However, printmaking should not be seen as an inferior medium. For a long time, there was almost a dogmatic belief that a print could only be considered an original if the artist had created the printing plate – that is, the woodblock for woodcuts, the copper plate for etching, the stone for lithography, and the screen for silkscreen printing – and had worked on it with their own hands.
If one defines the terminology so narrowly, one would have to deny the "authenticity" of the print works by the great masters of the 16th and 17th centuries.
