Who knew? Certainly there were documents from the sixteenth century around the publishing house of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp that mentioned payments to artists who added color to intaglio prints. At the same time in Germany, a quite respectable living was made in the print trade by individuals known as Briefmaler, or print colorists, who were included among the depicted professions in Jost Amman’s Book of Trades (Frankfurt, 1568). Not to mention all those surviving woodcuts from the earlier fifteenth-century, which were almost always religious images of Christ and the saints and were almost inevitably colored, especially with vivid red for blood. Yet as this groundbreaking exhibition richly demonstrates, such colored prints may well have existed in far greater numbers than we thought. Clearly the print aesthetic, encapsulated, as curator and author Susan Dackerman notes, in the famous Erasmus eulogy (1528) for Albrecht Dürer as an Apelles in black and white, shows that our own appreciation of prints already existed in the formative first century of printmaking, so much so that the addition of color was taken to be an unnecessary artifice that could actually spoil the purity of a print’s virtuoso effects. Dackerman goes on to cite the later...