When printmaking began in Europe in the fifteenth century, prints were essentially limited by the size and shape of a sheet of paper and a standard press. By the sixteenth century, a variety of impulses led printmakers to challenge these restrictions. Ambitions to rival paintings and to adorn wall surfaces prompted artists and printmakers to expand printed images horizontally into frieze-like sequences, like carved wall reliefs, or both horizontally and vertically to emulate the scale and monumentality of murals and tapestries. They achieved these effects by using multiple woodblocks or engraving plates and joining sheets of paper that were aligned to produce a single image.

Some of the most impressive mural-scale woodcuts were produced by the workshop of the Venetian painter, Titian, such as the extraordinary Submersion of Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, c.1514, which measures four by seven feet. Popular subject matter for oversize prints included maps, panoramas of battlefields and skylines of cities, as well as processional and narrative scenes. Extremely large prints were also commissioned as decorative schemes for festivals and events and for commemorative purposes.

Grand Scale assembles more than forty oversize and multi-part woodcuts and engravings from United States collections. Except for an exhibition of giant Renaissance woodcuts in the 1970s, this is the first exhibition in more than 100 years to explore the origins of this genre in printmaking with works by some of the most important artists and printmakers of their day.

Organizers

The exhibition is organized by the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College under the direction of Elizabeth Wyckoff, Assistant Director and Curator of Prints and Drawings

Curators

Shelley Langdale • Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings
Larry Silver • Farquhar Professor of Art History, University of Pennsylvania

Location

Berman and Stieglitz Galleries, ground floor

Itinerary

The Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College • March 19–June 8, 2008
Yale University Art Gallery • September 9–November 30, 2008
The Philadelphia Museum of Art • January 31–April 26, 2009