Ars Moriendi
In 2025 I received an unusual commission: to make a facsimile of a woodcut from the Ars moriendi, a fifteenth-century book, for the collection of Emmanuel Pan.
What is the Ars moriendi?
Its name means “the art of dying well.” It is a manual to accompany the dying, and one of the most widely circulated of the first books printed from wood. It shows a sick man in bed, besieged by demons who tempt him with doubt, despair, impatience, vainglory and avarice. In each image, angels answer the demons and defend him. The last scene is a peaceful death. It was printed in several languages throughout the fifteenth century, and its images could be understood even when the text was in Latin.
The first challenge was to determine the exact size of the print. As with fifteenth-century block books, there is no single standardized measurement. Impressions vary slightly from one copy to another. After research with no conclusive results, I managed to obtain precise information from a copy held at the Library of Congress in Washington, USA. The measurements were taken by the librarian Marianna Stell, who provided the exact information I needed to build the block.
The prints ranged from 21–22 cm in height and 16–17 cm in width. I understood then that historical fidelity did not mean a single absolute figure, but working within a plausible range. On that basis I defined the scale of the block.
The image was not carved from a single block, but built from eight independent cuts. Eight pieces that, assembled with millimetric precision, rebuild the visual unity of the original print.
The final printing sought a balance between pressure, ink load and the definition of the carved whites. The result is a print with firm contrast and clear structure, consistent with the didactic and severe character of the Ars moriendi.
This project, exhibited in 2026 at the Hören studio (Av. de Mayo 1370, 9th floor, office 242, Buenos Aires), was also for me an exercise in material archaeology, to understand how an image was built in the fifteenth century.
