Ars Moriendi
Woodblock Facsimile
In 2025 I was commissioned to make a facsimile of a fifteenth-century woodcut from the Ars moriendi for the collection of Emmanuel Pan. The work belongs to his private collection and is currently on display at the Hören studio, located at Av. de Mayo 1370, 9th floor, Office 242, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The first challenge was to determine the exact size of the print. As with fifteenth-century blockbooks, there is no single standardized measurement; impressions vary slightly from one copy to another. After research with inconclusive results, I obtained precise information from a copy held at the Library of Congress in Washington, USA. The measurements were taken by librarian Marianna Stell, who provided the exact data needed to make the block.
The prints ranged between 21–22 cm in height and 16–17 cm in width. I then understood that historical fidelity did not mean an absolute figure, but working within a plausible range. On that basis I defined the scale of the block.
I decided to make the block in palo blanco for its stability, its tight grain and its excellent response to the burin. The image was not carved from a single block but built from eight independent pieces: eight pieces which, joined with millimetric precision, reconstruct the visual unity of the original engraving.
The fragmentation was a technical decision. The format, together with the direction of the grain and the natural tension of the wood, made it safer to modularize the support to guarantee structural stability and uniformity in printing. Each section was planed, squared and calibrated before the drawing was transferred.
The carving process was gradual and methodical: first the structural lines, then the large clearings, and finally the internal modulations. More than copying outlines, I was interested in restoring the logic of the graphic system: the relationship between blacks and whites, the density of the line and the visual rhythm characteristic of fifteenth-century devotional woodcuts.
The proof confirmed that the chosen scale worked. The image had the compactness and presence found in the historical copies. I could not compare it physically with the original, and perhaps that was for the best, but against the available reproductions the correspondence was convincing.
The final printing sought a balance between pressure, ink load and definition of the carved whites. The result was a print of 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: understanding how an image was built in the fifteenth century, accepting variability as part of its nature, and recognizing that fidelity is not mechanical exactness but structural coherence.
