These next two are from printed editions of the work. The Latin edition has some illumination of the letters, while the German book’s image is fully colored.

Most illustrations found in books from the early days of print are in the form of woodcuts and etchings. Woodcuts were most compatible with moveable type because both used relief printing, and early printers could easily print a page with both text and illustrations.

Because of the carving and printing process, woodcuts have simpler designs with less shading. They therefore make for excellent coloring pages, and Color Our Collections participants frequently choose woodcuts for their images. Moreover, art historian Susan Dackerman argues that they were meant to be colored. Many of these color prints were created in a workshop setting, with an engraver, printer, and colorist working together. The “vast majority” of surviving fifteenth-century woodcuts are hand colored, and they were produced in the tens of thousands in the fifteenth century.1

Some images, like this fifteenth-century German woodcut of Christ on the cross, are only complete once colored. In this case, angels hold cups to catch blood that needs to be added with paint. The National Gallery of Art owns a number of examples of this woodcut, each differently colored. Some have been left uncolored, and a couple have only the requisite blood added to complete the image. Among those more fully colored, we can see that quite a bit of artistic license was taken.