Single-sheet printed devotional images were used in a variety of ways in the fifteenth century, few of which were conducive to their survival. Pasted to walls, glued to wooden panels, inside boxes and books or onto pieces of furniture, only a handful of the thousands of impressions which were produced have survived. Those that do have invariably been extracted from their context, removed to satisfy the desires of later print collectors.

Many surviving prints were once pasted into books, both printed and manuscript, to act as devotional aids and stimuli. These prints in books offer us a unique insight into the contemporary use of devotional images and into the complex interplay between manuscript and print. One such example is this extraordinary print of the Crucifixion. This graphic woodcut succinctly demonstrates how context is paramount and how evidence of use can be critical in dating and localizing single-sheet devotional images. The Crucifixion is unique and bears no indication of where or when it was produced. Beneath the image is a manuscript indulgence in Dutch, offering the bearer an unprecedented remission from purgatory of 80,000 years.

The hand and language suggest that the woodcut circulated in the Netherlands, probably in the east, during the late fifteenth century. The extraordinary duration of the indulgence allows us to identify this specific woodcut as the Ecce homo mentioned by Henry Bradshaw, University Librarian at Cambridge, in a letter to the Dutch bibliographer J.W. Holtrop, 10 May 1866. Therein, he describes its purchase from the Amsterdam bookseller, Frederik Muller, ‘lying loose in a copy of St. Gregory’s Homilies printed (by Veldener at Utrecht) in 1479’. Bradshaw’s later notebooks suggest that Muller may have been wholly unaware of the woodcut’s presence at the time of sale. The Utrecht Homilies remains in the University collections, and adds further weight to a contemporary Dutch origin for the woodcut.

The prolific spurts of blood were added by hand, and stylistically mimic other examples dated to the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The pigment used to colour the Cambridge print is remarkably similar to that used to rubricate the book in which the woodcut was found, suggesting that both were undertaken contemporaneously. That this print survives at all is remarkable, that the link between print and book can be reconstructed doubly so; the combination of evidence permits a tentative
dating and locating of a woodcut which otherwise would be impossible to place.

Essay by Ed Potten