been driven by the manipulations of the rich and pow-
erful. They have not, however, had it all their own way, for
a dialectic is at work here: the expansion of media, espe-
cially printing, raised literacy and popular consciousness,
thereby facilitating a counter-propaganda in which posters
have played a large part. But the imbalance of power is
still tremendous: the political poster of the counter-culture
is often a voice crying in the wilderness, stifled in the thicket
of the misrepresentations generated by government-con-
trolled or -influenced media corporations.
It is not hard to interpret much ancient art as propa-
ganda, even when it had a more immediate administrative
purpose. Was Hadrian’s Wall propaganda? The mere sight
of it should have scared the Scots and helped keep the Brits
in their place. Today, fragile and fragmentary, it has be-
come a new kind of propaganda, promoting tourism. Nor-
man castles were built not just to house the victorious
invaders but also to subdue the local populace. All the cas-
tles, abbeys, cathedrals and stately homes we love to visit
were built to impress, and in a way functioned as propa-
ganda, although Moore fails to discuss cathedrals. The
Bayeux tapestry (actually, embroidery) was made, probably
by English nuns, to hang in the cathedral at Bayeux and
to celebrate the Norman Conquest, although, as pointed
out by Moore, the defeated Anglo-Saxons retain a certain
dignity. To assess its function as propaganda we need to
know – and this is a matter of academic dispute – where it
was exhibited, how it was seen and by whom. The Cru-
sades were promoted by medieval Christian ideologues in
a barrage of fiery sermonizing and papal pronouncements.
The idea of the chivalrous medieval knight, armed in
virtue against the heathen Saracen, was propagandized at
the time by an immense amount of romance and poetry.
(I interpolate, wondering what parts of culture are not in
some sense propaganda?) The Christian ideal of overcom-
ing heretics and infidels survives, and modern wars con-
tinue to feed the appetite for knightly adventure. Moore
found an apt modern use of such a knight in an Austrian
poster of  advertising war bonds.
When discussing the advent of printing, the author in-
evitably disappoints print-lovers who will miss their
favourites. After one serious lapsus relating to Luther’s the-
ological revolution – in contrast to what Moore states, the
German reformer believed in justification by faith and ob-
jected strongly to the papal doctrine that Christians could
atone for their sins through good works – I would have
wanted an example of one of the ruder satirical woodcuts
from this first sustained cartoon campaign in history, the
print of the devil excreting papist clergy, for instance. Like-
wise, a propaganda print of Henry VIII (say, of his au-
thorizing a new English Bible) might have better served to
support the primary title of this book than Holbein’s
abundantly familiar half-length painting of the ruler,
which was seen by few at the time.
One can justify illustrating Italian Renaissance propa-
ganda (to which Moore dedicates almost two pages), with
a painting of a pope and a piece of architecture, for who
remembers the prints? And architecture can have incal-
culable visual impact. Here, instead of the obvious exam-
ple of St Peter’s in Rome, we get a Palladian villa with
Moore’s long and learned caption, where the propaganda
value gets lost. The Baroque age (‘The Propaganda of the
Senses’) is scantily covered in half a page of text; Louis
XIV’s Versailles gets about the same, with the Thirty
Years’ War (which actually preceded it) appended. Moore
correctly refers to the ‘huge quantities of printed material,
mostly posters and leaflets’ produced during this first truly
European war, but incorrectly adds ‘produced by both
sides’. In fact, just as Luther had the advantage in the
propaganda war against a system averse to the vulgarity
of woodcuts, the balance was very uneven. The first great
anti-war campaign in history was waged by German en-
gravers during the Thirty Years’ War. We think of the
Habsburgs relying on Rubens’s painting (and the prints
from it) to justify their aggressions, while the German
printing presses helplessly lamented them and the great
misery they brought. They were followed by a Dutch anti-
war and anti-Louis XIV campaign led by Romeyn de
Hooghe, who alas remains little known and is omitted
here. The English Civil War was marked by a plethora of
written tracts, whereas visual propaganda mostly had to
await the eighteenth century, and Hogarth. A notable ex-
ception was a brief flurry at the time of the notorious
Popish Plots in the s and s, which, curiously, took
the form of playing cards (also overlooked by Moore).
Given their easy availability, Hogarth and the Golden
Age of Caricature, with Gillray and Rowlandson as the
brightest stars in a sparkling firmament, understandably
get little space. The American and French Revolutions, cul-
minating in Napoleon, where the print production is less
amusing, do better. For the nineteenth century, Moore
touches on the rise of Chartism and the dissenting news-
paper at one end and the spectacle of the Great Exhibition
at the other. The Crimean War was certainly a watershed,
and the reportage of the appalling conditions suffered by
British soldiers, which helped a little to alleviate them, pre-
saged that of the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars of
our time. Daumier is faintly present here – as a name and
a small reproduction. He is unthinkable without the inven-
tion of lithography, which did so much to foster social and
political criticism in France, but less so elsewhere. Goya,
the effect of whose work today is in inverse proportion to
its impact at the time, is also a mere name, with a large
aquatint etching wrongly identified as a lithograph. It is as
if Jules Chéret, treated in some detail, were somehow more
significant than Daumier. Perhaps he is, at least in relation
to advertising and consumerism.
The ‘Golden Age of Posters’ of around  an-
 catalogue and book reviews
nounced a fundamentally new purpose for the print – sell-
ing things. Large, gorgeously coloured and designed with
the mellifluous line that only Art Nouveau could deploy,
the posters are simply beautiful. One can only imagine
how they embellished ugly industrial walls, since now they
are restricted to the interior of wealthy homes, and mu-
seum collections. Less dramatic but still eye-catching, the
public service posters of the interwar period had another
new and more essential purpose; some of the best pro-
moted London transport (see the review in this Journal of
Art for All: British Posters for Transport, pp. ‒).
The two World Wars are remarkable for their sheer
quantity and variety of poster production, organized at
the highest government level. Here Moore excels and
delves deep (no fewer than fourteen pages and thirty illus-
trations for World War I). Because there was at first no
compulsory military service as in other combatant coun-
tries, the British government mustered propaganda on a
colossal scale; although directed chiefly at home, much ef-
fort was secretly put into getting the Americans into the
war. After the war, the German High Command felt out-
witted by British superiority in propaganda, which they
considered in hindsight had been decisive; certainly Hitler
thought so, and blamed defeat accordingly: ‘We were hyp-
notized by the enemy propaganda like a rabbit by a snake.’
A certain desperation may be detected in the motifs: the
mutual accusation of (undocumented) atrocities on the
one hand, and, on the other, almost humorous notions,
with the war presented as a kind of card-game, to be won
by the ace of hearts, or the German posters demanding
the delivery of rabbit skins and women’s hair as essential
war material.
The American effort to coax and threaten a reluctant
people into the war involved an army of , designers
and related workers. It was undertaken as ‘a plain public-
ity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the
world’s greatest adventure in advertising’. The Americans’
success in creating, with all the latest psychological tech-
niques, a world-wide susceptibility to consumer advertis-
ing, is well-known and not the subject of the book.
Even in Soviet Russia, a country where literacy was
much lower than in the West, immense propaganda efforts
were made on behalf of the Revolution, with film being
systematically exploited for the first time. The same was
true of World War II, when the Russians produced a film
about Stalingrad within six weeks of the German surren-
der. Unlike Germany, films in wartime Soviet Russia were
patriotic, never escapist. The topic of film as propaganda
is too big even for Moore’s grasp, although he reminds us
that the American domination of this medium speaks
reams about their quest for world cultural and political
domination: we read that as early as   per cent of
films in Britain were made in the United States.
Propaganda can be that of the already strong, reinforc-
ing their power, or of the relatively weak, compensating
105
for lack of military muscle, on the premise that the pen is
mightier than the sword. There are contrasts in medium.
The papacy had the pulpit; Luther had the press. In the
Spanish Civil War, the fascists had the arms, the Republi-
cans the artists. The imbalance in the production of Span-
ish Civil War posters is so great that one wonders how the
Republicans could have lost. But what did a thousand
posters or Picasso’s Guernica weigh against one German
bomber or the supine indifference of the governments of
Western democracies? What can the poster (or even the
Internet) do today against radio, television and the press?
The Cold War was waged in the press and on televi-
sion. There was actually a Soviet peace poster campaign,
but who noticed it at the time and who remembers it now?
Could it match the anti-Soviet bubblegum cards or the
power of conspicuous consumption propagandized as the
very purpose of civilization? By contrast, the popular
peace campaign against the Vietnam War had a demon-
strable effect in changing minds and ending the war.
Moore does not give figures but there may have been as
many as , different designs, all made by small outfits
and concerned individuals, protesting various aspects of
this war that the Americans prefer to forget. The Center
for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles has
done sterling work fighting this amnesia, with numerous
exhibitions of posters denouncing imperialist wars.
The historian may do well to avoid the highly emotional
tone of many of these posters about Vietnam or the Iraq
and Afghan wars (‘No blood for oil!’), but I do not condone
the use of misleading euphemisms, such as when Moore
calls US-abetted war in the countries of Central America
and Chile, ‘interference’. Can the Gulf of Tonkin incident
(now known to have been deliberately manufactured to jus-
tify bombing of North Vietnam, which Moore fails to men-
tion) be characterized as a mere ‘incident’? Was the war
begun on the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s purported
possession of weapons of mass destruction a mere ‘fiasco’?
The Vietnam War is too often opaquely referred to as an
unfortunate ‘involvement’. One needs to match Moore’s
astonishing statistic of  billion leaflets dropped on the
country with the tonnage of bombs dropped by the United
States, which exceeded that dropped on all theatres of war,
European and Pacific, in World War II.
Relative to the size of the country, Cuban poster output
has been enormous. It is both anti-imperialist (best exam-
ples are from OSPAAAL, the Organization of Solidarity
with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America) and
aesthetic-cultural (best examples are from the Film Insti-
tute). Moore favours the latter and notes the initial non-
commercial purpose of all Cuban posters since the
country’s revolution, which, however, has been invalidated
since  by the economic crisis. But Cuban film posters
remain a rare example of posters created for visual pleas-
ure and independently of film – in effect, not propaganda
prints at all.