Text and Image on the Early Printing Press: The Complementarity of the Textual and the Visual in Antwerp’s Religious Book Production, 1480-1500

The introduction of the printing press in the transitional age between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period made it possible – for the first time in history – to produce books containing images on a large scale and for a free market. From the late 15th century onwards, Antwerp became the capital of printing in the Low Countries, attracting pioneers of the new medium from all over the Netherlands and Germany. Its development as a center of printing coincided and interlocked with its rapid growth as an international art market. Printers and painters worked together in one professional community: the St. Luke guild. How did texts and images function in the earliest printed religious books produced in this emerging European center of urban creativity? Ina Kok has inventoried the woodcuts used in incunabula in the Low Countries, but the actual function of these images in (relation to) the religious work(s) they were made for – or later reused in – has not yet been analyzed. Studying a small set of printed texts focusing on the life of Christ (notably the Devote ghetiden van den leven Jhesu Christi and Tboeck vanden leven Jhesu Christi, based on Ludolf of Saxony’s Vita Christi), this paper will explore the ways in which pictorial images in early printed devotional books produced in Antwerp function in relation to the texts and the underlying devotional discourse. Although these texts present mainstream devotional material, the popularity of these works indicates the significance of recurring, conventional themes, also for understanding the complex interaction with pictorial images. The paper will reflect on the specific (physical) nature of woodcuts – woodcuts were made in series, frequently reused, reordered and/or combined with woodcuts from another cycle – and its repercussions for methodological approaches to understand their function in connection to religious texts, the votaries’ religious and meditative practices, the underlying devotional discourse, and an age-long iconographic tradition