In the exhibition Michelangelo's Dream, currently at the Courtauld Gallery in London, the beauty of print is exemplified by Albrecht Dürer's timeless engraving Melencolia I. The curator was not content to use just any copy of this great print: that selected is one of the finest that exist, and in its microscopically refined use of black ink you can see how majestically artists were able to exploit what was still a new invention in the early-1500s to create beautiful objects.
A book, too, is a beautiful object – and I write with my own just back from the printers. For just as artists were quick to discover the aesthetic possibilities of printing, so were the makers of books. Some might say the advent of the printed book brought a devastating loss of beauty in the culture of the word: for centuries, medieval monasteries had created the spectacular visual treasures that are illuminated books. And yet, the printed book rapidly found its own standards of elegance and authority through the labours of great publishers such as the Aldine Press in Venice and Frobenius in Basel.
Printing was as revolutionary as the internet is now when Dürer created his Melencolia I, and it too had victims. Those medieval scriptoria were doomed, and those who clung to the handwrittern and painted word would be eclipsed. Critics of today's new communications see the aggression of bloggers as a vice of the digital age, but what about the aggression unleashed by the printing press? The resources of new technology that let Dürer create Melencolia I were soon being exploited to create vicious religious prints portraying the Pope as antichrist.
The printing press democratised knowledge, and with democracy came spite, libel, destruction and violence. But it also brought a new beauty into the world, and every book that has ever been published, every sheet of a newspaper blown along the street, is part of that beauty.
