Art. A user's guide: Interactive and sculptural printmaking in the Renaissance

Art always requires a beholder, but some artworks also need to be handled. Interactive and sculptural prints pervaded the European reading market of the sixteenth century, but remain little known today. These single sheets and book illustrations featured movable flaps and dials, or functioned as separate kits for building three-dimensional scientific instruments. The hybrid nature of these constructions---part text, part image, and part sculpture---engaged readers as much as did their content. By using dials and flaps, or building instruments themselves, viewers learned to read images as interactively as text. Unlike manuscripts copied indiscriminately with or without their movable parts, mass-produced prints could be sold as complete kits. The viewer could decide not to use them, but the choice was theirs. Thus, interactive prints insisted on an actively personal, tactile and auto-didactic viewership. The implications of this interdisciplinary medium expand beyond art history and the history of the book---to the ephemeral tools of early modern propaganda, science and medicine. Interactive and sculptural prints assumed many roles: as surrogates for devotional objects; as dissectable models of anatomies both normal and deformed by religion; as scientific instruments for personal experimentation; as lavish, yet functional book illustrations and artworks for noble and humanistic patrons; and finally as moralizing emblems in Stammbucher. The latter led to the trivialization of the genre and its ultimate use as pop-ups in children's literature.;Four chapters explore these phenomena. Revelatory Playthings establishes the interactive print's origins in the artworks and rituals of the Catholic Church, especially in the restriction of the Eucharist. Anatomy of Reformation compares the technical and political interconnections of the flap anatomy and the Protestant propaganda broadsheet. Instrumentle auff Papier introduces the printed scientific instrument's most prolific inventor, the Nurnberg mathematician and engraver, Georg Hartmann. Consumption and Exploitation explores the production and plagiarism of lavish interactive books and prints for science and divination, with concluding sections on erotic flap engravings of women---and the logical results of such promiscuity, the memento mori. Appendices catalogue early modern interactive prints, books, Georg Hartmann's sculptural print oeuvre, and extant anatomy flap prints.