WOOD ENGRAVING AND COPPER-PLATE ENGRAVING—THE DIFFERENCE.
Copper-plate engraving, which almost entirely superseded wood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, differs in principle from wood engraving in this—that a woodcut has the lines of the design standing up in relief, the wood between the lines incised or cut away, so that when the surface is inked the lines so charged will give off an impression upon paper by rubbing the back, or by the use of the type press. In the copper-plate the lines are cut _into_ the polished surface of the metal, which, when smeared over with printing ink, and the surface wiped clean, leaves the incised lines filled with ink; an impression is taken by the use of a press specially adapted to the purpose.
It will be seen that _surface printing_ is the necessity and characteristic of wood engraving. Simple and crude in its beginnings, owing chiefly to the imperfect mechanical means of cutting the wood in sufficiently fine or exact lines; it was employed first in the production of playing cards, the outlines of which were formed by impressions from wood blocks, and the colouring filled in by hand or stencil. In Europe the earliest application of the art to pictorial illustration took place in Germany about the close of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. The oldest woodcut with a date known is of 1423. It represents St. Christopher carrying our Saviour on his shoulders across a river. Other specimens, though undated, from their greater rudeness, have been held to have superior claims to antiquity. With the invention of printing the art soon made rapid strides, and on the introduction of moveable types to print in conjunction with engraved blocks, a new impetus was given to the production of engraved wood blocks. In the early part of the sixteenth century, several artists of celebrity were either designers on wood or engravers. Books at this period were profusely illustrated. Among the most distinguished in this line was Albert Dürer, whose productions as a painter and an engraver on copper and wood are so numerous that he could not possibly have engraved a tithe of the wood engravings attributed to him; probably he only put the design on the blocks, leaving them to others to execute.