Prints and Visual Communication

I have been aware of the interest of graphic media since my doctoral research, when I came across a copy of the polemical print reproduced on the home page of this website, “The Great Marmite Overturned,” and used it for my dissertation and subsequent book. The print distills several of the major themes of Protestant propaganda into a single image and reveals how confident the Huguenots were in the first months of 1562 that the established church was about to topple¹. Deciphering the image brought home how much satirical prints and political cartoons can reveal about mood and ideas of the moment of their creation. A subsequent invitation to contribute a catalog essay for an exhibition of French Renaissance prints from the Bibliothèque Nationale offered an occasion to deepen the analysis of this print, as well as to survey other polemical prints of the era.

Deeper engagement with the history of print-making and the place of graphic media in the early modern economy of information and communication began when I undertook a study of the series of forty woodcuts and etchings by Jean Perrissin and Jacques Tortorel, produced in Geneva in 1569-1570, depicting the “Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Our Time.” At this point I began to visit the print and map departments of major national libraries and read more about the techniques and history of print production. A 2004 fellowship from the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts enabled me to work inside the National Gallery in close proximity to Peter Parshall, the great expert on Renaissance prints.

The prevailing tendency in visual studies at the time was to probe beneath the surface of images to detect the political work they performed. Interpreters of the Tortorel and Perrissin print series had seen its individual sheets as “first and foremost works of propaganda.” Yet its title page declared them to offer true portraits of the events depicted based on eyewitness testimony. The series included images of events in which Catholics were massacred alongside its more numerous depictions of Protestant victimization. The captions employed party-neutral, dispassionate language. Editions were produced with captions in Latin, Italian and German as well as French.

Convinced that understanding this idiosyncratic cultural object required more than a hermeneutic of suspicion, I looked at the biography of the refugee artists and entrepreneurs who produced it, their economic situation at the moment of its production, the production process itself, the sources of information they drew upon for the content of the images, the visual precedents for the images’ form, prior histories told in pictures, and the work’s reception. I also undertook a broader investigation of the use of graphic media to report on current events in the first centuries of print-making. This made it clear that by the time these prints were made, woodcut and etched single sheet depictions of current events had become a regular enough component of the news reporting of the time for the makers of the print series to imagine trying to produce several dozen in rapid succession that could be sold in sets to form a graphic history of the recent past, a set produced not to glorify a ruler, but for sale to a trans-confessional and international market. In light of the audience that the economically stressed artists and entrepreneurs collaborating on the project were seeking to reach, credence had to be granted their stated ambition to produce accurate, non-partisan images of what actually happened. Yet however powerful the commercial incentives pushing them in this direction, they could not escape the limitations of the predominantly Protestant networks of information available to them in Geneva. Hence their depiction of many events incorporated details drawn from partisan accounts, even while the work as a whole was in some ways more balanced than any other history of French events produced in Geneva at the time.

The Tortorel and Perrissin series also turned out to occupy a pivot point in the use of graphic media to relate contemporary history. Commercially and artistically, the Geneva series was no success. The makers chose a large format for their images, started out using the laborious technique of woodcutting, then, as production lagged, switched to making some images as etchings, with the result that the final series lacked a uniform look and was of uneven technical quality. Although the title page of the series announced it as the “First Volume . . . ,” no second volume was ever made, but a printmaker in Cologne, Frans Hogenberg, quickly re-etched the images in a smaller size, learning in the process how quickly views of this sort could be made using this process and format. He went on to establish a successful business specializing in current events prints and print series. Graphic histories for an anonymous, international market enjoyed a modest vogue for a time, only to become rare again as the seventeenth century advanced. The chief afterlife of single-sheet images of contemporary events came to be as illustrations for upmarket folio-size history books. Used in that way, certain of the individual scenes of Tortorel and Perrissin would live on across the centuries, endlessly reproduced in history books and museum installations.

By implication, Graphic History is a manifesto for the value of understanding printed images such as these by situating them as precisely as possible in both the immediate socio-economic context of their production and the long sweep of the medium and its uses. It also insists that certain forms of graphic images should be seen as components of the history of information and knowledge, not only as vectors of propaganda.

Related Publications

“Of Marmites and Martyrs: Images and Polemics in the Wars of Religion” in The French Renaissance in Prints/La gravure française à la Renaissance (exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles and Paris, 1994).

(Co-authored with Lawrence M. Bryant and Kristen B. Neuschel) “Graphic History: What Readers Knew and Were Taught in the Quarante Tableaux of Perrissin and Tortorel,” French Historical Studies 28 (2005), 175-229.

Graphic History: The “Wars, Massacres and Troubles” of Tortorel and Perrissin Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance no. 431 (Geneva: Droz, 2007); revised and abridged French translation, Le regard saisit l’histoire. Les Guerres, massacres et troubles de Tortorel et Perrissin Titre courant no. 47 (Geneva: Droz, 2012). The English edition includes double-page foldouts of all forty prints in the series with commentary.

Footnotes

Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, p. 54-56, offers a succinct explication of the print’s message. A fuller discussion may be found in “Of Marmites and Martyrs,” p. 110-116.