Historic Wood Blocks

thingiverse

These are high-resolution scans of two sixteenth-century Austrian woodcuts of plants, suitable for use as demonstration objects for courses on printing, the history of printing, or the history of science. Overview and Background These blocks were originally commissioned for a mid-16th century publication of an ancient treatise on medicinal plants by Dioscorides, entitled De Materia Medica. This book was translated into Czech and German (and later Latin and Italian) by a renowned Viennese doctor and naturalist, Pietro Andreas Mattioli, with the support of the Hapsburg emperor Ferdinand I. Mattioli hired Giorgio Liberale de Udine and Wolfgang Meyerpeck to design and illustrate these blocks, of which there were originally over 600. They are considered some of the best woodblock prints of their era. These two are now in the collection of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Lesson Plan and Activity After 3D-printing this object, it can be used for a simple demonstration of historic book illustration processes, and is suitable for printing from directly. The scan is high-resolution enough to show the knife marks of the original carver. Materials Needed The file (one of two) The image printed from the block (one of two)