Multiplied wonders: Italian Renaissance woodcuts

The accompanying hardback catalogue to the British Museum exhibition Multiplied wonders: Italian Renaissance woodcuts, opening in October 2026, this richly illustrated publication presents the first significant study of Italian Renaissance woodcuts in the British Museum.

Woodcut was an important and highly inventive medium during the Italian Renaissance. Artists created designs for specialist cutters, who transformed them into relief printing blocks, requiring both technical skill and a remarkable ability to anticipate how a design would translate into print. This publication examines regional differences in the production of woodcuts, highlighting leading schools, designers and cutters, while exploring how and why this flourishing aspect of Italian printmaking declined so rapidly in favour of engraving.

The technical demands of cutting into a wooden block and foreseeing the image that would emerge in relief attracted some of the leading artists of the period. The medium inspired designs of extraordinary ingenuity across a wide range of subjects, including landscapes, mythology, devotional imagery and imagined portraits. Some woodcuts were produced on a spectacular scale, such as Titian’s Submersion of the Pharaoh’s Army in the Red Sea, which measures more than two metres in length.

With a few notable exceptions, woodcuts fell out of favour after the mid-sixteenth century, becoming increasingly associated with the cheaper and more popular end of the print market and consequently neglected by collectors. As a result, many woodcuts in the British Museum’s collection are the sole surviving examples or one of only a handful known today. The publication brings these remarkable works together, including celebrated prints by artists such as Titian and Parmigianino alongside woodcuts that have never previously been exhibited.