Historical Foundations of Visual Technology Workbook
6 Printing
Florentine artists are noted for the development of several kinds of perspective in the
Renaissance. Artists in Venice, in the north of Italy, were slower to adopt methods of perspective.
When they did they combined them with the use of color as a means of unifying and balancing images.
Giorgione (1478-1510), Titian (1485-1576), and Correggio (1489-1534) all lived and worked in
Florence and used innovative techniques of color and light. During this same period the invention
of movable type by Gutenberg in 1452 made information dissemination possible on an unprecedented
scale. By 1500 over a thousand publishers were active in Europe and the number of printed copies
of books exceeded 20 million. Engraving as a means of creating reproducible visual images was
perfected by Durer as an art form. Radical new thoughts about religion were spread in print when
Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The generation following the Renaissance was
affected by two factors: the difficulty of competing with the works of the Renaissance masters,
and the chilling effect of the Reformation on artistic endeavors in Protestant Europe.
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