WOODCUT or XYLOGRAPHY

Woodcut is a relief process. The matrix is a block of wood that can be cut either longitudinally as planks, or cross-grained, when it is cut transversally. Longitudinal blocks are softer and give a less precise line while the wood of the second kind, made by uniting various carefully selected pieces, is fine-grained and harder. Its thinner and closer lines produce a design rich in detail.

The drawing on the block is cut in relief. The parts cut away with the gouge are white in the finished print while those standing in relief are black.

The first prints on paper done from wood blocks were made in China and date from the eighth century. According to some documents, in Europe the first woodcuts-simple images of saints, and playing cards - date back to the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The ancient religious prints were essentially linear, often embellished by hand colouring.

The invention of movable type printing, which applied the relief process to the letters of the alphabet, and the subsequent development of publishing represented a field of applications and uses for woodcut. In the late fifteenth century the production of books illustrated with woodcuts spread especially in Italy and Germany.

However, even the most sophisticated images were anonymous or done by artists who can be identified only hypothetically, until Dürer, with the aid of the technical progress of the printing press, was able in just a few years to develop an idiom for the new art. He renewed the technique's possibilities for representation using the rules of Renaissance art, creating compositions of great openness and complexity.

The end of the eighteenth century was another period of renewal, when the new technique of engraving on cross-grained blocks brought about a radical change in the way woodcuts were conceived, and again when Gauguin ushered in the modern era in woodcut. 

(from "tecniche dell'incisione originale" INClub Firenze)