I wanted to know how old illustrations are.

I drew a cat. The woodcut made me laugh.

I love illustrations, whatever they’re of. From airports to food menus, a good illustration can teach you a lot. So, as usual, I wanted to learn how old they are, and it turned into a page where you draw something and it gets made the way people made pictures for 51,000 years.

On the cave wall it looked fine. Then I saw what a printer in 1493 would have made of it.

My cat, as I drew it, and as a woodcut.

For centuries, printing a picture meant someone had to cut it by hand, and that took a lot of people a long time.

In 1493 a printer in Nuremberg made a history of the world with 1,809 pictures but only 645 wood blocks. So blocks were used again and again. The same city view was printed as Damascus, then Ferrara, then Milan, then Mantua, with only the name changed.

Damascus in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. The same block was also Ferrara, Milan and Mantua.

In 1842 it took 19 people, working day and night for two months, to cut one picture of London for a newspaper. Ebenezer Landells and his 18 assistants cut it across 60 small blocks of boxwood, and the paper gave it away in January 1843. By 1900 photography and halftone printing had taken most of that work.

Pictures go back much further than printing. The oldest one we know of that shows something happening is at least 51,200 years old: three figures and a wild pig on a cave wall in Sulawesi, in Indonesia.

My favourite word from all this is miniature. It comes from minium, red lead, and first meant painting with it in a manuscript. Small came later.

What did you draw? Hit reply, I read every one.

Akash

what is an illustration? · a sheets.works data drop

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