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 Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank the following people for help with putting
this book together. First and foremost, without the help of Jesse
Heckstall-Smith the book would never have reached the publication
stage. I would also like to thank Joanna Montgomery for editing
down the final document and Dr Peter Walters for checking for
accuracy.
My thanks go to all of the case study artists, and I hope that I
have done them justice: Assa Ashuach, Laura Alvarado and Vivian
Meller, Sebastian Burdon, Mat Collishaw, Dr Lionel Dean, Marianne
Forrest, Sophie Kahn, Jack Row, Michael Schmidt, Jonathan
Monaghan and Don Undeen.
I particularly want to thank those artists from the previous volume,
Tom Lomax, Professor Keith Brown and Jonathan Keep. In addition,
thanks go to Rick Becker for his help and images of his sculpture,
to Rita Donagh for her kind permission to use the Richard Hamilton
images and to Gary Hawley from Denby Pottery for his help and
assistance.
Bloomsbury Visual Arts
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50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway
London New York
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UK USA
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury and the Diana logo are registered trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Stephen Hoskins, 2018
Stephen Hoskins has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this
work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage
or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 2
For kind permission for the use of images, Unfold, Heather and Ivan
Morison, Karin Sander, Peter Terezakis, Masaki Fujihata, Freedom
of Creation, Professor Neri Oxman from MI, Jessica Rosencrantz
from Nervous System, Charles Czurri, Aardman Animations Bristol
and LIAKA from Portland Oregon, Peter Ting, Counter Editions The
Spira Collection, 3DRTP, Envisiontec, Stratasys, 3D Systems, EOS,
Mcor, Renishaw, Viridis, Daniel Collin, Mary Vasseur and Christian
Lavigne, EADS Bristol and Evil Mad Scientists Company and Markus
Keyser. I would also like to thank all of those people I spoke to in
the course of writing this Second Edition.
I would like to thank the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council
for the research funding from which this book is an outcome.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Dr Sandy Hoskins, for her
patience and support.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization
acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this
publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: PB:  978-1-4742-4867-9
ePDF: 978-1-4742-4872-3
ePub:  978-1-4742-4874-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of
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Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa
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To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.
com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of
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9/26/17 3:39 PM
 3D
Printing
for artists, designers
and makers
Stephen Hoskins

Marianne Forrest. 'Silver Sliver' in electroformed silver over resin 3D print.

Bloomsbury Visual Arts

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

9781474248679_txt_app.indb 3 9/26/17 3:39 PM

9781474248679_txt_app.indb 4 9/26/17 3:39 PM
 Contents
6 Preface
8 Introduction

1 2 3
14 The history of 37 An overview of current 58 Crafts and craftspeople
3D printing in relation 3D printing technologies,
to the visual arts what each offers and 64 Case study: Jack Row
how they might develop 68 Case study: Marianne Forrest
in the future 72 Case study: Michael Eden

4 5 6
78 The fine arts 102 Design and designers: 130 Hackspaces, fablabs,
case studies from makerspaces, arts research:
87 Case study: Mat Collishaw contemporary designers the collaborative and more
91 Case study: Sophie Kahn public face of 3D printing
95 Case study: 110 Case study: Assa Ashuach and its future in the arts
Jonathan Monaghan 114 Case study: Laura Alvarado
99 Case study: and Vivian Meller 136 Case study: Don Undeen
Sebastian Burdon 119 Case study: Dr Lionel T. Dean 144 Case study: The Centre
126 Case study: Dr Peter Walters for Digital Design and
Manufacturing (DDM)

7 157 Conclusion
146 Fashion and animation 160 Glossary
165 Index
147 Case study: Michael Schmidt

Sophie Kahn, Période des attitudes passionelles, part of Prodromes series, 3D

printed nylon (from 3D laser scan), aluminum base © Sophie Kahn 2016

9781474248679_txt_app.indb 5 9/26/17 3:39 PM

 3D printing has received a great deal of publicity
Preface recently, much of which tends to skirt over the
practical information of how the process actually
works and ignore the fact that it is actually a number
of 3D processes that contribute to the field of 3D
printing. This preface is for those people who have
little experience of 3D printing and need a clear
description of what the basic processes are and how
they work. It will also define what I understand is
meant by 3D printing.
Before we delve into the history and development
of 3D printing, we need a description of what the
process actually entails. First and foremost all 3D
printing processes are additive by nature – in other
words, you build up an object by adding material. 3D
printing is a relatively recent innovation that allows
physical objects to be fabricated directly from a 3D
virtual model created in computer design software or
by scanning the shape of an existing object. In 3D
printing, objects are fabricated by computer-controlled
machinery, which deposits or solidifies material,
one layer on top of another, in a way that could be
described as analogous to the building of a traditional
coil pot. Objects can be built in a range of materials,
including plastics, ceramics and metals. The layer-by-
layer fabrication process of 3D printing frees the artist,
designer or engineer from many of the constraints of
traditional fabrication methods – hence the process is
sometimes referred to as ‘solid free-form fabrication’.
Visually oriented artists and designers are beginning
to explore the exciting aesthetic possibilities and
implications of 3D printing as a medium for creative
practice, and the purpose of this book is to provide
an introduction to 3D printing from a visual arts
perspective. This book introduces the historical and
technological context of 3D printing and provides
state-of-the-art case studies from creative practice in
the fine and applied arts, crafts and design.
Chapter 1 will begin by introducing the history
of 3D printing, paying particular attention to how
that history relates to a visual arts context. It will
trace a dual path of development, starting with
James Watt and his sculpture copying machines,
through developments in rendering maps in three
dimensions to a 1950s method of copying sculpture
in an analogue manner. The parallel track follows the
development of light sensitive gelatine materials in

6 PREFACE

9781474248679_txt_app.indb 6 9/26/17 3:39 PM


early Victorian photography and printing processes,
through the development of Photosculpture, to the
creation of bas-relief printing and into photo-polymeric
emulsions, which finally lead to the photo-initiated 3D
printing processes. The chapter then describes how
visual artists have interfaced with, and then adopted,
the processes to the benefit of artists, designers and
craftspeople.
Chapter 2 outlines the history of 3D printing
as a process and details the various technical
developments of the machinery involved. It then
details a selection of 3D printing machines currently
available and presents the wide range of different
processes that fall under the umbrella term ‘3D
printing’. Where possible it also details some of the
visual arts practitioners that have used each of the
various processes.
Chapter 3 covers crafts and how they interface
with 3D printing. This chapter details some of the
philosophical approaches to the discipline and how
those approaches interface with methodologies
necessary to develop a practitioner approach to 3D
printing. Three case studies of crafts practitioners
who use 3D printing as an integral part of their work
are presented, including details of how they both deal
with the process technically and how they approach
the process philosophically from a practitioner
perspective.
Chapter 4 describes the relationship between the
fine arts and 3D printing. It also details how artists
have worked with the technology almost since it was
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 7
Tom Lomax, Michael: Angels Series,
2011.
first made commercially available as a process. It
presents four case studies of fine art practitioners
whom I feel are representative of a generation of fine
artists for whom the digital is an integral part of their
practice and not something new.
Chapter 5 explores the implications of 3D
printing for designers and design practitioners. It
describes the field and differentiates the types of
practice between those designers working within
large companies and those who work independently.
The chapter presents four case studies of skilled
designers who each have very different approaches
to 3D printing.
Chapter 6 examines the public perception of 3D
printing through literature and mainstream press
and how this in turn impacts upon the creative
arts. This includes fashion designers and stop
motion animation, both of whom reach large public
audiences. This chapter also details the rise of the
Hackspace and Dorkbot cultures, then describes
how the future might look, illustrated by examples of
current research.
Chapter 7 describes how 3D printing has entered
the mainstream with examples from both the fashion
industry and the animation industry. Both of these
are beginning to use 3D printing as an everyday part
of their production.
The conclusion summarises the future potential of
3D printing for the visual arts and draws a conclusion
upon how artists, designers and craftspeople are
embracing the technology.
Preface 7
9/26/17 3:39 PM
 Introduction

This volume is of interest to a broad range of academics and 3D print

users from across the arts, industry and science disciplines. It is aimed
at artists, designers and people from the creative industries, but it will
also appeal to a more general audience of people who have an interest
in the new developments in technology. I also have to qualify what I mean
by the term ‘makers’; I am not referring to the home computer geeks but
to craftspeople. I do cover a little of the geek maker community, but this
volume is primarily about art and artists.

Between writing the first edition of this book in 2012–
13 and revising it in 2016–17, there has been a media
barrage around 3D printing. The early coverage was
mainly about the cheap do-it-yourself extruded plastic
technology (known as fused deposition modelling, or
FDM). Latterly most of the publicity has been in the
area of bio-medics and prosthetics. The American
technology company Gartner, which produces analysis
of the market through their Hype Curve predictions,
predicts that consumer low-cost 3D printing (FDM)
is now in a five-to-ten-year slough of despondency,
whereas commercial high-cost industrial 3D printing,
particularly in the area of prototyping, is heading into
the plateau of productivity.
Globally many universities, research institutions
and industry are working with and developing 3D
printing as an additive manufacturing process, and
most believe the technology is on the cusp of the
next big breakthrough. The goal has been to move
the technology to the arena of rapid manufacture –
where it is possible to produce a fully working part.
Already it has proven possible to 3D print a fully
working nylon bicycle, gold and silver jewellery and
titanium teeth. The authors’ research team (at the
Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) at University of
West England, Bristol) is leading the field in printing
three-dimensional ceramics, producing cups, plates,
bowls and sculpture using the process.
In a broader context there is a rapidly growing
population of Fab Labs. As of August 2016, there are
683 Fab Labs worldwide, with 119 in the USA and 28
in the UK. Fab Labs are a community spin-off of open
access high technology workshops, originally founded
by MIT, based around 3D printing. Another new
phenomenon are the Tech shops, which are a more
commercial alternative to Fab Labs. Hackspaces are
physical places for the technologically aware where
people can meet to learn, socialize and collaborate

8 introduction

9781474248679_txt_app.indb 8 9/26/17 3:39 PM

 on projects. All of these are rapidly spreading the
concept of this new technology to an ever-growing
audience of users, who are looking to situate this
technology in their everyday lives.
In this book, I aim to demonstrate that 3D printing
is now becoming an integral part of the canon of
arts practice. I have two clear aims. The first is to
introduce to an arts-based audience the potential of
the process now commonly known as 3D printing. The
second is to place the sequence of processes that
make up the discipline into some sort of historical
perspective and timeline in relation to the visual arts.
I intend to demonstrate objectively how these new
processes have been accepted by using a number of
case studies of current practitioners and explaining
how their diverse practices are creating new methods
of working for others to follow.
Keith Brown, ‘Crest’, 2009.
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 9
One could argue that any new process is
beginning to gain capital and acknowledged credibility
in the world when it starts to accumulate a variety
of names. 3D printing is currently in this phase.
Alternative names include: free-form fabrication,
rapid manufacture, additive layer manufacture (ALM),
selective laser sintering (SLS), stereo-lithography
(STL), rapid prototyping (RP) and fused deposition
modelling (FDM).
Often a change in the cultural acceptance of a
new process can be traced to a single event, which
in itself may not have been significant at the time,
but in retrospect serves as an indicator of changing
perceptions. An issue of Wired magazine in 2010 with
a feature article by editor Chris Anderson1 entitled ‘In
the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New
Bits’ highlights this changing perception. When this
Introduction 9
9/26/17 3:39 PM
 article was published I began to understand that a
fundamentally different approach to manufacturing
was beginning to take place.
Perhaps the most perceptive comment within
the article is the following: ‘Here’s the history of
two decades in one sentence. If the past ten years
have been about discovering post-institutional
models on the web, then the next ten years will be
about applying them to the real world.’ Anderson
was probably talking more about the influence of
social media, how society approached problems
collectively, and how this collaborative approach
would operate beyond the web. However, the article
went on to highlight a number of new ways of working
inspired by 3D printing, such as a crowd-sourced car
and the phenomena of Fab Labs and Tech Shops.
It is that real-world application of digital technology
that has evolved from that past excitement over 3D
printing. The prospect of designing a virtual object on
10 introduction
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 10
your Mac or PC and then just pressing a button to
print it out in real materials was very appealing and
futuristic. The reality has been, in fact, very far from
this – at least in the years 2010 through 2016. Even
now, at the time of writing, the only processes within
the field of additive layer manufacture that even
approach the reality/quality of a finished article in
real materials are laser-sintered titanium, steel and
nylon. In the field of the visual arts, two research
projects define new directions in real materials: The
collaboration between Cookson’s and Birmingham
UCE Jewellery Innovation Centre to print gold and
precious metals and the work of my own research
team at the University of the West of England, Bristol,
in 3D-printed ceramics. All of these processes still
require a great deal of cleaning and finishing after
printing; you cannot just take them as finished items
straight from the printer. I can quite safely say at this
point that currently no process offers what the user
requires, and I say that as a fan and advocate of 3D
printing!
There is no doubt that these processes, in the
long term, do have the ability to create a disruptive
technology, as articulated by Chris Anderson. 3D
printing’s disruptive path may well happen in a similar
way to the introduction of web-based communication,
which superseded the traditional newspaper printing
industry. This takes time; the revolution in printing
and communication took nearly 30 years from the
initial introduction of computer typesetting. This
is exemplified by the Wapping dispute with the
Murdoch press in the early 1980s. Here the catalyst
for change was the advent of desktop publishing
software, such as Aldus PageMaker for the Apple
Macintosh, developed in the late 1980s. The print
unions struggled with management over job cuts
because the journalists could now type their copy
directly into a computer and the printed page could
be made up on screen, without the need for trained
typesetters. There was no longer a requirement
for the legions of typesetters, platemakers and
reprographics departments.
Sophie Kahn, Head of a Young Woman.
9/26/17 3:39 PM
 A more recent catalyst was the spread of the
home PC and the widespread adoption of the Internet
in the 1990s. This has led us to the smartphone
and apps in the last few years, which have enabled
consumers to not only read a newspaper and but also
get the news in different forms on their smartphones
and tablets instantly, without any physical object
ever having existed and with no waste product to
throw away after reading. Collectively, all of these
developments, which grew from the development of
one digital technology, have resulted in the steady
decline of the traditional newspaper industry.
If we assume that 3D printing, as a disruptive
technology, is following the same path, then I
believe we are not even yet in the ‘Wapping’ phase.
I came to 3D printing relatively late, around 2005,
when commercial machines had been on the
market for almost two decades. At that time no
major industry had yet adopted 3D printing as a
primary manufacturing technology. However, there
were examples where the technology was gradually
beginning to be used. Today in aerospace 3D printing
technology is used to produce titanium parts that
have convoluted gas flow paths through the part,
with no casting or joining seams. 3D printing these
parts has the further benefit of increasing space and
cooling capacity. In Formula 1, 3D printing is used
for parts tailored specifically to the individual car and
driver, as most of these parts are one off or, at most,
manufactured in double figures. The dental industry
also increasingly employs 3D printing technology
for the manufacture of replacement teeth, because
these are individually tailored but printed en masse
in one build of the 3D print machine.
Finally 3D printing is beginning to be used in
planning medical surgery, such as orthopaedic
surgery. For example, CAT scans can be turned into
3D-printed replicas of fractures enabling surgeons
to work out how an operation might be undertaken
– and particularly in veterinary surgery, where the
medical governance restrictions are less stringent.
None of these applications are geared up for large-
scale manufacture, but this may come in the next
few years.
The rise of the cheap home printer, such as the
RepRap, MakerBot, Cubify or Lulzbot machines,
was fascinating in its influence on the future of 3D
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 11
printing and its general acceptance as a technology.
This phenomena certainly did much to promote
the cause of 3D printing, but it also added to the
unrealistic hype, perhaps exemplified by the fuss
about the ‘3D-printed gun’2 and popular books such
as the novel Makers by Cory Doctrow (see Chapter
6), where the chief characters print everything from
fairground rides to electronic parts using a 3D printer
and ‘goop’ (theoretically an epoxy-based material!)
All of this publicity was not a bad thing – any publicity
is good publicity.
The rise of the affordable 3D printer has had both
positive and negative effects on the marketplace.
The two largest companies in the field, 3D Systems
and Stratasys, both bought up low-cost FDM
manufacturers and, along with 57 other companies,
produced a flood of low cost machines, ranging from
US$500 to US$2,500. Both the major players have
now ceased production of their low-cost printers,
as the market collapsed because the average
purchaser lacked sufficient knowledge to run the
machine consistently. Those machines that survive
in this area are now very reliable (see Chapter 2). The
positive side was all of the publicity surrounding 3D
printing and the fact that the proliferation of cheap
printers has created a high quality low-end market,
partially fuelled by the end of the protection of many
original patents (see Chapter 2).
It is always difficult to predict the future, but in my
mind 3D printing is and will develop in a number of
different ways. The ‘high end’ of the 3D print industry
that primarily involves the metal fabrication of parts
will remain high end and will be used mainly by the big
industrial manufacturers to make specialist parts on
high-tech machinery that will continue to cost many
hundreds of thousands of pounds. These machines
will become more and more specialised and will only
be capable of manufacturing very high quality parts
within a very narrow spectrum. The same will apply
for machines that will be geared to bio-medics.
I think that the middle ground will be occupied
by bureau services such as Shapeways™ and
iMaterialise™ (see Chapter 2). You can use these
services to order a part you need online, in the same
way that you might order something from Amazon,
and it will be printed, finished and then dispatched
to you. Bureau services marry the ability to mass
Introduction 11
9/26/17 3:39 PM
 customise a bespoke printed object with economies
of scale, thus reducing the need for warehousing,
transport and stocking – truly creating just-in-
time solutions. I see this as the largest potential
growth area; many products in this sector will be
manufactured and dispatched without the customer
even knowing they are 3D printed. To return to our 2D
digital printing analogy, this method of manufacture
will be ‘print on demand’ much the same as current
online book production websites, such as Lulu or
Blurb, or Amazon’s out of print books service, where
the copy is printed and bound only when the order is
received and then dispatched direct to the customer.
So even though the book is produced on a high-
volume large-scale machine, it is a tiny segment of a
continuous printing process.
The ‘low cost end’ of the 3D printing market
has changed so rapidly that it is hard to make
any predictions. In the first edition of this book, I
stated that I thought there would be a 3D print toy
market, and yet a year ago I would have said that
the potential toy market was too complicated. In the
last few months, however, Mattel has just launched
its Thingmaker, and I can find seven other printers
that are aimed at children. Across the wider cheap
spectrum, many patents ceased to be enforceable in
2013 and 2014, so there have been a number of new
digital light projection (DLP) and stereo lithography
machines that have made big changes to the market
(see Chapter 2).
I have reservations that these machines will
fulfil a long-term manufacturing role apart from
niche areas such as printable foodstuffs, or low-end
prototyping and model making. In fact it is already
possible to print using chocolate and icing sugar
from a pressure-fed head on cheap Fused Deposition
Modelling (FDM) machines.
But where then does this technology fit within a
creative arts context? Its influence is slowly gaining
ground. Early adopters such as Assa Ashuach in the
design field or Keith Brown within the visual arts
field are slowly being joined by many more visual
arts practitioners as the learning curve for entry gets
easier and more affordable. 3D printing will become
more mainstream as artists and creatives adopt
these processes. At this point in time the majority
12 introduction
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 12
of users are primarily concerned with the technology
rather than the specific objects that 3D printing tools
can create. While artists are seldom the leaders in a
new technology, established artists tend to push the
boundaries of new technology into new interesting
areas. It is at this stage that the technology becomes
more mainstream and functional, rather than simply
creating artefacts that are primarily products of the
technology.
I firmly believe that this technology has the
potential to be a catalyst for breaking the arts and
science divide, as first articulated by C. P. Snow in
the 1950s.3 Snow explained that historically the two
disciplines were not separated but by the 1950s the
arts and science had become two completely different
philosophical approaches. Most of the recent
interventions of the arts with industry have been
attempts to create an artificial marriage between the
two. Conversely, the underlying philosophy of this
book is to directly link arts and industry, an approach
employed by the author at the CFPR that has caught
the attention of government and national research
councils.4 This research provides a case study of
how this new technology will influence industry in the
future, create wealth and capital for the UK economy,
and is also an exemplar of the possible interface
between the arts and industry.
Finally, to return to the visual arts, the potential
of 3D printing is its function as a new tool. The
technology in itself will not make art; it is inanimate and
subservient to the user, although this subservience is
not always obvious in the objects that one makes with
the process. However, I am sure there will be a new
breed of artists who will run with the technology in ways
that are different to anything of which I can conceive.
In writing this book I have encountered work that
has surprised and delighted me for its combination
of innovation and elegance, using the technology in
ways that transcend the actual process. In particular,
for me, Karin Sanders, Stephanie Lempert, Marianne
Forrest, Neri Oxman, Jack Row, Michael Eden,
Jonathan Monaghan, Lionel Dean, Sophie Kahn, Laura
Alvarado and Vivian Meller have all created works that
I would want to own and live with – and not because
they are 3D printed but because they in themselves
are inherently beautiful works of art.
9/26/17 3:39 PM
 I also believe that there is a surprising democracy
to 3D printing. Traditionally most observers of
technology would assume that a digital interface
activity requiring knowledge of both software and
engineering could only be the domain of the young
male. However, the fact that seven of the eleven
practitioners of 3D printing I have cited above are
female illustrates that, in the creative sphere at
least, the users interfacing with the technology
are not necessarily following the expected norms
associated with digital technologies.
The case studies
For this book I interviewed seven new leading
practitioners in their respective disciplines. I have
divided these into four primary categories: designers,
fine artists, craftspeople and ‘other disciplines’.
As a practitioner I firmly believe in interdisciplinary
work and do not like the traditional artistic labels;
however, it would have been difficult to divide the
chapters in any other way. I deliberately chose
practitioners with an established history of practice
in 3D printing. In this edition two things have become
clear. First, practitioners have become much more
difficult to pigeonhole; for example, I spent much
time agonising where to put the goldsmith Jack
Row and the designer/craftspeople/jewellers Vivian
Meller and Laura Alvarado. Second, nearly all of
the new case studies are far more acquainted with
the technology and what they expect to get from
it. I tried to ask all practitioners the same set of
questions, starting with how they would describe
themselves and their personal practice. Whilst the
intention was to draw consistent information, each
individual’s priorities were different. Therefore,
I have transcribed the interviews in an informal
manner in order to show how each individual has
a personal approach to 3D printing. This also
demonstrates how the creative practitioners tailor
the process of 3D printing to their own requirements
and how they use the technology in a manner that
is not necessarily prescribed by the manufacturer.

1 Anderson, C. (2010), ‘The Next
Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the New
Bits’, Wired, 18 (2): 58.
2 Greenberg, A. (2013, May 5),
‘Meet The “Liberator”: Test-Firing
the World’s First Fully 3D-Printed
Gun’, Forbes. Available online:
https://www.forbes.com/sites
/andygreenberg/2013/05/05/meet-the
-liberator-test-firing-the-worlds-first-fully-3d
-printed-gun/#1252430b52d7
3 Snow, C. P. (1959), Two Cultures
and the Scientific Revolution University
of Cambridge Rede Lecture, London: The
Syndicate of the Cambridge University
Press.
4 AHRC, Centre for Business Research
(2011), ‘Hidden Connections Knowledge
Exchange between the Arts and
Humanities and the Private, Public and
Third Sectors’, Swindon: AHRC, pp 13,
16, 38.

Introduction 13

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 1
The history of 3D printing in relation to
the visual arts
This chapter outlines the history of 3D printing technology, its rise as
an industrial prototyping process developed for engineers and industrial
designers and its parallel history as a medium for visual artists.
I have focused on the physical outputs of the
technology mainly because there are many other
excellent texts that deal very particularly with the
rise of screen-based digital technology and its
relationship with the visual arts. A Computer in the
Art Room1 is one of the best examples. I propose to
take that set of virtual technological developments as
read, including most of the software developments,
and concentrate on the three-dimensional physical
output generated by 3D printing hardware. It is
specifically those developments in physical output
that can be generated from a digital file that will
be covered here. Therefore, by necessity, I will try
to give a comprehensive view of the history of the
technological hardware developments and their
contribution to the development of 3D printing. I will
then illustrate that history with examples of arts-
based practice in order to create a timeline to show
how artists have interfaced with the technology and
how this runs in parallel to the industry.
In common with many commercial processes
adopted by artists and subsumed into the canon of
artistic practice, the origins of 3D printing can be
14 Chapter 1
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 14
ascribed to many historic contexts and starting points.
3D printing in particular is a young enough technology
to have several traceable development patterns.
However, it does not yet have a clearly defined history
beyond that of a straightforward engineering technical
development much like that of a mobile phone.
The recent history of 3D printing, quite rightly in my
view, begins post-1976, but relevant developments
in technologies were actually made from the 1850s
onwards.2 It is those earlier technologies that I will
speculate upon here before documenting 3D printing’s
history as it relates to the visual arts.
An historical perspective of the visual arts’
interaction with 3D printing is needed because
the vast majority of the 3D printing industry is
only just becoming aware that there could be an
arts perspective to the technology. This is entirely
separate to the fact that artists themselves are
very keen to adopt the technology. Clearly, as we
document each process, we have no proof that each
subsequent invention was directly informed by the
previous work. However, once a process is in the
public domain, then developments occur both from
9/26/17 3:39 PM
 1
2 process of extruding clay to build a 3D-printed pot.
1 Unfold Labs, ‘Stratigraphic
Porcelain’, 2011. This is from
the Belgian company, Unfold,
which first extruded clay from
an FDM-type printer, and is
part of a bigger project about a
distributed production system
called ‘Stratigraphic Manufactury’.
© Unfold.
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 15
2 Jonathan Keep, ‘Noise
Morphology 5’, 2012. High-fired,
glazed stoneware clay, printed on
RapMan 3D printer. © Jonathan
Keep.
what is generally available and from the sparks of
pure innovation. In order to create a visual history, to
delve into 3D printing’s earliest origins, we can liken
its earliest history to the development of the coil pot
in Neolithic culture. The coil pot, unlike almost any
other making or craft process, is a directly additive
process. In plain terms, one builds the pot by adding
clay one coil at a time until one has built a complete
object. This hand-built process has direct parallels
to the fused deposition modelling (FDM) method of
building a 3D object with a coil of heated plastic wire
and can be said to be in complete harmony with the
The clay extrusion process was first developed
as a 3D process by Unfold Labs in Belgium3 and
additionally taken up by Jonathan Keep4 and also
Peter Walters et al.5 The heated FDM head and
plastic are replaced with a syringe filled with clay
or slip. Since writing this in 2013, the variety of
materials that can be extruded by the FDM process
has expanded exponentially. Now it is possible to
extrude materials as diverse as soft plastics, wood,
recycled milk bottles and an infinite variety of clays.
Until the advent of 3D printing, most three-
dimensional manufacturing processes were
subtractive – in other words, based on carving or
machining the object from a larger block of material.
The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 15
9/26/17 3:40 PM
 Whilst I am aware this is a fairly subjective statement
(as casting processes are additive), invariably, in
order to create a mould or make a die, a positive
pattern (or electrode used in spark erosion) has first
to be created, usually by subtractive means. In the
case of spark erosion, where the metal is eroded by
an electric current, creating a spark to eat away the
material, a positive block first has to be milled in
graphite or copper in order to create an electrode.
This relates directly to engineering practice;
therefore, in artistic terms, it may be easier to talk
about the traditional fine art processes of carving
and modelling. Carving is the subtractive process,
such as in carving a block of wood or marble,
and modelling is the additive process, such as in
modelling a head from clay for bronze casting, where
one slowly adds clay to model the form.
In 2001 Joseph Beaman, from the University of
Texas in Austin,6 traced the dual chronology of 3D
printing technology from the mid-nineteenth century
up to the 1970s via two approaches: topographic
and photosculpture. He defined these processes
3
16 Chapter 1
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 16
as: Topography plots a surface in a linear manner
and then reproduces that surface from a linear form.
Photosculpture uses the camera and lens to capture
a surface, and then analogue photomechanical
processes are used to reproduce it. Beaman uses
this technological divergence to define the growth of
3D printing through two primary approaches. The first
approach is the powder deposition and layered-object
manufacture methods of 3D printing, such as the Z
Corp process (now called 3D Systems), which are
akin to the topographic approach. The photosculpture
approach addresses all of the methods that use a
photopolymeric liquid hardened by light, such as the
Objet 3D Printing method.
Beaman’s photosculpture track begins in 1863
with the Willème photosculpture patent, and his
topography track begins in 1890 with a patent from
Blanther, who, in Beaman’s words, ‘suggested a
layered method for making a mould for topographic
relief maps. The method consisted of impressing
topographical contour lines onto a series of wax
plates and cutting these wax plates on the lines.’
3 American, ‘Ulysses S. Grant’, c. 1870.
Ivory painted plaster cast statue of Ulysses S.
Grant in military uniform, seated on a cloth-
draped chair smoking a cigar, the wood grain
painted base with the initials ‘U.S.G.’ and
‘Photosculpture’ on the front; the back with
‘Pat. Aug. 27, 1867’. 53 cm high. The subject
is seated in the centre of a room surrounded
by twenty-four cameras. From the twenty-four
profiles, a pantograph is used to construct a
clay model from which a mould is made to cast
the statuettes. A similar patent was granted
F. Willème on 9 August 1846.
9/26/17 3:40 PM
 4 ‘James Watt’s studio’,
preserved and recreated for
visitors at the Science Museum,
London. Photo © Science &
Society Picture Library, Science
Museum Group Enterprises Ltd.

5 Benjamin Cheverton’s sculpture

copying machine, patented in
1884, is on display at the Science
Museum in London. © Science &
Society Picture Library, Science
Museum Group Enterprises Ltd.

Whilst I agree with the rationale for these tracks,

there is much overlap between the two. I would start
the topographic track much earlier, at the turn of
the nineteenth century, beginning with the sculpture
copying machines of the inventor of the steam
engine, James Watt, who from his retirement in 1800
to his death in 1819 developed a series of machines
for copying sculpture, which he never patented.
The extant machine can still be seen in his
workshop, which is preserved in the Science Museum
in London.7 In my opinion, these machines are
definitely the forerunner of the topographic machine
described by Beaman. The sculpture copying machine
was improved upon by Benjamin Cheverton,8 who
in 1884 patented a sculpture copying machine for
reducing sculpture, much like a three-dimensional
pantagraph. A copy of Cheverton’s machine may also
be seen at the Science Museum.
Cheverton’s machine was fitted with a rotating
cutting bit, which was used to carve reduced versions
of well-known sculptures. Cheverton demonstrated
his reducing machine at the great exhibition in 1851,
winning a gold medal for his copy of ‘Theseus’ from the
Elgin Marble collection in the British Museum. Many
copies of Cheverton’s sculptures still exist today and
a large collection of over 200 busts can be viewed at 5

The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 17

9781474248679_txt_app.indb 17 9/26/17 3:40 PM

 6 7
6 Benjamin Cheverton’s copy of ‘Theseus’ from the Elgin Marble
collection at the British Museum, 1851. Parian sculptured bust of
Benjamin Cheverton. In the early nineteenth century, the middle classes
liked to display busts of famous figures in literature and music as well as
copies of famous antique sculptures. A new material, Parian ware, was
introduced in the 1840s by the firm of Copeland and Garrett and closely
followed by Minton. This unglazed, fine-grained porcelain had a slight
sheen and soon replaced plaster of Paris. James Watt (1736–1819) had
the Art Gallery of Ontario. Concurrent with Cheverton
was the French engineer and designer Achille Collas,9
who also produced a method of reproducing sculpture
using a pantagraph. I would argue that these
machines were the forerunners of today’s computer
numeric control (CNC) milling machines, which in turn
were the forerunners of 3D printing.
The other track, as postulated by Beaman,
relates directly to photography and its descendent,
photosculpture. This in some ways makes it easier to
draw a parallel in artistic terms, as it is possible to trace
developments of 3D sculptural creation in relation
to photography back to the early nineteenth century.
Walters and Thirkell10 argue that the origins of 3D
printing are based within photographic scanning and
recreation processes, such as the aforementioned
process of photosculpture, developed in France in the
1860s by François Willème11 and the ‘Photographic
Process for the Reproduction of Plastic Objects’, for
18 Chapter 1
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 18
developed a machine to produce scaled-down copies of original works.
Cheverton perfected the machine for commercial use in 1836. © Science
& Society Picture Library, Science Museum Group Enterprises Ltd.
7 Achille Collas, bas-relief engraving of Doctor Robert Southey, made
c. 1838 using a pantagraph. © Centre for Research Collections,
Edinburgh University Library.
which Carlo Baese filed a United States patent in
1904.12
Willème situated his subjects in the centre of a
circular room and photographed them using twenty-
four cameras placed around the circumference of
the room. From these photographs silhouettes were
created and then the outline of each photograph was
projected onto a screen. The outlines of the projections
were then used by an artisan who, with the aid of a
pantagraph that had a knife or carving tool attached,
carved the bust from a cylindrical block of plaster, or
clay, thus using each of the 24 photographs to create
the form. The resulting sculpture was then smoothed
out by eye, before casting in plaster to make a
mould. Willème’s process had a well documented
commercial life and his large Paris studio was in
operation from 1863 to 1868.13
Willème in fact had two types of approach to
his process, documented in Sobieszek’s article
9/26/17 3:40 PM
 about photosculpture in France.14 There was an
earlier process, which Sobieszek calls ‘mechanical
sculpture’. Fifty photographs were taken in a
circumference at points equidistant from the sitter.
The photos were then developed and individually
outlined on wood and cut in half. Each wooden
profile half section was cut to an individual wedge.
Finally, all 100 wedges were assembled as a circular
bust. This is one of the earliest demonstrations of
slicing an object in exactly the same way as most
current 3D printing processes. An extant example of
this process may be found in the Eastman Kodak
Museum in Rochester, New York State.
In the United Sates, Carlo Baese proposed to
alleviate some of the carving undertaken in the Willème
process by using the properties of Bichromated
Gelatine in his development, which were well known
from the work of Fox Talbot and Walter Woodbury.
He proposed to use layers of swelled gelatine, laid
one on top of the other, to create the relief as he
photographed around the head. It is not clear if
Baese actually managed to use or commercialise
8 9
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 19
his process. However, from a twenty-first century
perspective, as well as my own experience of working
with bichromated gelatine processes, it does not
seem likely this was a workable process (beyond
the theoretical). The technical challenges of handling
many layers of gelatine – and the added difficulty
of previous layers shrinking and hardening as you
apply new layers – seem too problematic and time
consuming. It is, however, a very forward-looking
concept, and as Baese patented the process he must
have achieved some level of practical success, thus
securing its place as a forerunner to a new technology.
My view is that the Willème method relates more to
a topographic approach, whereas the Baese method
uses a light-sensitive gelatine and can therefore be
defined as a photographic approach. Gelatine is in
itself a bio-polymer, a precursor to the polymers now
used in 3D printing. If we look back to the early Victorian
history of photography, we can see the development
of a light-sensitive material from Mungo Ponton, who
discovered the properties of using a chrome-based
hardener material in 1839. ‘Ponton found that paper
8 Carlo
Baese’s patent
diagram for the
‘Photographic
Process for the
Reproduction of
Plastic Objects’.
US Patent
774,549 (1904).
Reproduced in
Artifact, Vol 1,
Issue 4, 2007.
9 Willème’s
patent
diagram for
‘Photographing
Sculpture’. US
Patent 43,822
(1864).
The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 19
9/26/17 3:40 PM
 dipped in potassium bichromate was coloured brown
by the rays of the sun, but that unexposed bichromate
would dissolve out of the paper in water.’15
It is possible to create a clearer logical chronology
if we put Ponton’s work in context with the photorelief
process invented by Walter Woodbury (1865) and follow
those developments through to the photoceramic
relief tiles of George Cartlidge (from the early 1900s).
There is little doubt that these processes are the birth
of the photopolymeric relief processes, which are an
integral part of contemporary 3D printing.
Ponton had discovered the light-sensitive properties
of chrome salts, and this discovery was built upon by
William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1847, Talbot filed a patent
for combining gelatine with potassium bichromate.16
These two factors were to form the basis for all
photomechanical printing processes for the next
century and would consequently lead to the birth of
modern photopolymeric 3D printing.
These developments become even more relevant
to the future of 3D printing when, in 1865, Walter
Woodbury17 created a continuous tone photographic
10
relief process that transcribed a black and white
photograph into a tonal relief surface. Woodbury
created a slab of gelatine approximately one inch thick
(25mm) to which was added a 3.5 per cent solution
of potassium bichromate, making the gelatine light-
sensitive. When exposed to a photographic negative,
the gelatine hardens in direct proportion to the light
it has received. Once washed with water, the gelatine
forms a tonal relief ‘bump map topography’ in three
dimensions, with the white areas standing proud
and the dark areas forming the valleys. Woodbury
then made a lead matrix from the gelatine and could
create continuous tone prints in hot liquid translucent
gelatine ink from the matrix. When cool, the tonal
range of the prints was entirely dependent on the

10 Woodbury image from ‘Men

of Mark’ 1877. Photographs by
Lock and Whitfield © CFPR Archive
Bristol.

11 Woodbury image from ‘Men

of Mark’, 1877. Photographs by
Lock and Whitfield © CFPR Archive
Bristol.
11

20 Chapter 1

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 12

12 John Thompson, ‘Italian Street 13 Walter Ford’s patent diagram

Musicians: Street Life in London’,
1877–8. Woodburytype. Given
by Mrs D. Crisp © V&A Images,
Victoria and Albert Museum.
for the photoceramic process
using bichromated gelatine. US
patent 2,147,770 (21 February
1939; filed 17 June 1956).
13

depth of gelatine (i.e., the thicker the gelatine, the
darker that section of the print). Even though this
was only in low relief, what is important here is that
this was the first time ever that a photograph was
transcribed directly, without an analogue transcription
process, to a three-dimensional surface.
The results were spectacular and are perhaps
best represented in John Thompson’s Street Life
of London (1877)18, which are also some of the
earliest examples of social documentary photography.
However, the process was problematic. It not only
required a highly skilled workforce to make the matrices
and print the images, but also because the hot liquid
gelatine squirted out from the sides of the matrix
as the pressure increased during printing, the prints
had to be cut down and pasted into the published
books by hand. This effectively killed the process for
commercially viable mass production despite its
obvious high quality results.
Now let’s leap forward sixty years to the 1930s
and the industrial ceramicist Walter Ford of the Ford
Ceramic Arts Company in Ohio. Ford successfully built
upon Woodbury’s gelatine process to create low relief
ceramic moulds. Instead of creating a lead matrix,
he used the light-sensitive gelatine slab to create a
plaster mould. From this mould he cast ceramic relief
tiles that, once ‘biscuit’ fired and had a translucent
glaze applied, created the photographic tonal relief.
Where the glaze pooled it became thicker in the low
areas and created the dark tones. The high areas,
then, had a very thin glaze, and the combination of
the two produced photographic highlights. Ford was
granted a patent for the process in 1936.19 Ford
had created a physical relief photographic image
in a permanent material that did not require the
intervention of a craftsman to realise the image.20
This process was a direct descendent of the
photoceramic relief tiles created by George Cartlidge
between the 1880s and the late 1910s. The tonal
range was again dictated by the height of the relief;
the white areas were high and the black areas were
low. Once translucent glaze was applied, the tiles
exhibited a photographic quality, with rich black and
a subtle tonal range through to white, dictated by

The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 21

9781474248679_txt_app.indb 21 9/26/17 3:41 PM

 14
the relief height of the tile. Created primarily for the
company Sherwin and Cotton, it is generally believed
that these tiles were photographic precursors of the
Ford Tiles.21 From my own discussions with Cartlidge’s
nephew and research I undertook between 2003 and
2006, I believe the tiles were actually sculpted in
wax from photographic negatives, in the same way
the photolithophanes were created in Limoges in
France during the same period.22
The reason I discuss Ford before Cartlidge is that
Ford is the direct descendent of Woodbury – in terms
of photomechanical process. Although the Cartlidge
tiles have all of the attributes and appearance of a
true photomechanical process, they were in fact
completely autographic. There is no doubt that these
tiles were the primary influence for Ford and his
subsequent photoceramic work. The development of
these processes laid the groundwork for a directly
transcribable photographic process that can be
realized into a three-dimensional photorealistic object.
To return to the topographic track, in the 1950s
the London-based sculptor George Macdonald Reid
22 Chapter 1
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 22
15
developed an extension of the Willème technique
by using army surplus map-making machinery to
produce a series of portrait busts. The process
used a combination of work by hand, photography
and an adapted lathe. In particular, Reid’s technique
mapped a surface contour, in much the same way as
Willème, to produce the 3D model.
To capture the data, the subject was placed on
a revolving chair and up to 300 profile photographs
were taken. These were then transcribed to an
outline profile, which was then milled into a plaster
block. The full process can be viewed in two Pathè
News films, one from 1957 entitled Robot Sculpture,
which features the creation of a portrait head of the
Danish actress Lillemore Knudsen,23 and another
entitled Instant Sculpture (1963), which features the
racing driver Graham Hill.24 Macdonald Reid made
many adaptations to the process in the six years
between the recording of the two films.
In 1956 Otto Munz filed a patent that predates
most 3D printing technologies by thirty years,25 but
Beaman argues this patent clearly represents the link
9/26/17 3:41 PM
 between photography and the current technologies.
In his patent, Munz postulates an idea he calls
‘Photo-glyph recording’ in which:
A layer of a photo-emulsion of the silver halide type
in a transparent medium suspension, of exposing said
layer at a predetermined focus with said radiation, of
developing and fixing said photo-emulsion, of covering
the said fixed layer of photo-emulsion with another
layer of unexposed photo-emulsion and of bringing
16
17
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 23
said unexposed layer of said photo-emulsion into
said predetermined focus with said radiation and of
repeating said cycle, the number of repetitions being
controlled by the third magnitude recorded.
In simple terms, Munz proposed to create a 3D
object by exposing layer upon layer of photographic
emulsion, which is hardened by light one layer
at a time! Thus he spanned the divide between
processes such as Woodburytype and Baese and
14 George Cartlidge, ‘Sophia’, 1904. The
image of a New Zealand Maori woman on a
photoceramic tile. © The Potteries Museum
& Art Gallery, Stoke on Trent.
15 Lead casts of the original Cartlidge
moulds sculpted in wax by George Cartlidge.
© Archive Tony Johnson.
16 George Macdonald Reid creating a bust
of the Danish actress Lillemore Knudson.
1957. Still from Instant Sculpture. © Pathè.
17 George Macdonald Reid creating a bust
of the racing driver Graham Hill in 1963. Still
from Instant Sculpture. © Pathè.
18 Otto Munz patent diagrams for ‘Photo-
glyph recording’. US Patent 2,775,758
(25 December 1956).
18
The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 23
9/26/17 3:41 PM
 the current additive technologies for 3D printing,
which use a photographic image for exposure with a
photopolymeric resin that cures by exposure to light
(e.g., Objet and EnvisionTEC™; see Chapter 2).
It is in the 1960s that photopolymer emulsions
began to be used extensively in the printing industry
– in particular, for the flexographic process.26
Originally known as ‘aniline printing’, the process
was renamed ‘flexography’ in 1952. It is now one
of the most commonly used printing processes.
Print that is on packaging is printed by flexography,
covering everything from your milk bottle and cereal
packet to the box your fridge arrives in. These are
direct descendents of the light-sensitive gelatine
processes such as Woodburytype and photogravure.
These emulsions now come in many forms but can
create a multitude of printing plates, which can vary
in size, from a plate an inch thick to a thin coated
roller. Depending upon their composition, they can
be hardened to produce printing plates from very soft
to extremely rigid. It is this photo-polymeric emulsion
chemistry that has formed much of the basis of the
3D printing industry, where photo-polymeric plastics
can now be hardened by light to create physical
objects.
19
24 Chapter 1
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 24
However, the development and history of any
process or set of processes is never linear. It is
therefore perfectly valid to trace a number of other
histories or timelines that relate to the processes
of 3D printing. Most developments occur both in
isolation and in tandem with peer developments in the
field. For example, the developments in photopolymer
light-sensitive emulsions and photography are both
relevant to the field of 3D printing, but we also need
to consider other developments in engineering,
specifically CNC milling and CAD (Computer Aided
Design) technologies.
If one follows the documented development
of the 3D printing process from an engineering
standpoint, 3D printing is also a direct descendent
of CNC milling. The process involves transcribing
numeric data into a file that will then subtractively
cut away a solid block to create an object. CNC was
first developed during the 1940s, and the numeric
control part (which came first) is attributed to an
American engineering machinist and salesman
John T. Parsons. The process continued to develop
throughout the 1950s and 1960s.27 With the price of
computers and CNC machinery dropping rapidly in the
1970s, CNC soon became the bedrock of industrial
9/26/17 3:41 PM

20
manufacturing processes. CAD was a natural
progression because, as in many other arenas where
computer design tools were introduced, it allowed a
separation between the draughtsman or designer and
the machine. The ubiquity in industry of three-, four-
and five-axis milling machinery is hard to describe
to a non-specialist. Perhaps the best entry point is
knowing that when you buy almost any part or piece
of machinery – whether metal or plastic – if it has not
itself been milled by a CNC machine then the tool or
mould that made that part or piece will have been
milled by a CNC machine.
Milling is a subtractive process. In essence,
it is the process of drilling out an object from a
solid block of material. Historically, this would have
involved using a lathe to which a block of wood or
metal is clamped in a horizontal ‘chuck’. The block
is then spun and a chisel or cutting tool is applied to
the spinning block to cut away parts of the block. A
simple example of a product that results from milling
is the traditional round chair leg, which is created
from a rectangular block of wood.
The next technological development in milling
was the milling machine, where the block is mounted
in a chuck that is horizontal or vertical. Crucially, in
this milling machine it is the tool and not the block
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 25
19 Richard Hamilton,
‘Depth of Cut’, from the
series of work ‘Five Tyres
Remoulded’. This is the
final cast. 3D relief cast
in silicone. © Richard
Hamilton Studio 1976.
20 Richard Hamilton,
‘Circumferential
Sections’, from the
series of work ‘Five Tyres
Remoulded’, 1972.
Screenprint on polyester
film. © Richard Hamilton
Studio 1976.
that spins – in this case, a drill or router is used as
the spinning tool to cut away parts of the block.
The key development in milling technology was
the ability to move the drill or router forwards and
backwards horizontally as well as vertically. With
the advent of the personal computer in the early
1970s, the cutting paths of the tool no longer
needed to be controlled by the operator, but could
now be controlled by a computer program; hence, the
introduction of CNC.
For many years artists have actively used CNC
milling in their work. Its influence spreads widely
through laser cutting, routing (for this book I shall
define a router as a machine that mills in two or
three dimensions with a very small Z-axis) and, of
course, 3D printing.
With the introduction of CAD packages in
the 1980s, it became difficult to separate arts
practitioners that used CNC as part of their artistic
production methods from those arts practitioners
that used the early forms of 3D printing. As both
processes can often share the same digital file, the
two processes overlap and artists tended to use both
in the early days of 3D printing. Many still do.
In my opinion one of the first extant examples
of a physical digitally printed artwork of any note
The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 25
9/26/17 3:41 PM
 occurred in 1976, with Richard Hamilton’s piece
‘Five Tyres Remoulded’. Hamilton had trained as
an engineering draughtsman and this grounding
manifested itself frequently throughout his art
career, from the aluminium joints he created for
his stretcher frames through to ‘Five Tyres’ and his
love of digital technologies. Hamilton was an early
adopter of Quantel Paintbox™ and ‘Harry’™ (both
computer generated image design systems). In my
discussions with Hamilton between 2003 and 2010,
he explained how he had originally created ‘Five Tyres
Abandoned’ in the early 1960s as a collotype print,
but had been frustrated that the engineering drawing
was taking him so long to create. He abandoned
the project after printing the single collotype print in
1966.28 In 1976 he discovered that it was possible
to create a computer-generated CNC file to route a
brass plate, which would form a mould for a silicone
elastomer material. The resulting two-and-a-half–
dimension print became part of a boxed set of seven
prints, which formed the ‘Five Tyres Remoulded’ set.
The route he took to find a programmer seems a
little unclear, but in 2007 he stated that he had been
26 Chapter 1
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 26
helped by MIT to create the CNC files. However, the
AHRC website states:29
The project had been revived when an American dealer
offered to find a US computer programmer interested in
plotting the perspective with a computer. Sherrill Martin
at Kaye Instruments organised the computer formulation
of the perspective, using a general FORTRAN™ program
called CAPER™ (Computer aided perspective). The
screen prints were printed by Frank Kircherer in Stuttgart
and the collotypes by E. Schrieber next-door.
It is the creation of the 3D brass plate, and the
subsequent moulding in silicone elastomer of the tyre
print, that I argue was the first functional 3D artwork
of note. Hamilton produced an edition of seventy-
five boxed sets of the seven prints and a further
individual edition of seventy-five, which just included
the silicone print. Importantly, in both editions of this
print the process was completely subservient to the
image. The computer and CNC milling route created
the result he was aiming for, one that previously he
had been unable to achieve by any other means.
21 Richard
Hamilton, ‘Treads
(Area)’, from the
series of work ‘Five
Tyres Remoulded’,
1972. Screenprint
on polyester film.
© Richard Hamilton
Studio 1976.
9/26/17 3:41 PM
 22 Charles Csuri, ‘Ridges Over Time’, 1968. CNC milled wooden sculpture. © Charles Csuri.
There is no doubt that concurrent to this other
artists were beginning to use CNC technologies to
create artworks from digital files. The earliest among
them was Charles Csuri from the Department of Art,
Ohio State University, who in 1968 created the works
‘Ridges Over Time’ and ‘Sculpture Graphic’. As an artist
he had a consistent record of early digital work exhibited
via Siggraph, the special interest group for graphics
and interactive work. The Siggraph conference, which
is attended by thousands of computer professionals,
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 27
has long been the benchmark of innovation in visual
digital arts. Csuri said of Siggraph’s dedication to him:
‘This work made use of the Bessel function to generate
the surface. The computer program then generated
a punched tape to represent the coordinate data.
Included were instructions to a 3-axis, continuous
path, numerically controlled milling machine (CNC).’
To quote further from Csuri: ‘While the device was
capable of making a smooth surface, I decided it was
best to leave the tools marks for the paths.'30
The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 27
9/26/17 3:41 PM
 23 Antony Gormley, ‘CORE’. 2008. Cast iron, 191 x 96 x 95 cm. Installation view, Galerie Xavier Hufkens,
Brussels, Belgium. Photograph by Allard Bovenberg, Amsterdam. © The artist, courtesy White Cube.
Perhaps one of the best recent examples of
art practice using CNC milling is Antony Gormley’s
‘Core’, made by Metropolitan Works, a fabrication
and digital technology workshop that is part of
London Metropolitan University.
De Zeen magazine described the making of
‘Core’:31
Antony Gormley made use of digital manufacturing
for the first time to cut the master for his figurative
sculpture. Previously made by hand, the process would
often take up to three weeks. Using digital technology
was both faster and resulted in a more accurate
model. His stunning iron sculpture was CNC (Computer
Numerically Controlled) routed from modelling foam,
before being cast in iron and finished by hand. The
28 Chapter 1
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 28
figure is suspended from a beam adjacent to the CNC
machine used to create it, within the Centre’s imposing
machine hall. “The idea was to see if the volume of the
body could be re-described as a bubble matrix: a tight
packing of polyhedral cells that transform anatomy into
geometry,” says Gormley.
Whilst over the years many artists had begun to
use CNC technology for generating imagery, very little
of this actually related to 3D printing. It was not until
the advent of the first machine – the 3D Systems™
Stereolithography SLA 1™ in 198632 – that artists
could actually turn a 3D file into a 3D additive
printed object. Artists began to use the technology
within three years of its introduction. Whilst the
1980s was the era of industrial development of 3D
9/26/17 3:42 PM
 24 Neri Oxman, ‘Leviathan 1’, from the ‘Armor Imaginary Beings’ series, 2012. Digital Materials Fabrication: Objet, Ltd. Neri Oxman, Architect and
Designer, MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with Prof. W. Carter (MIT) and Joe Hicklin (The Mathworks) Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Photo by Yoram
Reshef, © Neri Oxman.
printing technologies, the 1990s are definitely the
birth of the relationships between artists and rapid
prototyping. However, most of these artists were
bound into the academic research culture of large
universities, where they had the resources and ability
to access the new and expensive research tools that
were being developed. This was and is still a new and
developing technology.
It is only very recently that well-known artists
and designers, such as Iris Van Herpen33 and Neri
Oxman,34 are beginning to incorporate 3D-printed
items into their practice and to consider them to
be integral for material results. In 2012 Oxman,
Director of the Mediated Matter Research Group and
Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at
the MIT Media Lab, exhibited a commissioned show
9781474248679_txt_app.indb 29
at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. ‘Imaginary Beings:
Mythologies of the Not Yet’, consisted of eighteen
new pieces that pushed the boundaries of 3D printing
technologies and required advanced R&D from Objet
(who 3D printed all the pieces in their Connex™
material and sponsored the exhibition). Iris Van
Herpen, a Dutch fashion designer known for stunning
3D-printed garments, started her own label in 2007.
After studying at Artez Institute of the Arts, Arnhem,
and interning for Alexander McQueen in London and
Claudy Jongstra in Amsterdam, Van Herpen created
her second catwalk show containing garments entirely
3D printed. ‘Hybrid Holism’ was presented at the July
2012 Paris Haute Couture Week. A 3D-printed dress
was made in collaboration with the Architect Julia
Koerner for show, and this was printed by the 3D
The history of 3D printing in relation to the visual arts 29
9/26/17 3:42 PM
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
needed, and that something was the art of writing, which is that
extension of the uses of language, without which no serviceable
amount of knowledge could have been attained, or retained. Without
this little could have been done. With it everything became possible.
The further we advance by its aid, the longer, and the broader, and
the more glorious are the vistas that open before us. Now, of this we
are certain, that the ancient Egyptians discovered this art. The idea
of the possibility of speaking words to the mind through the eye, and
rendering thought fixed, and permanent, and portable, and
transmissible from generation to generation, of committing it, not to
the air, but to stone, or, still better, to paper, first occurred to the
Egyptians. And they were the first to give effect to the idea, which
they did in their hieroglyphic form of writing, out of which afterwards
grew the hieratic and demotic forms.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this discovery. It
contained in its single self the possibility of the whole of science, art,
law, religion, history, beyond their merest rudiments, which were all
that would have been attainable without it. It contained all this as
completely as the acorn contains the oak. Where, and what would
any and every one of them now be were it not for that discovery?
Indeed, what does it not contain? There are now 31,000,000 souls
within the United Kingdom, had it not been for that discovery
probably there would not have been 3,000,000. Neither the readers
nor the writer of this book would have existed. None of the existing
population of Europe would have seen the light. Other combinations
would have taken place. Europe would be sparsely tenanted by
tribes of rude barbarians—only a little less rude in its favoured
southern clime. The New World would be still unknown. On the day
some Egyptian priest, perhaps at This, thought out a scheme for
representing words and sounds by signs, Christianity, the British
Constitution, and the steam-engine became possible. With respect to
so great, so all-important a discovery, one on which the destinies of
the human race so entirely depended, every particular of its history
must be deeply interesting. Of one particular, however, at all events,
we are certain: we know where it had its birth. And this is what has
made so many in all times desire to visit Egypt. It was that they
wished to see the land of those who had conferred this much-
containing gift upon mankind—not all of them seeing this distinctly,
yet having a kind of intuition that the wisdom of the Egyptians was a
mighty wisdom to which civilization, through this discovery, owed
itself.
We know, too, another particular, and that is, that this discovery
was first used for sacred and religious purposes; and it must have
been invented for the purposes for which it was first used. We can
imagine what prompted the thought that issued in the discovery. We
can trace out what it was that set the discovering mind at work. It
must have been some idea in Egypt that was more active, and so
more productive than ideas that were stirring in men’s minds
elsewhere. It must have been some need in Egypt that spurred men
on more than the needs felt elsewhere. And this idea could only have
been that of the future life; and this need that which arose out of this
idea, the need of recording the laws it prompted, and the ritual which
grew out of it; and of aiding, embellishing, and advancing in their
general laws, their religious observances, their arts, and what
afterwards became their science and their history, the whole life of
the people which was struggling to rise into higher conditions, more
worthy of their great idea.
But we must give some account of what the Egyptian doctrine of
the future life actually was. Fortunately, in the Book of the Dead, we
have for its historical reconstruction the identical materials the old
Egyptians had for its construction in their own moral being. This
Book of the Dead was one of their Sacred Scriptures. Its contents
are very various and comprehensive, and are quite sufficient to give
us a distinct idea of what we are in want of here. It is divided into 165
sections. Its object is to supply the man, now in the mummy stage of
existence, with all the instructions he will require in his passage to,
and into, the future world. It contains the primæval hymns that were
to be sung, and the prayers that were to be offered, as the mummy
was lowered into the pit of the catacomb or grave; and the
invocations that were to be used over the mummy, the various
amulets appended to it, and the bandages in which it was swathed.
These bandages had great mystical importance. Some of them have
been unrolled to the length of 1,000 yards; and we are told that there
is no form of bandage known to modern surgery of which instances
may not be found on the mummies.
What has now been mentioned forms, as it were, the introductory
part of the book. The rest is devoted to what is to be done by the
mummy himself on his passage to, and entrance into, the unseen
world. It taught him what he was to say and do during the days of
trying words, and on the occasion of the great and terrible final
judgment. An image of the rendering of this awful account had
already been presented to the eyes of the surviving friends and
neighbours at the funeral. It was a scene in which the mummy had
often taken part himself in the days of his own earthly trial. The
corpse, on its way to the grave, had to pass the sacred lake of the
nome, or department. When it had reached the shore there was a
pause in the progress of the procession, and forty-two judges, or
jurymen, stood forward to hear any accusations that any one was at
liberty to advance against the deceased. If any accusation could be
substantiated to the satisfaction of the judges, whether the deceased
were the Pharaoh who had sat on the throne, or a poor peasant or
artizan, the terrible sentence, to an Egyptian beyond measure
terrible, was passed upon him, that his mummy was to be excluded
from burial. The awful consequence of this was 3,000 years of
wandering in darkness, and in animal forms.
But, supposing that the mummy had passed this earthly ordeal, he
was then committed to his earthly resting-place; and this Book of the
Dead, either the whole, or what was deemed the most essential part
of it, was placed on, or in the mummy case: sometimes it was
inscribed on the sarcophagus. These were the instructions which
were to guide him on the long, dread, difficult course upon which he
was about to enter. He will have to appear in the hall of two-fold
Divine Justice—the justice, that is, which rewards as well as
punishes. Osiris, the judge of the dead, will look on, as president of
the court. He will wear the emblem of truth, and the tablet breast-
plate, containing the figure of Divine Justice. The scales of Divine
Justice will be produced. The heart of the mummy will be placed in
one scale, and the figure of Divine Justice in the other. The mummy
will stand by the scale in which his heart is being weighed. Anubis,
the Guardian of the Dead, will watch the opposite scale. Thoth, who
had been the revealer to man of the divine words, of which the
Sacred Books of Egypt were transcripts, will be present to record the
sentence.
The book contains, for the use of the mummy, the forty-two denials
of sin he will have to make in the presence of this awful court, while
his heart is in the balance, and the forty-two avenging demons, all
ape-faced, symbolizing man in the extremity of degradation, with
reason perverted and without conscience, and each with the pitiless
knife in his raised hand, will be standing by, ready to claim him, or
some part of him, if the balance indicates that the denial is false.
These forty-two denials have reference to the ordinary duties of
human life, such as all civilized people have understood them;
though, of course, as might have been expected, the forms of some
of these duties are Egyptian, as, for instance, that of using the
waters of the irrigation fairly, and without prejudice to the rights of
others: an application to the circumstances of Egypt, of the
universally received ideas of fairness and justice, which the working
of human society must, everywhere, give birth to. The denials also
include, as again we might be sure they would, the mummy’s
observance of Egyptian ceremonial law.
There is still a great deal more in the book. The mummy will have
to achieve many difficult passages before he can attain the
empyrean gate, through which those who have been found true in
the balance, for that is the meaning of the Egyptian word for the
justified, are at last admitted to the realms of pure and everlasting
light. This gate is the gate of the Sun, and this light is the presence
of the Sun-god. There will be many adversaries that will be lying-in-
wait for him, seeking to fasten charges of one kind or another upon
him, and to destroy him. The book tells him how he is to comport
himself, and what he is to do, as each of these occasions arise.
There are certain halls, for instance, through which he will have to
pass. These halls he will find inhabited by demons, but they are a
necessary part of the great journey. And the entrance to them he will
find barred and guarded by demon door-keepers. Here mystical
names and words must be used, which alone will enable the mummy
to get by these demon door-keepers, and through these demon-
inhabited halls. These names and words of power he will find in the
book. We here have traces of the thought of primitive times, when
men regarded with wonder, deepening into awe, the supposed
mysterious efficacy of articulate sound.
One demon, in particular, will endeavour to secure the mummy’s
head. In a hellish place he must cross, a net will be spread to
entangle him. He will have to journey through regions of thick
darkness, and to confront the fury of the Great Dragon. He will have
to go through places where he may incur pollution; through others
where he may become subject to corruption. He will have to submit
to a fiery ordeal. He will have to work out a course of carefully and
toilsomely conducted husbandry, the harvest of which will be
knowledge. He will have to obtain the air that is untainted, the water
that is of heaven, and the bread of Ra and Seb. The book will give
him all the needful instructions on these, and on all other matters
where he will require guidance.
Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress enables us to understand this Book of
the Dead. The aim of both is the same. Each presents a picture of
the hindrances and difficulties, both from within and from without,
and of the requirements and aids of the soul, in its struggle to attain
to the higher life. The Egyptian doctrine places the scene in the
passage from this life to the next. The Elstow tinker places it,
allegorically, in this life. But this is a difference that is immaterial. The
ideas of both are fundamentally the same. The consciousness to
which they both appeal is the same. The old Egyptian of 5,000 or
6,000 years ago received the teaching of his book on precisely the
same grounds as we ourselves at this day receive the teaching of
the Pilgrim. With how much additional authority does this discovery
invest these ideas! The mind must be more or less than human that
arrays itself against what has, so overwhelmingly, approved itself
semper, ubique, et omnibus.
The antiquity of the book is very great. Portions of it are found on
the mummy cases of the eleventh dynasty. This shows that it was in
use 4,000 years ago. But this was very far from having been the date
of its first use; for even then it had become so old as to be
unintelligible to royal scribes; and we find that, in consequence, it
was at that remote time the custom to give together with the sacred
text its interpretation.
All collections of Egyptian antiquities contain copies of this book,
or of portions of it. Several are to be seen in our British Museum. Of
course this abundance of copies results from the nature of the book,
and the use to which it was put. It was literally the viaticum, the
itinerary, the guide and hand-book, the route and instructions, for the
mummy to and through that world, from which no traveller returns.
Each of its sections is accompanied by a rubric, and generally
illustrated by a vignette, directing, and showing the mummy, how the
section is to be used.
I know nothing more instructive and more touching in human
history than one of these old Egyptian Books of the Dead, with its
doctrine, its invocations, its hymns, its prayers, its instructions, its
rubrics, its illustrations. All its images are of the earth earthy. How
could it be otherwise? The soul that has kept all the commandments,
that has been tried in the balance and not found wanting, that has
fought the good fight to final triumph through all the dangers, and
temptations, and pollutions, that beset its path, reaches at last only a
purer ether and eternal light.
It is easy to endeavour to dismiss all this with cold indifference, or
with a cheap sneer. But those who placed this book by the side of a
departed relative had hearts that were still turned towards those they
could never any more behold in the flesh. All their care and thought
were not for themselves. And, too, they believed in right and truth, in
justice and goodness. And because they believed in them, they
believed also in a world and in a life of which those principles would
be the law.
 CHAPTER XXV.
WHY THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES IGNORE THE
FUTURE LIFE.

Veritas filia temporis.—Bacon.

It is impossible to become familiar with the monumental, and other,

evidences of the position, which the idea of a future life held in the
religious system, and in the minds and lives of the Egyptians, without
finding one’s self again and again occupied with the inquiry—Why
the Mosaic Dispensation rejected it?[5] To pass over a matter of this
kind is to reject it. If a code makes no reference whatever to the idea
of inheritance, but provides for the appropriation and distribution of
the property of deceased persons in such a manner that the idea of
inheritance does not at all enter into the arrangement, as, for
instance, appropriating it all to the State, or distributing it all among
the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, it is clear that the author of the
code rejected the ordinary, and natural ideas of inheritance. In this
way the Mosaic Dispensation rejects the idea of a future life, an idea
which was the backbone of organized thought in Egypt, and among
all Aryan people. It does not reject it in the sense of saying that it is
false, but in the sense of omitting it as unsuitable for the purposes it
has in view. It adjourns the consideration of it to another day, and to
other conjunctures of circumstances.
But this is only a part of the wonder. Solomon, one of whose wives
was an Egyptian princess, and who possessed so inquiring a mind
that it is absolutely impossible he could have been unacquainted
with the idea, nowhere in what has survived of his ethical,
philosophical, religious, poetical, or practical writings, thinks it worth
even a passing reference. On the contrary, like his father David, he
emphatically speaks of death as the end. The former had asked
whether God shows His wonders among the dead? Or whether the
dead shall rise up again and praise Him? Shall His loving kindness
be showed in the grave, or His righteousness in the land where all
things are forgotten? The wisdom of the latter promised length of
these subsolar days only.
Our surprise, already great, is carried to a still higher point on
discovering that, for the six centuries which followed the time of
Solomon, the Hebrew prophets, men of the profoundest moral
insight, and whose very business it was to put before their
countrymen’s minds every motive which could have power to induce
them to eschew evil, and to do good, pass over in their teaching, just
as Moses, David, and Solomon had done before them, this
paramountly influential, and to us morally vital idea.
If one had been called upon to give an à priori opinion on the
subject, it would have seemed, I think, utterly impossible that such
an omission could have been made at the beginning, considering the
nature of the work that had to be done; or, if for some exceptional,
but decisive, reason it had been made at first, that it could have been
maintained throughout. We must remember that the word throughout
here applies to the whole course of a national literature, embracing
history, legislation, philosophy, poetry, morals, and, above all, religion
through a range of a thousand years. The idea was all that time all
about the people, and those who contributed to their literature, in
Persia, in Egypt, and in Asia Minor. In Europe every tribe of
barbarians, and of semi-barbarians, and every civilized people,
possessed it. It was the source of their respective religions. It made
them all what they were. But in this all-embracing, vigorous, and
long-sustained literature of the Hebrews it has no place. It might, for
some special reason, have been excluded at one epoch, but why
through all? It might, for some special reason, have been ill-adapted
to some departments of Hebrew thought, but why to all? And the
manner is as singular as the fact of the rejection. It is simply passed
over in silence. No reference is made to it. It is not discussed. It is
not denounced. It is not ridiculed. It is not insisted on: that is all.
Here, then, is an historical problem than which few can be more
curious and interesting. We may not yet be in a position to answer it
completely, but it is evident that the first step towards doing this is to
set down all the reasons that appear to us possible, and to weigh
each with reference to the mind, and the circumstances, of the times.
We may not be able to divine all the reasons, or, indeed, the right
one, but still this is the course that must be pursued.
The right answer will depend to a considerable extent on dates,
that is to say, on the preceding and contemporary history; on
ethnological facts; and on a right appreciation of the mental condition
of the people. We shall have to ascertain the date of the Exodus;
who the Hebrews were, or, to be more precise, who the Israelites
were; and what were the popular beliefs, and forms of thought, that
bore on the question before us. With respect, then, to the date of the
Exodus, we shall, if we confine ourselves to the Hebrew accounts,
find the inquiry beset with great difficulties. It is evident, from their
character, that those accounts were intended primarily for religious,
and not for historical, purposes. Had history been their object, we
should have had some Egyptian names; the absence of which,
however, from the records, alone throws some light on their purpose.
The name, for instance, of the Pharaoh under whom the Exodus
took place is not given, nor the name of the Pharaoh, whose minister
Joseph was, nor that of the Pharaoh, who reigned when Abraham
came down into Egypt, nor, indeed, of one of the kings, who reigned
during the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. Nothing is told us of the
internal condition of the country, with the single exception of the
success of Joseph’s plan for enabling Pharaoh, in a time of famine,
to become the actual proprietor of the whole of the land of Egypt,
save what was held by the priests; nor is anything told us of its
external history, notwithstanding that that was its most eventful and
important period: for Egypt happened, just at that particular time, to
be—having recently culminated in the very zenith of its power—the
wonder, the terror, and the glory of the Eastern world. It was the
period, which had seen the conclusion of the long struggle between
the Egyptians and their Semitic invaders; a struggle in which the
latter, having at first been victorious, had overthrown the native
dynasty, got complete possession of the country, and ruled it for
some centuries, but had in the end been expelled. This struggle,
which had terminated when the connexion of the Israelites with
Egypt commenced, was followed by a period of unexampled
greatness and prosperity. To it belong the reigns of Sethos, whose
minister Joseph was, and of Rameses II., the son of Sethos, and the
oppressor of the children of Israel. These two greatest of Egyptian
conquerors, both of them, overran Syria, and the neighbouring
countries: the latter carrying his devastations even as far as Persia
and Asia Minor. They had permanently occupied positions on the
Euphrates; and were keeping open their communications with them
through the sea-side plains to the west, and through the countries to
the north, of the district the Israelites conquered, and took
possession of. Sethos had been a great builder, but Rameses was
the greatest builder the world has ever seen. All the chief structures
at Karnak, Thebes, Abydos, and in a multitude of other places in the
Delta, as well as in Upper Egypt, and even in Nubia, were his work.
What he had done in this way was so far in advance of all that had
ever been done before, that it must have been the talk of all that part
of the world. Of all these great names and great events, no mention
whatever is made in the Hebrew Scriptures, although, during the
sojourn, Egypt was actually the scene of the sacred history. The
omission is very similar to that which is the subject of this chapter,
and almost as difficult to explain. If, then, we were confined to the
Jewish accounts, it would be impossible for us to assign to the date
of the Exodus its place in the history of Egypt. There is, however,
one name occurring incidentally in the account of the oppression,
which, in conjunction with monumental evidence, enables us to fix
precisely this indispensable date—so precisely as that we are sure
that it took place in the reign of Menephthah, or Menophres, the son
of the great Rameses, and the grandson of Sethos. I shall reserve
the demonstration of this till I have occasion to mention the Canal of
Rameses.
I said that the date of the Exodus has an important bearing on the
inquiry of why the doctrine of a future life was excluded from the
Mosaic Dispensation: it has this importance, because it enables us
to know what had been going on in that part of the world for some
time immediately preceding the promulgation of that Dispensation.
Knowing the date, we know that reciprocal barbarities, such as this
age can fortunately form but a feeble conception of, had for centuries
been the order of the day between the Egyptians and the Semites.
At last the Egyptians had got completely the upper hand, and had
driven out the main body of the Semites from their country, had
devastated in a most sweeping, and ruthless manner neighbouring
countries, and most frequently and most completely those parts of
Syria which soon afterwards fell into the hands of the Israelites. If we
can form but a feeble conception of the barbarities of those times,
we can perhaps form only a still less adequate conception of that
which prompted them—the gluttonous hatred that animated these
two races towards each other. No amount of blood, no form of
cruelty on any scale, could satiate it. There is nothing in the
practices, the history, the religion, of the modern world which
enables us to understand their feelings. We see much evidence of
them on the Egyptian monuments, and some indications of them in
the Hebrew Scriptures; and these, of course, must be translated, not
in accordance with our ideas, but with the ideas of those times.
Every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. The Hebrews
took the opposite view, and regarded the first tiller of the ground as
the first murderer. The Hebrews might not eat with the Egyptians, for
that was an abomination to them.
It is the date, which enables us, in some measure, to understand
the feelings that underlie these statements.
The next question is, who were the Israelites? We are now
regarding the question singly from the historical point of view, just as
we should the question of who were the Lydians, the Etruscans, the
Dorians, or any other people of antiquity? There is no question but
that they were substantially a Semitic people, mainly of the same
race, and of the same dispositions and capacities as the other
branches of the Semitic stock, as for instance, the Phœnicians, and
the Moabites of the old, and the Arabs of the modern world. It is
clear, however, and this is a point of some importance, that they
were not of unmixed Semitic blood. Abraham came from Ur of the
Chaldees, and was therefore a Chaldean, whatever that appellative
stood for at that time. The Hebrew Scriptures describe him as a
Syrian. He can, therefore hardly be regarded as of pure Semitic
descent. Furthermore, when the people left Egypt they must have
had in their veins a large infusion of Egyptian, that is old Aryan
blood, somewhat mixed with Ethiopian. This must have been the
case, because during their sojourn in Egypt there had been no
disinclination among them to intermarry with Egyptians. Joseph had
had for his wife a high-caste Egyptian woman, Amenath, the
daughter of Potipherah, priest of On; and the wife of Moses is called
a Cushite, or Ethiopian woman. Besides this, we are told that when
the people—their blood being already mixed in this way with that of
the semi-Aryan Egyptians—went up out of Egypt, there went out with
them a mixed multitude, which can only mean Egyptians, who cast in
their lot with them, or a remnant of the Hyksos, who had stayed
behind at the time of the expulsion of the main body, or the
descendants of the Asiatic captives of Sethos and Rameses, and
their predecessors. I need not go to the Egyptian accounts. The
above facts will be sufficient for our present purpose. They enable us
historically to understand the people. They were of mixed descent, of
very composite blood. The preponderant element was Semitic, but
that had been enriched by large additions of better blood; still,
however, not to such an extent as to efface, or even to any decisive
degree alter the Semitic characteristics. The mental capacity and
vigour, the apprehensiveness and receptiveness of the people, had
been increased, but still they were in the main Semitic; in language,
in sentiment, in cast and direction of thought.
At that particular juncture, then, in the history of that part of the
world to which our attention has just been recalled, Moses had to
deal with the material we are examining. Still limiting our inquiry to
historical objects, historically investigated, what he had to do at that
time was to make these mixed and unpromising materials into a
people—a work that was from first to last entirely a moral one: as
hard a task as was ever undertaken, the very idea of which has no
place in the minds of us moderns. He was thoroughly aware of the
difficulty of his task. Had it ever been heard before, and, after some
thousands of years, we may add, has it ever been heard since, of a
nation taken out of another nation, and, according even to the
Hebrew accounts, the object of which is not historical, taken chiefly
from the servile class of another nation, and yet welded into a true
people, with the strongest, the most enduring, and the most
distinctive characteristics? What material was ever more unlikely?
And yet was ever success more complete? A scion, not a vigorous
and healthy offset, but a bruised sprout, was so planted, and
surrounded with such influences, as that it took good root, grew
vigorously, sent forth strong and spreading branches, and bore, and
even still bears, its own peculiar fruit. Nowhere in Europe in these
days, except it may be to some extent in northern Germany, is any
attempt made to fashion in this way the mind, and sentiments, and
instincts of a people, which, and not the amount of population, or of
wealth, is what truly constitutes a people.
Why, then, did Moses, in this great attempt, omit entirely the one
thought we consider the most potent of all? His object was to make a
people. It was not primarily to reveal a religion. We come to this
conclusion from an observation of the facts, from an analysis of the
Dispensation, and from taking into account the principle, that religion
is for man, and not man for religion. But a nation, especially such a
nation as he contemplated, is made only by moral and intellectual
means. The revelation, therefore, of a religion was not at all an
accident, or in any sense something which might be, according to
circumstances, included in, or excluded from, his plan. It was a
necessity—a necessary part of the one means for the one object.
These materials could not have been made into a people without a
code, nor could there have then been a code without a religion. The
question, then, before him was not simply—as is generally supposed
—to promulgate a religion, but to make the mass of living integers
before him into a nation by a code, sanctioned by a religion. The
religious part of the question, therefore, was limited to the
consideration of what form of religion would best effect this?
One indispensable requisite was that it must be a religion that
would never take them back in thought and heart to Egypt. With
Egypt he must break utterly and for ever. This was a most difficult
task. The thoughts of the people went back to the flesh-pots of
Egypt. They remembered the fish, and the leeks, the onions, the
cucumbers, and the melons they had eaten in Egypt; but, more than
all this, they remembered the palpable and intelligible religion, the
magnificent and touching ceremonies and processions, the awe-
inspiring temples—all that had satisfied at once the eye, the heart,
and the thought, while they had sojourned in, and served the gods
of, Egypt. They even recurred to the worship of the bull Mnevis, the
divinity of Heliopolis—Joseph’s On—at the very foot of Sinai.
Everything, therefore, that could recall Egypt and its religion,
everything that might present a point of contact between the
thoughts, the worship, the lives of the new people and of their old
masters, was to be studiously avoided. The dividing lines must
everywhere be deep and sharp—there must be no bridges from one
to the other. So it must be. But the doctrine of the future life was the
very kernel—the heart itself—of the religion of Egypt. There was,
therefore, no choice; this must be utterly abandoned and excluded:
to admit it would be to admit Osiris, the judge of the souls deceased
this world, his assessors, and his array of avengers, and the whole
apparatus of the lower world. As to Heaven, too, or the place of the
blessed, the Egyptians had already appropriated the sun, which, in
that material age, must have appeared as the best—indeed, the only
suitable—locus in quo. That was already peopled with Egyptians;
and it could, therefore, be no heaven for the Hebrews—for Semites.
Or, if they were, in the end, to inhabit the same heaven, sympathy for
the Egyptians, and for their ideas, would be kept alive; and, if so,
then the design of forming a peculiar people, separate and distinct
from all other people, must be abandoned. It would be impossible to
carry it out.
This view of the reason for the omission of the great doctrine has
in it, I think, some truth, though it is far from being the whole truth.
Moses may have seen clearly that it would have been impossible to
carry out his paramount object if this doctrine was allowed a place in
his system; but this view falls short of what is required. It does not
account for the whole of the fact. It does not account, for instance,
for the doctrine not having been admitted into the system in after
times—and no explanation can be complete, or satisfactory, which
does not include that. We know, also, that Moses did not reject
absolutely everything that was Egyptian. He retained, for instance,
circumcision, and the Egyptian division of the lunar month into four
weeks of seven days each, etc.
 Another conceivable supposition is that, if the doctrine of a future
life had been admitted, it was foreseen that the priestly caste,
instead of remaining the ministers and servants of the congregation,
would have become its masters, as in Egypt; and that the law would
then have been wrested into an instrument for giving them undue
power and domination. It would have given them the lever for moving
this world at their pleasure, and for their own behoof; and so its
primary object, which was a moral and political one, would have
become only secondary to the maintenance of a dominant privileged
class. This supposition, when applied to those early times, is not, as
the history of Egypt shows, altogether an anachronism; and it is
evident that dangers of this kind were foreseen, and, to some extent,
provided against. We see an indication of this in the intentional
absence, during the earlier periods of the history of the nation, of
monarchical institutions, which, in those times, were, externally and
politically, almost necessary, and, consequently, almost universal in
the outside world. We trace, also, this thought in the comment made
on their adoption, when it had become impossible any longer to
dispense with them. And, again, in the fact that the Prophets, who
were the authorized expositors and maintainers of the law, were not
Priests. But of this supposition, also, we must say that it does not
explain the whole of the phenomenon—for there were periods when,
notwithstanding the amount of truth and force contained in the
reason it suggests, the great doctrine might have been, but was not,
introduced.
Or was it, and this I propose as a third conjecture, that the
Hebrews were too unimaginative a people to realize in thought the
conception of a future life? And, therefore, was this one instance,
amongst others, of the progressiveness of the Revelation, which had
spoken in one mode to the fathers, and which spoke afterwards—of
course, within certain intelligible limitations—in a diverse manner to
their descendants? This progressiveness every one is aware of; but I
do not think that the Hebrew was quite so unimaginative as the
supposition implies. The Semitic race is imaginative in its way. It is,
and was, a gross race; which, of course, implies grossness of
imagination; but we can hardly suppose that the Hebrew of old would
have been less capable of imagining a future Paradise than the
modern Arab; though, we may be sure, it would have assumed, like
his, very much of an earthly character; and that earthly character
would not have been of the highest and most refined kind. Feasting,
for instance, would have been an ingredient in the future bliss of a
healthy and hungry people, who, in this world, had very little to eat.
And here it would be interesting to ascertain what, on this subject,
was the belief of the Phœnicians, Canaanites, Moabites, and ancient
Arabians. It is to the point, also, to remember that the Hebrew
system had a Paradise. It was, however, one which came at the
beginning, and not at the end, of all things. It was, also, an earthly
Paradise. In this I see implied contradictions to the Egyptian doctrine
on this subject. And I believe that there are other similarly implied
contradictions without direct references; and that there are such
points of allusive protest, and of intended contrast, is of importance.
For instance, I am disposed to think that the comment on the Ten
Commandments—‘these words ... and no more’ is an implied
contradiction of the Divine authority of the Forty-two
Commandments, with reference to which the Egyptian believed that
he should be tried at the Day of Judgment; an article of Egyptian
faith, with which Moses, and the people who were listening to him,
must have been quite familiar; and which could hardly, at that
moment, have been absent from their minds. But as to the
supposition before us, I think, to whatever extent we may be able to
allow it to be true in itself, we shall still be unable to accept it, just as
was the case with the two others we considered before it, as a
sufficient cause for the phenomenon we are now investigating.
But I have not yet exhausted all the light that can be brought to
bear on this difficulty. I can see a fourth solution. It occurred to me at
Jerusalem. I there said to myself, ‘Let us endeavour to look at it in
the form in which it appears to have presented itself to the Divine
Master. He “brought life and immortality to light” to His countrymen,
and, in the highest sense, to us. He must, while engaged in this
work, have seen clearly the very difficulty that is now before us. It
was, in fact, the difficulty that directly, or in its logical consequences,
stood up before Him on all occasions of His teaching. How, then, did
He meet it? How did He deal with it?’ I will now proceed to propound
the answer, that this way of contemplating the difficulty evolved in my
mind.
I assumed that the first step towards finding the way to the true
answer to our question was to ascertain what was precisely the work
Moses had been called to do, and what were the conditions under
which he had to do it. In order to reach a right understanding of
these matters, it was necessary to know the date at which his work
was done. Without that we should have been quite unable to
reconstruct in our minds the conditions under which he had done his
work; the very chief of which were the nature and composition of the
human materials, out of which he had to form a people, which was
his great task. A similar process must here be repeated with respect
to the work of Christ: we must now make out distinctly what it was
that He had to accomplish, and what were the obstacles in the way
of His accomplishing it.
Hitherto we have been endeavouring to make out what had to be
done at the first establishment of, and throughout, the old
Dispensation; and we have summoned before us, successively,
three reasons, which might be imagined, and alleged, for the
omission in that Dispensation of one particular doctrine we might
have expected to find in it. This we did with a constant reference to
the times, circumstances, and conditions of the work. We saw,
however, that not one of those reasons is sufficient and admissible.
Not one explains all the phenomena. What, therefore, we are
endeavouring to get sight of is still in obscurity. The answer sought
has not yet been found. What we now propose to do, still for the
purpose of obtaining this answer, is to recall what He taught, and
what arguments He used, Who ‘brought life and immortality to light;’
and how in doing this He dealt with what Moses had taught, and with
what he had not taught; and how He dealt with the thoughts that
were in the minds of the people He was addressing. If this inquiry
shall enable us to see that it was, precisely, the doctrine of the future
life (what Moses had abstained from teaching) which overturned the
old Dispensation (what he had taught); and at the same time to see
how, and why, it had this effect, then we shall know why Moses, and
the Prophets, had not taught it.
 Fifteen hundred years had elapsed since Moses’s day. What we
have to set before our minds, now, is the conditions under which the
new work had to be done. It was new, because it cancelled, or
supplemented, what was old. It did both. How did it do it? What were
the difficulties it had to contend with? What were the obstacles that
stood in its path, and had to be surmounted? Of course, they must
have been the creation of the foregoing state of things. Let us, then,
be sure that we understand the antecedent times and events.
The object of Moses had been to form a people, in the ordinary
sense of these words; a people, that is to say, who would be well-
ordered at home, and able to hold their own among their neighbours.
For this purpose a code was the first necessity, and, indeed, it might
effect all that was required. But even a somewhat superficial
acquaintance with the history of those fifteen centuries shows us that
this code must come from God. That was a necessity. A law from
man would, at that time, have been useless, and even inconceivable.
There was, however, no difficulty about a law from God. In the
spontaneous apprehensions of the people, at that time, God was the
source of all law, directly and immediately, as distinctly as He is to
our apprehensions the source of all law, mediately and ultimately.
We must make out the effect of this difference. Theirs was the case
in which the intervention of God is not confined to principles, it being
left to human legislators to apply those principles; but it was the case
in which He gives, necessarily, the letter of the statute. Of this it is
the natural, and logical, sequence, that He should be the
administrator and executor of His own law, even of what we call civil
and criminal law. Human agency, when employed, was employed
only mechanically, in the same way as a famine, or pestilence. There
was nothing in the mind of the people that could dispose them to
reject this conclusion, for they had already accepted the premises.
They saw God standing behind the law—which is regulative of
society; and dictating its letter; and, because they saw this, they
could not, also, but see Him standing behind the course of events,
and bringing about the rewards and punishments the law required.
But, furthermore, it is evident that law, civil and criminal, must be
executed here in this life. This is a concern of existing human
societies that must be attended to. The more instantaneously
punishment overtakes the offender the better. The more completely,
then, will the very object of the law be carried out, that which is the
whole of its raison d’être. It always has been so all over the world. To
be effective, to answer its purpose, to do what it aims at doing, its
action must be certain, speedy, visible. Punishment has two political
objects, to rid society of those who are disturbing it, and to strike
terror into, and so deter, those who might be disposed to disturb it.
The object of law, therefore, can not be attained without present,
immediate punishment. The more immediate the better. It has been
so everywhere, and always. Moses’s law, therefore, required the
sanction of direct, immediate, mundane rewards and punishments,
just like any other code.
We see, then, at once, that there was no absolute need for future
rewards and punishments. We can even already imagine that they
would have had a weakening and disturbing effect upon the system:
at all events, we shall eventually find that they were, precisely, as a
matter of fact and history, the very solvent that was used, designedly,
for the very purpose of disintegrating and destroying it. As it was a
system of statute law, what was needed was that the offender should
be punished here at once. Moses had no concern with the world to
come, or with the unseen world at all, excepting so far as it could
further his great object. No code of civil and criminal law, that ever
was heard of, could be maintained, if it relegated the punishment of
the offender to a future life. And, furthermore, as God was the
primary giver of the law, and the actual source of it, so must He be
the actual executor of it: it was His own law. This was intelligible, and
logical. And furthermore, it was in perfect harmony both with the
physics and the metaphysics of those ages, among the learned and
the unlearned alike. To their apprehension everything good in nature,
in society, and the mind of man, came direct from God. God’s arm,
therefore, was ever bared, and visible. Every offence had its penalty,
whether the offence of an individual, or of the nation; and that
penalty was visibly exacted at the time, that is to say, in this life. The
idea of future rewards and punishments would have been
antagonistic to this. It would have been an element of confusion and
weakness. There was no place for it. It was practically and logically
and philosophically excluded. The one thing that was paramount,
and indispensable, was thoroughly attended to. What would have
acted injuriously on that imperious necessity was set aside.
All this is clear abstractedly. And in the concrete history it comes
out with perfect distinctness. During the fifteen hundred years the
law is in force, we have not one syllable about a doctrine of a future
life. It was so, because it was absolutely logical, and quite natural,
that it should be so. Nothing else could account for the fact. It was
just what ought to have been the case. It was excluded not so much
designedly as spontaneously. There was no more place for it in the
teaching of the Prophets than there had been, originally, in the code
itself, because it would have been destructive of the system they
were expounding and enforcing. It could not, therefore, have
occurred to them to teach it.
But at last, for certain reasons, the time has come for teaching it.
What now, therefore, we have to do is to mark the way in which the
law was dealt with in order that it might be taught. The object of the
Light of the World was not, as that of the code of Moses had been, to
form a people, in the ordinary sense of those words, that is, to make
and maintain in the world that political organism we call a nation, but
to form a peculiar people, that would belong to all nations. His
kingdom was not to be as the separate kingdoms of the world, but an
universal kingdom, constructed out of all the kingdoms of the world.
It would differ from the ordinary kingdoms of the world in the source,
in the purview, and in the object of its law. It would reject everything,
however necessary for national purposes, which conflicted with the
idea of the universal brotherhood of mankind, the only conceivable
principle for an universal voluntary society; and its law, for obvious
reasons, would not be a written law. It would not require that its
members should pay taxes, though it would require that they should
tax themselves to satisfy the claims of fraternity. Nor would it require
that they should fight. God would not be to them the Lord of hosts,
but the universal Father. The working of the community would give
no occasion for the use of arms. It would be composed of Jews,
Greeks, and Scythians; of bond and free; of all peoples, kindreds,
and languages. Nothing could bind together this unlocalized society