By CARL HARTMAN

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON: Years before Johann Gutenberg printed his Bible, artists were tossing off little handbills printed with religious pictures, such as an angel looking down on Mary and the infant Jesus as she watches Joseph cooking all in bright color.

The National Gallery of Art is putting 146 items into a massive show, “Origins of European Printmaking,” which opens Sunday. It calls this collection the first major international exhibit of the earliest images printed on paper in the western world. Many, like Gutenberg himself, came from Germany.

For the first time, mass production made it possible for ordinary people in the west to own pictures. Though printing of both text and pictures had been common in China and Japan for centuries, the technology had not made it to the west.

The German scenes aren’t all religious. In a later one, a couple sits in a meadow, fashionably dressed in 1400s style. The young man, a huge plume in his hat, is offering an engagement ring. Surrounding that image are 24 small icons to illustrate what they’ll need in their first home, beginning with a rather narrow bed and going on to dishes, pieces of armour, weapons, a scythe and a pitchfork

“Not a tenth of it is pictured here,” engraver Hanns Paur warned in a little poem above the picture.

Carved woodblocks, the pioneering technique for printing pictures, were also used to improve maps, to inform people about counterfeit coins and to aid memory — as in the image of a hand that served to mark points of religious teaching.

Gutenberg didn’t use woodcuts in his Bible — he preferred more elegant, hand-painted illuminations. Printers who followed used woodcuts in quantity.

The single-leaf woodcut seems to have come early in the 1400s, after the appearance of printed fabrics and, possibly, printed playing cards. People often glued the pictures into books. The great bulk of them that were left as single leaves apparently got so much handling that few copies survive.

In contrast to the simplicity of the woodcut technique, the gallery is also opening an exhibit Sunday of work by Felix-Hilaire Buhot, a French artist who worked more than 400 years later. He is known for his ability to reproduce in prints the subtle weather effects evoked in paintings by Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro.

Buhot (pronounce buh-owe) used many of the techniques developed over the centuries: etching, dry point, roulette, aquatint — often several of them in the same picture. He was also an innovator, using the wide border that printmakers usually leave blank for images he called “symphonic margins.”

“Origins of European Printmaking” will close in Washington on Nov. 2. From Dec. 14 it will be seen at the Germanisches National museum in Nuremberg, Germany, the museum that worked with the National Gallery in organizing the exhibit and in putting together an exhaustive catalog.

The Buhot prints will be on view through Feb. 20. In Washington, admission to both shows is free.

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