1.
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
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The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is an etching by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. Occasionally the phrase is rendered as “The dream of reason produces monsters”. Created between 1797 and 1799, it is the 43rd of 80 etchings making up the suite of satires Los Caprichos, Goya imagines himself asleep amidst his drawing tools, his reason dulled by slumber and bedeviled by creatures that prowl in the dark. The work includes owls that may be symbols of folly and bats symbolizing ignorance, the artists nightmare reflected his view of Spanish society, which he portrayed in the Caprichos as demented, corrupt, and ripe for ridicule. The work is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was the gift of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1918. The full epigraph for capricho No.43 reads, Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters, united with her, she is the mother of the arts, the title of C. P. Snows The Sleep of Reason is drawn from this painting. Goya in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Goyas The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, nyu. edu, The Sleep of Reason The Sleep of Reason – article in World&I Magazine
2.
Francisco Goya
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Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of late 18th and early 19th centuries and throughout his career was a commentator. Immensely successful in his lifetime, Goya is often referred to as both the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns and he was also one of the great portraitists of modern times. He was born to a modest family in 1746 in the village of Fuendetodos in Aragon and he studied painting from age 14 under José Luzán y Martinez and moved to Madrid to study with Anton Raphael Mengs. He married Josefa Bayeu in 1773, the couples life together was characterised by an almost constant series of pregnancies and miscarriages, Goya was a guarded man and although letters and writings survive, little is known about his thoughts. He suffered a severe and undiagnosed illness in 1793 which left him completely deaf, after 1793 his work became progressively darker and more pessimistic. His later easel and mural paintings, prints and drawings appear to reflect a bleak outlook on personal, social and political levels and he was appointed Director of the Royal Academy in 1795, the year Manuel Godoy made an unfavorable treaty with France. In 1799 Goya became Primer Pintor de Cámara, the then-highest rank for a Spanish court painter, in the late 1790s, commissioned by Godoy, he completed his La maja desnuda, a remarkably daring nude for the time and clearly indebted to Diego Velázquez. In 1801 he painted Charles IV of Spain and His Family, in 1807 Napoleon led the French army into Spain. Goya remained in Madrid during the Peninsular War, which seems to have affected him deeply. Although he did not vocalise his thoughts in public, they can be inferred from his Disasters of War series of prints and his 1814 paintings The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808. Goya eventually abandoned Spain in 1824 to retire to the French city of Bordeaux, accompanied by his much younger maid and companion, Leocadia Weiss, there he completed his La Tauromaquia series and a number of other, major, canvases. Following a stroke left him paralyzed on his right side. His body was later re-interred in Spain, Francisco Goya was born in Fuendetodos, Aragón, Spain, on 30 March 1746 to José Benito de Goya y Franque and Gracia de Lucientes y Salvador. The family had moved that year from the city of Zaragoza, José was the son of a notary and of Basque origin, his ancestors being from Zerain, earning his living as a gilder, specialising in religious and decorative craftwork. He oversaw the gilding and most of the ornamentation during the rebuilding of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar, Francisco was their fourth child, following his sister Rita, brother Tomás and second sister Jacinta. There were two sons, Mariano and Camilo. His mothers family had pretensions of nobility and the house, a modest brick cottage, was owned by her family and, perhaps fancifully, about 1749 José and Gracia bought a home in Zaragoza and were able to return to live in the city
3.
History of printing
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The history of printing goes back to the duplication of images by means of stamps in very early times. In both China and Egypt, the use of stamps for seals preceded the use of larger blocks. In China, India and Europe, the printing of cloth certainly preceded the printing of paper or papyrus, the process is essentially the same - in Europe special presentation impressions of prints were often printed on silk until the seventeenth century. Block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia both as a method of printing on textiles and later, under the influence of Buddhism, on paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to about 220, ukiyo-e is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique on paper are covered by the term woodcut, the worlds earliest printer printed fragments to survive are from China and are of silk printed with flowers in three colours from the Han Dynasty. It reached Europe, via the Islamic world, and by around 1400 was being used on paper for old master prints, the third oldest wood-block printed book ever found after Mugujeonggwang great Dharani sutraand Hyakumantō Darani is the Diamond Sutra. It carries a date of the 13th day of the moon of the ninth year of the Xiantong era. A number of printed dhāraṇīs, however, predate the Diamond Sūtra by about two hundred years, in Buddhism, great merit is thought to accrue from copying and preserving texts. The fourth-century master listed the copying of scripture as the first of ten essential religious practices and this ‘cult of the book’ led to techniques for reproducing texts in great numbers, especially the short prayers or charms known as dhāraṇīs. Stamps were carved for printing these prayers on clay tablets from at least the seventh century, especially popular was the Pratītyasamutpāda Gāthā, a short verse text summing up Nāgārjunas philosophy of causal genesis or dependent origination. Nagarjuna lived in the centuries of the current era and the Buddhist Creed. This tradition was transmitted to China and Tibet with Buddhism, Printing text from woodblocks does not, however, seem to have been developed in India. Printing with a press was practiced in Christian Europe as a method for printing on cloth and these prints were produced in very large numbers from about 1425 onwards. Around the mid-century, block-books, woodcut books with text and images, usually carved in the same block, emerged as a cheaper alternative to manuscripts. These were all heavily illustrated works, the bestsellers of the day, repeated in many different block-book versions, the Ars moriendi. In Europe, from about 1450 they were commonly used to colour old master prints printed in black and white. This was especially the case with playing-cards, which continued to be coloured by stencil long after most other subjects for prints were left in black, stenciling back in the 27th century BCE was different
4.
Woodblock printing
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Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Ukiyo-e is the best known type of Japanese woodblock art print, most European uses of the technique for printing images on paper are covered by the art term woodcut, except for the block-books produced mainly in the 15th century. Prior to the invention of printing, seals and stamps were used for making impressions. The oldest of these came from Mesopotamia and Egypt. A few much larger brick stamps for marking clay bricks survive from Akkad from around 2270 BC. There are also Roman lead pipe inscriptions of some length that were stamped, however none of these used ink, which is necessary for printing, but stamped marks into relatively soft materials. In both China and Egypt, the use of stamps for seals preceded the use of larger blocks. In Europe and India, the printing of cloth certainly preceded the printing of paper or papyrus, the process is essentially the same—in Europe special presentation impressions of prints were often printed on silk until at least the 17th century. The block was cut along the grain of the wood and it is necessary only to ink the block and bring it into firm and even contact with the paper or cloth to achieve an acceptable print. The content would of course print in reverse or mirror-image, a further complication when text was involved, the art of carving the woodcut is technically known as xylography, though the term is rarely used in English. For colour printing, multiple blocks are used, each for one colour, multiple colours can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks. There are three methods of printing to consider, Stamping Used for many fabrics, and most early European woodcuts. These items were printed by putting paper or fabric on a table or a surface with the block on top, and pressing, or hammering. Rubbing Apparently the most common for Far Eastern printing, Used for European woodcuts and block-books later in the 15th century, and very widely for cloth. The block is placed face side up on a table, with the paper or fabric on top, the back of the paper or fabric is rubbed with a hard pad, a flat piece of wood, a burnisher, or a leather frotton. Printing in a press Presses only seem to have used in Asia in relatively recent times. Simple weighted presses may have used in Europe, but firm evidence is lacking. A deceased Abbess of Mechelen in Flanders in 1465 had unum instrumentum ad imprintendum scripturas et ymagines, cum 14 aliis lapideis printis which is probably too early to be a Gutenberg-type printing press in that location
5.
Movable type
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Movable type is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document usually on the medium of paper. In 1377, currently the oldest extant movable metal print book, the diffusion of both movable-type systems was, however, limited. Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg made another version of a metal printing press in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix. The more limited number of characters needed for European languages was an important factor, Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony—and these materials remained standard for 550 years. For alphabetic scripts, movable-type page setting was quicker than woodblock printing, the metal type pieces were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, leading to typography and fonts. The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible established the superiority of movable type in Europe, the printing press may be regarded as one of the key factors fostering the Renaissance and due to its effectiveness, its use spread around the globe. The 19th-century invention of hot metal typesetting and its successors caused movable type to decline in the 20th century, the technique of imprinting multiple copies of symbols or glyphs with a master type punch made of hard metal first developed around 3000 BC in ancient Sumer. These metal punch types can be seen as precursors of the letter punches adapted in later millennia to printing with metal type. Cylinder seals were used in Mesopotamia to create an impression on a surface by rolling the seal on wet clay and they were used to sign documents and mark objects as the owners property. By 650 BC the ancient Greeks were using larger diameter punches to imprint small page images onto coins and tokens, seals and stamps may have been precursors to movable type. A few authors even view the disc as technically meeting all definitional criteria to represent an early incidence of movable-type printing, recently it has been alleged by Jerome Eisenberg that the disk is a forgery. The Prüfening dedicatory inscription is medieval example of movable type stamps being used, yet copying books by hand was still labour-consuming. Not until the Xiping Era, towards the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty did sealing print and it was soon used for printing designs on fabrics, and later for printing texts. Woodblock printing, invented by about the 8th century during the Tang Dynasty, then carvers cut away the parts of the board that were not part of the character, so that the characters were cut in relief, completely differently from those cut intaglio. When printing, the characters would have some ink spread on them. With workers’ hands moving on the back of paper gently, characters would be printed on the paper, by the Song Dynasty, woodblock printing came to its heyday. Although woodblock printing played a role in spreading culture, there remained some apparent drawbacks. Firstly, carving the printing plate required considerable time, labour and materials, secondly, it was not convenient to store these plates, with woodblock printing, one printing plate could be used for tens of hundreds of books, playing a magnificent role in spreading culture
6.
Printing press
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A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium, thereby transferring the ink. The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire by the German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, the printing press spread within several decades to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries. By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes, in the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies. The operation of a press became so synonymous with the enterprise of printing that it lent its name to a new branch of media. The sharp rise of learning and literacy amongst the middle class led to an increased demand for books which the time-consuming hand-copying method fell far short of accommodating. Technologies preceding the press led to the presss invention included, manufacturing of paper, development of ink, woodblock printing. At the same time, a number of products and technological processes had reached a level of maturity which allowed their potential use for printing purposes. The device was used from very early on in urban contexts as a cloth press for printing patterns. Gutenberg may have also inspired by the paper presses which had spread through the German lands since the late 14th century. Gutenberg adopted the design, thereby mechanizing the printing process. Printing, however, put a demand on the quite different from pressing. Gutenberg adapted the construction so that the power exerted by the platen on the paper was now applied both evenly and with the required sudden elasticity. To speed up the process, he introduced a movable undertable with a plane surface on which the sheets could be swiftly changed. The known examples range from Germany to England to Italy, however, the various techniques employed did not have the refinement and efficiency needed to become widely accepted. Gutenberg greatly improved the process by treating typesetting and printing as two separate work steps, a goldsmith by profession, he created his type pieces from a lead-based alloy which suited printing purposes so well that it is still used today. The mass production of metal letters was achieved by his key invention of a hand mould. Another factor conducive to printing arose from the existing in the format of the codex. Considered the most important advance in the history of the prior to printing itself
7.
Etching
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Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types of material, as a method of printmaking, it is, along with engraving, the most important technique for old master prints, and remains in wide use today. In a number of variants such as microfabrication etching and photochemical milling it is a crucial technique in much modern technology. In traditional pure etching, a plate is covered with a waxy ground which is resistant to acid. The artist then scratches off the ground with an etching needle where he or she wants a line to appear in the finished piece. The échoppe, a tool with an oval section, is also used for swelling lines. The plate is dipped in a bath of acid, technically called the mordant or etchant. The acid bites into the metal where it is exposed, leaving behind lines sunk into the plate, the remaining ground is then cleaned off the plate. The plate is inked all over, and then the ink wiped off the surface, the plate is then put through a high-pressure printing press together with a sheet of paper. The paper picks up the ink from the lines, making a print. The process can be repeated many times, typically several hundred impressions could be printed before the shows much sign of wear. The work on the plate can also be added to by repeating the whole process, Etching has often been combined with other intaglio techniques such as engraving or aquatint. The process as applied to printmaking is believed to have been invented by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Hopfer was a craftsman who decorated armour in this way, and applied the method to printmaking, using iron plates. Apart from his prints, there are two examples of his work on armour, a shield from 1536 now in the Real Armeria of Madrid. The switch to copper plates was made in Italy. On the other hand, the handling of the ground and acid need skill and experience, prior to 1100 AD, the New World Hohokam independently utilized the technique of acid etching in marine shell designs. Jacques Callot from Nancy in Lorraine made important technical advances in etching technique and he developed the échoppe, a type of etching-needle with a slanting oval section at the end, which enabled etchers to create a swelling line, as engravers were able to do. Callot also appears to have responsible for an improved, harder, recipe for the etching ground
8.
Mezzotint
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Mezzotint is a printmaking process of the intaglio family, technically a drypoint method. It was the first tonal method to be used, enabling half-tones to be produced without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple. Mezzotint achieves tonality by roughening the plate with thousands of little dots made by a tool with small teeth. In printing, the pits in the plate hold the ink when the face of the plate is wiped clean. A high level of quality and richness in the print can be achieved, the mezzotint printmaking method was invented by the German amateur artist Ludwig von Siegen. His earliest mezzotint print dates to 1642 and is a portrait of Countess Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg and this was made by working from light to dark. The rocker seems to have been invented by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a cavalry commander in the English Civil War, who was the next to use the process. Sir Peter Lely saw the potential for using it to publicise his portraits, the process was especially widely used in England from the mid-eighteenth century, to reproduce portraits and other paintings. Since the mid-nineteenth century it has relatively little used. Robert Kipniss and Peter Ilsted are two notable 20th-century exponents of the technique, M. C, British mezzotint collecting was a great craze from about 1760 to the Great Crash of 1929, also spreading to America. The favourite period to collect was roughly from 1750 to 1820, leading collectors included William Eaton, 2nd Baron Cheylesmore and the Irishman John Chaloner Smith. This became the most common method, the whole surface of a metal, usually copper, plate is roughened evenly, manually with a rocker, or mechanically. If the plate were printed at this point it would show as solid black, a burnisher has a smooth, round end, which flattens the minutely protruding points comprising the roughened surface of the metal printing plate. Areas smoothed completely flat will not hold ink at all, such areas will print white, by varying the degree of smoothing, mid-tones between black and white can be created, hence the name mezzo-tinto which is Italian for half-tone or half-painted. This is called working from dark to light, or the subtractive method, alternatively, it is possible to create the image directly by only roughening a blank plate selectively, where the darker parts of the image are to be. This is called working from light to dark, or the additive method, the first mezzotints by Ludwig von Siegen were made in this way. Especially in this method, the mezzotint can be combined with other techniques, such as engraving, on areas of the plate not roughened. The plate is put through a printing press next to a sheet of paper
9.
Lithography
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Lithography is a method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by German author and actor Alois Senefelder as a method of publishing theatrical works. Lithography can be used to print text or artwork onto paper or other suitable material, Lithography originally used an image drawn with oil, fat, or wax onto the surface of a smooth, level lithographic limestone plate. The stone was treated with a mixture of acid and gum arabic, when the stone was subsequently moistened, these etched areas retained water, an oil-based ink could then be applied and would be repelled by the water, sticking only to the original drawing. The ink would finally be transferred to a paper sheet. This traditional technique is used in some fine art printmaking applications. In modern lithography, the image is made of a coating applied to a flexible aluminum plate. The image can be printed directly from the plate, or it can be offset, by transferring the image onto a sheet for printing. In fact, photolithography is used synonymously with offset printing, the technique as well as the term were introduced in Europe in the 1850s. Beginning in the 1960s, photolithography has played an important role in the fabrication, Lithography uses simple chemical processes to create an image. For instance, the part of an image is a water-repelling substance. Thus, when the plate is introduced to a printing ink and water mixture, the ink will adhere to the positive image. This allows a flat print plate to be used, enabling much longer, Lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder in the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1796. In the early days of lithography, a piece of limestone was used. After the oil-based image was put on the surface, a solution of gum arabic in water was applied, during printing, water adhered to the gum arabic surfaces and was repelled by the oily parts, while the oily ink used for printing did the opposite. Lithography works because of the repulsion of oil and water. The image is drawn on the surface of the print plate with a fat or oil-based medium such as a wax crayon, which may be pigmented to make the drawing visible
10.
Chromolithography
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Chromolithography is a unique method for making multi-colour prints. This type of colour printing stemmed from the process of lithography, when chromolithography is used to reproduce photographs, the term photochrome is frequently used. Lithographers sought to find a way to print on flat surfaces with the use of chemicals instead of relief or intaglio printing, hand-colouring also remained important, elements of the official British Ordnance Survey maps were coloured by hand by boys until 1875. The initial technique involved the use of multiple lithographic stones, one for each colour, depending on the number of colours present, a chromolithograph could take months to produce, by very skilled workers. However much cheaper prints could be produced by simplifying both the number of used, and the refinement of the detail in the image. Cheaper images, like advertisements, relied heavily on a black print. The process is based on the rejection of grease by water, the image is applied to stone, grained zinc or aluminium surfaces, with a grease-based crayon or ink. Limestone and zinc are two commonly used materials in the production of chromolithographs, as aluminium unfortunately corrodes easily, after the image is drawn onto one of these surfaces, the image is gummed-up with a gum arabic solution and weak nitric acid to desensitize the surface. Before printing, the image is proved before finally inking up the image with oil based transfer or printing ink, the inked image under pressure is transposed onto a sheet of paper using a flat-bed press. This describes the form of printing. The offset indirect method uses a cylinder that transfers the image from printing surface to the paper. Colours may be overprinted by using stones or plates to achieve a closer reproduction of the original. Accurate registration for multi-coloured work is achieved by the use of a key outline image, ben-Day medium, uses a raised gelatin stipple image to give tone gradation. An air-brush sprays ink to give soft edges and these are just two methods used to achieve gradations of tone. The use of twelve overprinted colours would not be considered unusual, each sheet of paper will therefore pass through the printing press as many times as there are colours in the final print. In order that each colour is placed in the position, each stone or plate must be precisely ‘registered, ’ or lined up. Chromolithographs are considered to be reproductions that are smaller than double demi, autolithographs are prints where the artist draws and perhaps prints his or her own limited number of reproductions. This is the true art form
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