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Abstract
The development of a professionalized, highly centralized printmaking industry in northern Europe during the mid-sixteenth century has been argued to be the inevitable result of prints' efficacy at reproducing images, and thus encouraging mass production. However, it is unclear whether such a centralized structure was truly inevitable, and if it persisted through the seventeenth century. This paper uses network analysis to infer these historical print production networks from two large databases of existing prints in order to characterize whether and how centralization of printmaking networks changed over the course of this period, and how these changes may have influenced individual printmakers.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/dah.2016.2.25337
Author
Matthew Lincoln
is a Data Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, where he focuses on data-driven research into the history of the art market. He earned his PhD in Art History at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016, and has been a recipient of Kress and Getty Foundation grants for their summer institutes in digital art history.