Early Illustrated Books
by Alfred W. Pollard · English · Gutenberg #39845 · 319,166 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Early Illustrated Books
Author: Alfred W. Pollard
Release date: May 29, 2012 [eBook #39845]
Language: English
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Transcriber's Notes
Inconsistent spellings and hyphenation have been retained as in the
original. With the exception of minor changes to format or
punctuation, any changes to the text are listed at the end of the
book.
In this Plain Text version of the e-book, symbols from the ASCII
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accented characters and other symbols in the text:
[:a], [:o],[:u] = o-umlaut, u-umlaut
[AE], [ae] = ae-ligature
[a'], [e'], [o'], [u'] = a-grave, e-grave, o-grave, u-grave
[c,] = c-cedilla
['E], ['e] = e-acute
[^e] = e-circumflex
[et] = Latin Small Letter Et
[:e], [:i] = e, i with dieresis
[~n] = n-tilde
[OE] and [oe] = oe-ligature (upper and lower case).
[P] = paragraph symbol
['u] = u-acute
[.] = centre dot
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Footnotes are numbered in sequence throughout the book and presented
at the end of each chapter.
* * * * *
_Books about Books_
_Edited by A. W. Pollard_
Early
Illustrated Books
[Illustration]
Early
Illustrated Books
A History of the Decoration and
Illustration of Books in the
15th and 16th Centuries
By Alfred W. Pollard
[Illustration]
_Second Edition_
London
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
MDCCCCXVII
_First Edition, 1893_
_Second Edition, revised and corrected_
_May 1917_
_The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved_
Preface
This little book was written nearly a quarter of a century ago in the
enthusiasm of a first acquaintance with a fascinating subject, and
with an honest endeavour to see for myself as many as possible of the
books I set out to describe. If I had tried to rewrite it now I might
have made it more interesting to experts, but at the cost of
destroying whatever merit it possesses as an introductory sketch. I
have therefore been content to correct, as thoroughly as I could, its
many small errors (not all of my own making), more especially those
due to the ascription of books to impossible dates and printers, which
before the publication of Robert Proctor's _Index to the Early Printed
Books in the British Museum_, in 1898, was very difficult to avoid. In
these emendations, and in getting the titles of foreign books into
better form, I have had much kind help from Mr. Victor Scholderer of
the British Museum. I am grateful also to Mr. E. Gordon Duff for his
leave to use again the chapter on English Illustrated Books which he
kindly wrote for me for the first edition.
A. W. P.
Contents
CHAPTER I
PAGE
RUBRISHERS AND ILLUMINATORS 1
CHAPTER II
THE COMPLETION OF THE PRINTED BOOK 22
CHAPTER III
GERMANY--I. 37
CHAPTER IV
GERMANY--II. 56
CHAPTER V
ITALY--I. 79
CHAPTER VI
ITALY--II. 108
CHAPTER VII
FRANCE 142
CHAPTER VIII
THE FRENCH BOOKS OF HOURS 174
CHAPTER IX
HOLLAND 195
CHAPTER X
SPAIN 209
CHAPTER XI
ENGLAND. By E. Gordon Duff 219
INDEX 249
EARLY ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
CHAPTER I
RUBRISHERS AND ILLUMINATORS
No point in the history of printing has been more rightly insisted on
than that the early printers were compelled to make the very utmost of
their new art in order to justify its right to exist. When a
generation had passed by, when the scribes trained in the first half
of the fifteenth century had died or given up the struggle, when
printing-presses had invaded the very monasteries themselves, and
clever boys no longer regarded penmanship as a possible profession,
then, but not till then, printers could afford to be careless, and
speedily began to avail themselves of their new license. In the early
days of the art no such license was possible, and the striking
similarity in the appearance of the printed books and manuscripts
produced contemporaneously in any given city or district, is the best
possible proof of the success with which the early printers competed
with the most expert of the professional scribes.
All this is trite enough, but we are somewhat less frequently
reminded that, after some magnificent experiments by Fust and
Schoeffer at Mainz, the earliest printers deliberately elected to do
battle at first with the scribes alone, and that in the fifteenth
century the scribes were very far, indeed, from being the only persons
engaged in the production of books. The subdivision of labour is not
by any means a modern invention; on the contrary, it is impossible to
read a list of the medieval guilds in any important town without being
struck with the minuteness of the sections into which some apparently
quite simple callings were split up. Of this subdivision of labour,
the complex art of book-production was naturally an instance. For a
proof of this, we need go no further than the records of the Guild of
St. John the Evangelist at Bruges, in which, according to Mr. Blades's
quotation of the extracts made by Van Praet, members of at least
fourteen branches of industry connected with the manufacture of books
joined together for common objects. In the fifteenth century a book of
devotions, commissioned by some wealthy book-lover, such as the Duke
of Bedford, might be written by one man, have its rubrics supplied by
another, its small initial letters and borders by a third, and then be
sent to some famous miniaturist in France or Flanders for final
completion. The scribe only supplied the groundwork, all the rest was
added by other hands, and it was only with the scribe that the early
printers competed.
The restriction of their efforts to competition with the scribe alone,
was not accepted by the first little group of printers until after
some fairly exhaustive experiments. The interesting trial leaves,
preserved in some copies of the 42-line Bible, differ from the rest
not only in having their text compressed into two lines less, but also
in having the rubrics printed instead of filled in by hand. Printing
in two colours still involves much extra labour, and it was easier to
supply the rubric by hand than to be at the pains of a second
impression, even if this could be effected by the comparatively simple
process of stamping. Except, therefore, in the trial leaves, the
rubrics of the first Bible are all in manuscript. Peter Schoeffer,
however, when he joined with the goldsmith Fust in the production of
the magnificent Mainz _Psalter_ of 1457, was not content to rely on
the help of illuminators for his rubrics and capitals, or, as the
disuse of the word majuscules makes it convenient to call them,
initial letters. Accordingly, the Psalter appeared not only with
printed rubrics, but with the magnificent B at the head of the first
psalm, which has so often been copied, and some two hundred and eighty
smaller initials, printed in blue and red.
Schoeffer's initial letters appear again in two editions of the _Canon
of the Mass_ attributed to 1458, in the _Psalter_ of 1459, in the
_Rationale_ of Durandus of the same year, and in a _Donatus_ printed
in the type of the 1462 Bible. As Mr. Duff has pointed out, in some
sheets of this Bible itself the red initial letters are printed and
the outline of the blue ones impressed in blank for the guidance of
the illuminator in filling them in. Thereafter Schoeffer seems to have
kept his initials for special occasions, as in the 35-line _Donatus_
issued _c._ 1468, perhaps when he was starting business for himself,
and in the antiquarian reprints of the _Psalter_ in and after 1490.
Doubtless he was sorry when he could no longer print in the colophon
of a book that it was 'venustate capitalium decoratus,
rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus,' but while illuminators
were still plentiful, handwork was probably the least expensive
process of decoration. It is noteworthy, also, that Mr. Duff's
discovery as regards the 1462 Bible brings us down to the beginning of
those troublous three years in the history of Mainz, during which Fust
and Schoeffer only printed 'Bulls and other such ephemeral
publications.' When they resumed the printing of important works in
1465 with the _Decretals_ of Boniface VIII. and the _De Officiis_ of
Cicero, Schoeffer was content to leave decoration to the illuminator.
The firm's expenses were thus diminished, and purchasers were able to
economise in the amount of decoration bestowed upon the copy they were
buying. It is noteworthy, indeed, that even in 1459, when he was
habitually using his printed initial letters, Schoeffer did not refuse
customers this liberty, for while one of the copies of the _Rationale
Durandi_ at the Biblioth[e']que Nationale has the initials printed, in
the others they are illuminated by hand.
Very little attention has as yet been devoted to the study of the
illumination and rubrication of printed books, and much patient
investigation will be needed before we can attain any real knowledge
of the relation of the illuminators to the early printers. Professor
Middleton, in his work on _Illuminated Manuscripts_, had something to
say on the subject, but the pretty little picture he drew of a scene
in Gutenberg's (?) shop seems to have been rather hastily arrived at.
'The workshop,' he wrote, 'of an early printer included not only
compositors and printers, but also cutters and founders of type,
illuminators of borders and initials, and skilful binders, who could
cover books with various qualities and kinds of binding. A purchaser
in Gutenberg's shop, for example, of his magnificent Bible in loose
sheets, would then have been asked what style of illumination he was
prepared to pay for, and then what kind of binding, and how many brass
bosses and clasps he wished to have.' What evidence there is on the
subject hardly favours the theory which Professor Middleton thus
boldly stated as a fact. The names we know in connection with the
decoration of the 42-line Bible are those of Heinrich Cremer, vicar of
the Church of St. Stephen at Mainz, who rubricated, illuminated, and
bound the paper copy now in the Biblioth[e']que Nationale, and Johann
Fogel, a well-known binder of the time, whose stamps are found on no
fewer than three of the extant copies of this Bible. We have no reason
to believe that either Cremer or Fogel was employed in the printer's
shop, so that as regards the particular book which he instances, it is
hard to see on what ground Professor Middleton built his assertion.
As regards Schoeffer's practice after 1462, the evidence certainly
points to the majority of his books having been rubricated before they
left his hands, but the variety of the styles in the copies I have
seen, especially in those on vellum, forbids my believing that they
were all illuminated in a single workshop. A copy in the British
Museum of his 1471 edition of the _Constitutions_ of Pope Clement V.
presents us with an instance, rather uncommon in a printed book,
though not infrequently found in manuscripts, of an elaborate border
and miniatures, sketched out in pencil and prepared for gilding, but
never completed. The book could hardly have been sold in this
condition, and would not have been returned so from any illuminator's
workshop. We must conjecture that it was sold unilluminated to some
monastery, where its decoration was begun by one of the monks, but put
aside for some cause, and never finished.
The utmost on this subject that we can say at present is that as a
printer would depend for the sale of his books in the first place on
the inhabitants of the town in which he printed, and as these would
be most likely to employ an illuminator from the same place, the
predominant style of decoration in any book is likely to be that of
the district in which it was printed, and if we find the same style
predominant in a number of books this may give us a clue to connect
them altogether, or to distinguish them from some other group. In this
way, for instance, it is possible that some light may be thrown on the
question whether the 36-line Bible was finished at Bamberg or at
Mainz. Certainly the clumsy, heavy initials in the British Museum copy
are very unlike those which occur in Mainz books, and if this style
were found to predominate in other copies we should have an important
piece of new evidence on a much debated question. But our knowledge
that Schoeffer had an agency for the sale of his books as far off from
the place of their printing as Paris, the Italian character of the
illuminations added to some of his books, and the occurrence of a note
in a book printed in Italy that the purchaser could not wait to have
it illuminated there, but entrusted it to a German artist on his
return home, may suffice to warn us against any rash conclusion in the
present very meagre state of our knowledge.
Apart from the question as to where they were executed, the
illuminations in books printed in Germany are not, as a rule, very
interesting. Germany was not the home of fine manuscripts during the
fifteenth century, and her printed books depend for their beauty on
the rich effect of their gothic types, their good paper and handsome
margins, rather than on the accessories added by hand. The attempts of
the more ambitious miniaturists to depict, within the limits of an
initial, St. Jerome translating the Bible or David playing on the
harp, are, for the most part, clumsy and ill-drawn. On the other hand,
fairly good scroll-work of flowers and birds is not uncommon. As a
rule it surrounds the whole page of text, but in some cases an
excellent effect is produced by the stem of the design being brought
up between the two columns of a large page, branching out at either
end so as to cover the upper and lower margins, those at the sides
being left bare. It may be mentioned that much good scroll-work is
found on paper copies, the vellum used in early German books being
usually coarse and brown, and sometimes showing the imperfections of
the skin by holes as large as a filbert, so that it was employed
apparently, chiefly for its greater resistance to wear and tear,
rather than as a luxurious refinement, as was the case in Italy and
France. An extreme instance of the superiority of a paper copy to one
on vellum may be found by comparing the coarsely-rubricated 42-line
Bible in the Grenville Collection at the British Museum with the very
prettily illuminated copy of the same book in the King's Library. The
Grenville copy is on vellum, the King's on paper; but my own
preference has always been for the latter. Even in Germany, however,
good vellum books were sometimes produced, for the printers
endeavoured to match the skins fairly uniformly throughout a volume,
and a book-lover of taste would not be slow to pick out the best copy.
The finest German vellum book with which I am acquainted is the
Lamoignon copy of the 1462 Bible, now in the British Museum. This was
specially illuminated for a certain Conradus Dolea, whose name and
initials are introduced into the lower border on the first page of the
second volume. The scroll-work is excellent, and the majority of the
large initials are wisely restricted to simple decorative designs.
Only in a few cases, as at the beginning of the Psalms, where David is
as usual playing his harp, is the general good taste which marks the
volume disturbed by clumsy figure-work.
In turning from the illuminations of the first German books to those
printed by Jenson and Vindelinus de Spira at Venice we are confronted
with an interesting discovery, first noted by the Vicomte Delaborde in
his delightful book _La Gravure en Italie avant Marc-Antoine_ (p.
252), carried a little further in the _Bibliographie des Livres [a']
figures Venitiens_, written by the Prince d'Essling when he was Duc de
Rivoli, then greatly extended by the researches of Dr. Paul
Kristeller, some of the results of which, when as yet unpublished, he
kindly communicated to me, and finally summed up in the Prince
d'Essling's magnificent work, _Les Livres [a'] figures Venitiens_. In a
considerable number--the list given me by Dr. Kristeller enumerated
about forty--of the works published by Jenson and Vindelinus, from
1469 to 1473, the work of the illuminator has been facilitated in some
copies by the whole or a portion of his design having been first
stamped for him from a block. The evidence of this stamping is partly
in the dent made in the paper or vellum, partly in the numerous little
breaks in the lines where the block has not retained the ink; but I
was myself lucky enough to find in the Grenville copy of the _Virgil_
printed at Venice by Bartholomaeus de Cremona in 1472, an uncoloured
example of this stamped work, which was reproduced in
_Bibliographica_, and subsequently by the Prince d'Essling. A copy of
the _Pliny_ of 1469 in the Biblioth[e']que Nationale, illuminated by
means of this device, has an upper and inner border of the familiar
white elliptical interlacements on a gold and green ground. In the
centre of the lower border is a shield supported by two children, and
at the feet of each child is a rabbit. The outer border shows two
cornucopias on a green and gold ground. The upper and inner borders
are repeated again in the _Livy_ and _Virgil_ of 1470, in the
_Valerius Maximus_ of 1471, and in the _Rhetorica_ of George of
Trebizond of 1472. In this last book it is joined with another border,
first found in the _De Officiis_ of Cicero of the same year. All these
books proceeded from the press of Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira. A
quite distinct set of borders are found in Jenson's edition of
Cicero's _Epistolae ad Familiares_ of 1471; but in an article in the
_Archivio Storico delle Arti_ Dr. Kristeller showed that the lower
border of the _Pliny_ of 1469, described above, occurs again in a copy
of the _De Evangelica Praeparatione_, printed by Jenson in 1470. The
apparent distinction of the blocks used in the books of the two firms
is thus broken down, and in face of the rarity of the copies thus
decorated in comparison with those illuminated by hand, or which have
come down to us with their blank spaces still unfilled, it seems
impossible to maintain that either the preliminary engraving or the
illumination was done in the printer's workshop. We should rather
regard the engraving as a labour-saving device employed by some master
illuminator to whom private purchasers sent the books they had
purchased from the De Spiras or Jenson for decoration. No instance has
as yet been found of a book printed after 1473 being illuminated in
this way.[1]
Apart from the special interest of these particular borders, the
illumination in early Italian books is almost uniformly graceful and
beautiful. Interlacements, oftenest of white upon blue, sometimes of
gold upon green, are the form of ornament most commonly met with.
Still prettier than these are the floral borders, tapering off into
little stars of gold. Elaborate architectural designs are also found,
but these, as a rule, are much less pleasing. In the majority of the
borders of all three classes a shield, of the graceful Italian shape,
is usually introduced, sometimes left blank, sometimes filled in with
the arms of the owner. More often than not this shield is enclosed in
a circle of green bay leaves. The initial letters are, as a rule,
purely decorative, the designs harmonising with the borders. In some
instances they consist simply of a large letter in red or blue,
without any surrounding scroll-work. We must also note that in some
copies of books from the presses of the German printers at Rome we
find large initial letters in red and blue, distinctly German in their
design, the work, possibly, of the printers themselves.
Germany and Italy are the only two countries in which illumination
plays an important part in the decoration of early books. In England,
where the Wars of the Roses had checked the development of a very
promising native school of illuminators, the use of colour in printed
books is almost unknown. The early issues from Caxton's press, before
he began to employ printed initials, are either left with their blanks
unfilled, or rubricated in the plainest possible manner. In France,
the scholastic objects of the press at the Sorbonne, and the few
resources of the printers who succeeded it during the next seven or
eight years, at first forbade any serious competition with the
splendid manuscripts which were then being produced. In Holland and
Spain woodcut initials, which practically gave the death-blow to
illumination as a necessary adjunct of a book, were introduced almost
simultaneously with the use of type.
So far we have considered illumination merely as a means of completing
in a not immoderately expensive manner the blanks left by the earliest
printers. We may devote a few pages to glancing at the subsequent
application of the art to the decoration of special copies intended
for presentation to a patron, or commissioned by a wealthy book-lover.
The preparation of such copies was practically confined to France and
Italy. A copy on vellum of the Great Bible of 1540, presented to Henry
VIII. by his 'loving, faithfull and obedient subject and daylye
oratour, Anthony Marler of London, Haberdassher,' has the elaborate
woodcut title-page carefully painted over by hand, but this is almost
the only English book of which I can think in which colour was thus
employed. In Germany its use was only too common, but for popular, not
for artistic work, for at least two out of every three early German
books with woodcut illustrations have the cuts garishly painted over
in the rudest possible manner, to the great defacement of the
outlines, which we would far rather see unobscured. It is tempting,
indeed, to believe that in many cases this deplorable addition must
have been the work of the 'domestic' artist; it is certainly rare to
find an instance in which it in any way improves the underlying cut.
In France and Italy, on the other hand, the early printers were
confronted by many wealthy book-lovers, accustomed to manuscripts
adorned with every possible magnificence, and in a few instances they
found it worth while to cater for their tastes. For this purpose they
employed the most delicate vellum (very unlike the coarse material used
by the Germans for its strength) decorating the margins with elaborate
borders, and sometimes prefixing a coloured frontispiece. In France this
practice was begun by Guillaume Fichet and Jean Heynlyn, the managers of
the press at the Sorbonne. Several magnificent copies of early Sorbonne
books--so sober in their ordinary dress--are still extant, to which
Fichet has prefixed a large miniature representing himself in his
clerical garb presenting a copy of the book to the Pope, to our own
Edward IV., to Cardinal Bessarion, or to other patrons. In some cases he
also prefixed a specially printed letter of dedication, thereby
rendering the copy absolutely unique. Some twenty years later this
practice of preparing special copies for wealthy patrons was resumed by
Antoine V['e]rard, whose enterprise has bequeathed to the
Biblioth[e']que Nationale a whole row of books thus specially decorated
for Charles VIII., and to the British Museum a no less splendid set
commissioned by Henry VII. Nor were V['e]rard's patrons only found among
kings, for a record still exists of four books thus ornamented by him
for Charles d'Angoul[^e]me, at a total cost of over two hundred livres,
equivalent to rather more than the same number of pounds sterling of our
present money.
V['e]rard's methods of preparing these magnificent volumes were neither
very artistic nor very honest. The miniatures are thickly painted, so
that an underlying woodcut, on quite a different subject, was sometimes
utilised to furnish the artist with an idea for the grouping of the
figures. Thus a cut from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, representing Saturn
devouring his children and a very unpleasing figure of Venus rising from
the sea, was converted into a Holy Family by painting out the Venus and
reducing Saturn's cannibal embrace to an affectionate fondling. This
process of alteration and painting out was also employed by V['e]rard to
conceal the fact that these splendid copies were often not of his own
publication, but commissioned by him from other publishers. Thus Henry
VII.'s copy of _L'Examen de Conscience_ has the colophon, in which it is
stated to have been printed for Pierre Regnault of Rouen, rather
carelessly erased, and in Charles VIII.'s copy of the _Compost et
Kalendrier des Bergers_ (1493)[2] Guiot Marchant's device has been
concealed by painting over it the royal arms, while the colophon in
which his name appears has been partly erased, partly covered over by a
painted copy of V['e]rard's well-known device. V['e]rard's borders,
also, are as a rule heavy, consisting chiefly of flowers and arabesques
arranged in clumsy squares or lozenges. Altogether these princely
volumes are perhaps rather magnificent than in good taste.
The custom of illuminating the cuts in vellum books was not practised
only by V['e]rard. Almost all the French publishers of Books of Hours
resorted to it--at first, while the illumination was carefully done,
with very splendid effect, afterwards to the utter ruin of the beautiful
designs which the colour concealed. Under Francis I. illumination seems
to have revived, for we hear of a vellum copy of the _De Philologia_ of
Bud[ae]us, printed by Ascensius (1532), having its first page of text
enclosed in a rich border in which appear the arms of the dukes of
Orleans and Angoul[^e]me to whom it was dedicated. In another work by
Bud[ae]us (himself a book-lover as well as a scholar), the _De Transitu
Hellenismi_, printed by Robert Estienne in 1535, the portrait and arms
of Francis I. are enclosed in another richly illuminated border, and the
King's arms are painted in other books printed about this time. In a
vellum copy of a French Bible printed by Jean de Tournes at Lyons in
1557, there are over three hundred miniatures, and borders to every
page. Even by the middle of the seventeenth century the use of
illumination had not quite died out in France, though it adds nothing to
the beauty of the tasteless works then issued from the French presses.
One of the latest instances in which I have encountered it is in a copy
presented to Louis XIV. of _La Lyre du Jeune Apollon, ou la Muse
naissante du Petit de Beauchasteau_ (Paris, 1657); in this the
half-title is surrounded by a wreath of gold, and surmounted by a lyre,
the title is picked out in red, blue, and gold, and the headpieces and
tailpieces throughout the volume are daubed over with colour. By the
expenditure of a vast amount of pains, a dull book is thus rendered both
pretentious and offensive.
In Italy, the difference between ordinary copies of early books and
specially prepared ones, is bridged over by so many intermediate
stages of decoration that we are obliged to confine our attention to
one or two famous examples of sumptuous books. The Italian version of
_Pliny_, made by Cristoforo Landino and printed by Jenson in 1476,
exists in such a form as one of the Douce books (No. 310) in the
Bodleian Library. This copy has superb borders at the beginning of
each book, and is variously supposed to have been prepared for
Ferdinand II., King of Naples, and for a member of the Strozzi family
of Florence, the arms of both being frequently introduced into the
decoration. Still more superb are the three vellum copies of Giovanni
Simoneta's _Historia delle cose facte dallo invictissimo Duca
Francesco Sforza_, translated (like the _Pliny_) by Cristoforo
Landino, and printed by Antonio Zarotto at Milan in 1490. These copies
were prepared for members of the Sforza family, portraits of whom are
introduced in the borders. The decoration is florid, but superb of its
kind, and provoked Dibdin to record his admiration of the copy now in
the Grenville Library as 'one of the loveliest of membranaceous
jewels' it had ever been his fortune to meet with. For many years in a
case devoted to specimens of illuminated printed books in the King's
Library the British Museum used to exhibit vellum copies of the Aldine
_Martial_ of 1501, and _Catullus_ of 1502, and side by side with them,
printed respectively just twelve years later, and also on vellum, an
_Aulus Gellius_ and _Plautus_ presented by Giunta, the Florentine
rival of Aldus, to the younger Lorenzo de' Medici.
The use of illumination in printed books was a natural and pleasing
survival of the glories of the illuminated manuscript. Its
discontinuance was in part a sign of health as testifying to the
increased resources of the printing press; in part a symptom of the
carelessness as to the form of books which by the end of the
seventeenth century had become well-nigh universal throughout Europe.
So long as a few rich amateurs cared for copies of their favourite
authors printed on vellum, and decorated by the hands of skilful
artists, a high standard of excellence was set up which influenced the
whole of the book-trade, and for this reason the revival of the use
of vellum in our own day may perhaps be welcomed. It may be noted that
the especially Italian custom of introducing the arms of the owner
into the majority of illuminated designs left its trace in the blank
shields which so frequently form the centre of the printed borders in
Italian books from 1490 to 1520. Theoretically these shields were
intended to be filled in with the owner's arms in colour, but they are
more often found blank. Two examples of their use are here shown, one
from the upper border of the _Calendar_, printed at Venice in 1476
(the first book with an ornamental title-page), the other from the
lower border of the first page of text of the _Trabisonda Istoriata_,
printed also at Venice in 1494. We may note also that the parallel
custom of inserting the arms of the patron to whom a book was
dedicated was carried on in Spain in a long series of title-pages, in
which the arms of the patron form the principal feature.
[Illustration: From the _Calendar_ of 1476.]
[Illustration: From _La Trabisonda Historiata_ of 1494.]
In England, also, a patron's coat was sometimes printed as one of the
decorations of a book. Thus on the third leaf of the first edition of
the _Golden Legend_ there is a large woodcut of a horse galloping past
a tree, the device of the Earl of Arundel, the patron to whom Caxton
owed his yearly fee of a buck in summer and a doe in winter. So, too,
in the Morton _Missal_, printed by Pynson in 1500, the Morton arms
occupy a full page at the beginning of the book. Under Elizabeth and
James I. the practice became fairly common. In some cases where the
leaf thus decorated has become detached, the arms have all the
appearance of an early book-plate, and the Bagford example of Sir
Nicholas Bacon's plate has endured suspicions on this account. In this
instance, however, the fortunate existence of a slight flaw in the
block, which occurs also in the undoubtedly genuine gift-plate of
1574, offers a strong argument in favour of its having been in the
possession of Sir Nicholas himself, and therefore presumably used by
him as a mark of possession.
* * * * *
[1] In a copy of the edition of _Suetonius_, printed by Sweynheym and
Pannartz at Rome in 1470, which belonged to William Morris, and is now
in the Morgan collection at New York, there are nine excellent woodcut
capitals used with a handsome border-piece, which do not appear in
other examples. Dr. Lippmann found similar decorations in the 1465
edition of _Lactantius_, printed at Subiaco by the same firm. In this
case the blocks probably belonged to the printers, but were used to
decorate only a few copies.
[2] A full description of this copy will be found in Dr. Sommer's
introduction to the facsimile and reprint of the English translations
of Paris, 1503, and London, 1506 (Kegan Paul, 1892).
CHAPTER II
THE COMPLETION OF THE PRINTED BOOK
As we have seen, the typical book during the first quarter of a
century of the history of printing is one in which the printer
supplied the place of the scribe and of the scribe alone. An
appreciable, though not a very large, percentage of early books have
come down to us in the exact state in which they issued from the
press, with a blank space at their beginning for an illumination,
blanks for the initial letters, blanks for the chapter headings, no
head-lines, no title-page, no pagination, and no signatures to guide
the binder in arranging the sheets in the different gatherings. Our
task in the present chapter is to trace briefly the history of the
emancipation of the printer from his dependence on handwork for the
completion of his books. We shall not expect to find this emancipation
effected step by step in any orderly progression. Innovations, the
utility of which seems to us obvious and striking, occur as if by
hazard in an isolated book, are then abandoned even by the printer who
started them, and subsequently reappear in a number of books printed
about the same time at different places, so that it is impossible to
fix the chronology of the revived fashion.
[Illustration]
We have already noted how the anxiety of the earliest Mainz printers
to rival at the very outset the best manuscripts with which they were
acquainted, led them to anticipate improvements which were not
generally adopted till many years afterwards. Among these we must not
reckon the use for the rubrics or chapter headings of red ink, which
appears in the trial leaves of the 42-line Bible, and was to a greater
or less extent employed by Schoeffer in most of his books. Although
red ink has appeared sporadically, and still does so, on the
title-page of a book here or there, more especially on those which
make some pretence to sumptuousness, its use in the fifteenth century
was a survival, not an anticipation. For legal and liturgical works it
was long considered essential; for other books the expense of the
double printing which it involves soon brought it into disfavour and
has kept it there ever since.
The use of a colophon, or crowning paragraph, at the end of a book, to
give the information now contained on our title-pages, dates from the
Mainz Psalter of 1457, and was continued by Schoeffer in most of his
books. A colophon occurs also in the _Catholicon_ of 1460, though it
does not mention the printer's name (almost certainly Gutenberg). There
is an admirably full one in rhyming couplets (set out as prose) to
Pfister's _Buch der vier Historien von Joseph, Daniel, Esther, und
Judith_, and the brothers Bechterm[:u]ntze, who printed the
_Vocabularius ex quo_ at Eltvil in 1467, are equally explicit. In many
cases, however, no colophon of any sort appears, and the year and place
of publication have to be deduced from the information given in other
books printed in the same types, or from the chance entry by a purchaser
or rubricator of the date at which the book came into or left his hands.
We may claim colophons as part of the subject of this book, because
they early received decorative treatment. Schoeffer prints them, as a
rule, in his favourite red ink, and it was as an appendix to the
colophon that the printer's device first made its appearance.
Schoeffer's well-known shields occur in this connection in his Bible of
1462. No other instance of a device is known until about 1470, when they
became common, some printers, like Arnold ther Hoernen of Cologne, and
Colard Mansion of Bruges, imitating Schoeffer in the modest size of
their badges, while others, among whom some Dutch printers are
prominent, made their emblem large enough, if need be, to decorate a
whole page.
Of Schoeffer's coloured capitals enough has already been said. Woodcut
initials for printing in outline, the outline being intended to be
coloured by hand, were used by G[:u]nther Zainer at Augsburg at least as
early as 1471, and involved him in a controversy to which we shall
allude in our next chapter. Their use spread slowly, for it was about
this date that the employment of hand-painted initials was given a
fresh lease of life, by the introduction of the printed 'director,' or
small letter, indicating to the illuminator the initial he was
required to supply. The director had been used by the scribes, and in
early printed books is frequently found in manuscript. It was, of
course, intended to be painted over, but the rubrication of printed
books was so carelessly executed that it often appears in the open
centre of the coloured letter. In so far as it delayed the
introduction of woodcut letters, this ingenious device was a step
backward rather than an improvement.
In the order of introduction, the next addition to a printer's
stock-in-trade which we have to chronicle is the use of woodcut
illustrations. These were first employed by Albrecht Pfister, who in
1461 was printing at Bamberg. Like Schoeffer's coloured initials,
Pfister's illustrated books form an incident apart from the general
history of the development of the printed book, and it will be
convenient, therefore, to give them a brief notice here, rather than
to place them at the head of our next chapter. They are six in number,
or, if we count different editions separately, nine, of which only two
have dates, viz.: one of the two editions of Boner's _Edelstein_,
dated 1461, and the _Buch der vier Historien von Joseph, Daniel,
Esther, und Judith_, dated 1462, with Pfister's name in the rhyming
colophon already alluded to. The undated books are another edition of
the _Edelstein_; the _Belial seu consolatio peccatorum_; a _Biblia
Pauperum_; two closely similar editions of this in German; two
editions of the _Rechtstreit des Menschen mit dem Tode_, also called
_Gespr[:a]ch zwischen einem Wittwer und dem Tode_. Attention was first
drawn to these books by the Pastor Jacob August Steiner of Augsburg in
1792, and when the volume which he described was brought to the
Biblioth[e']que Nationale, with other spoils from Germany, a learned
Frenchman, Camus, read a paper on them before the Institute in 1799.
The three tracts which the volume contained were restored to the
library at Wolfenb[:u]ttel in 1815, but the Biblioth[e']que has since
acquired another set of three and a separate edition of the German
_Biblia Pauperum_. The only other copies known are those in the
Spencer Collection, one of the _Belial_ at Nuremberg, and a unique
example of the undated _Edelstein_ at Berlin.[3]
These four books contain altogether no less than 201 cuts, executed in
clumsy outline. One hundred and one of these cuts belong to the
_Edelstein_, a collection of German fables written before 1330. The
book which contains them is a small folio of 28 leaves, and with a
width of page larger by a fourth than the size of the cuts. To fill
this gap, Pfister introduced on the left of the illustration a figure
of a man. In the dated copy, in which the cuts are more worn, this
figure is the same throughout the book; in the undated there are
differences in the man's headgear, and in the book or tablet he is
holding, constituting three different variations. In the _Buch der
vier Historien_ the cuts number 55, six of which, however, are
repeated, making 61 impressions. In the impossibility of obtaining
access to the originals, while the Spencer Collection was in the
course of removal, the careful copy of one of these, made for Camus in
1799, was chosen for reproduction as likely to be less familiar than
the illustrations from Pfister's other books given by Dibdin in his
_Bibliotheca Spenceriana_. The subject is the solemn sacrifice of a
lamb at Bethulia after Judith's murder of Holofernes. The _Biblia
Pauperum_ is in three editions, two in German, the third in Latin;
each consists of 17 printed leaves, with a large cut formed of five
separate blocks illustrating different subjects, but joined together
as a whole, on each page.
The last book of Pfister's we have to notice, the _Complaint of the
Widower against Death_, is probably earlier than either of his dated
ones. It contains 24 leaves, with five full-page cuts, showing (1)
Death on his throne, and the widower and his little son in mourning;
(2) Death and the widower, with a pope, a noble, and a monk vainly
offering Death gold; (3) two figures of Death (one mounted) pursuing
their victims; (4) Death on his throne, with two lower compartments
representing monks at a cloister gate, and women walking with a child
in a fair garden,--this to symbolise the widower's choice between
remarriage and retiring to a monastery; (5) the widower appearing
before Christ, who gives the verdict against him, since all mortals
must yield their bodies to Death and their souls to God. The cuts in
this book are larger and bolder than the other specimens of Pfister's
work which we have noticed, but they are rude enough.
[Illustration: From Pfister's _Buch der vier Historien_.]
[Illustration--transcription as follows:
Sermo ad populum predicabilis [.] In festo presentacionis. Beatissime
marie semper virginis nouiter cum magna diligencia. ad communem vsum
multorum sacerdotum presertim curatorum collectus. Et idcirco per
impressonem multiplicatus. sub hoc currente. Anno domini M^o cccc^o
.lxx^o. cuiusquidem collectionis atque etiam multiplicacionis eius non
paruipendenda racio si placet [.] videri poteret. In folii laterem
sequenti]
After the introduction of woodcut illustrations, the next innovation
with which we have to concern ourselves is the adoption of the
title-page. What may be called accidental title-pages are found on
both the Latin and the German edition of a Bull of Pope Pius II.
printed by Fust and Schoeffer in 1463. After this Arnold ther Hoernen
of Cologne appears to have been the first printer lavish enough to
devote a whole page to prefixing a title to a book. A facsimile is
here given, from which we see that this 'sermon preachable on the
feast of the presentation of the most blessed Virgin' was printed in
1470 at the outset of ther Hoernen's career. The printer, however,
seems to have understood no better than Schoeffer the commercial
advantage of what he was doing, and the next title-page which has to
be chronicled is another of the same kind, reading the 'Tractatulus
compendiosus per modum dyalogi timidis | ac deuotis viris editus
instruens non plus curam | de pullis et carnibus habere suillis quam
quo modo | verus deus et homo qui in celis est digne tractetur. |
Ostendens insuper etiam salubres manuductiones quibus | minus
dispositus abilitetur,' etc. What we may call the business title of
this book is much more sensibly set forth in the brief colophon:
'Explicit exhortacio de celebratione misse per modum dyalogi inter
pontificem et sacerdotem, Anno Lxx[et],' &c. Still, here also, the
absence of an incipit, and of any following text must be taken as
constituting a title-page. Three years later two Augsburg printers,
Bernardus 'pictor' and Erhardus Ratdolt, who had started a
partnership in Venice with Petrus L[:o]slein of Langenzenn in Bavaria,
produced the first artistic title-page as yet discovered. This appears
in all the three editions of a Calendar which they issued in Latin and
Italian in 1476, and in German in 1478. The praises of the Calendar
are sung in twelve lines of verse, beginning in the Latin edition:--
Aureus hic liber est: non est preciosior ulla
Gemma kalendario quod docet istud opus.
Aureus hic numerus; lune solisque labores
Monstrantur facile: cunctaque signa poli.
Then follows the date, then the names of the three printers in red
ink. This letterpress is surrounded by a border in five pieces, the
uppermost of which shows a small blank shield (see p. 19), while on
the two sides skilfully conventionalised foliage is springing out of
two urns. The two gaps between these and the printers' names are
filled up by two small blocks of tracery. It is noteworthy that this
charming design was employed by printers from Augsburg, the city in
which wood-engraving was first seriously employed for the decoration
of printed books. But the design itself is distinctly Italian in its
spirit, not German.
Like its two predecessors, the title-page of 1476 was a mere
anticipation, and was not imitated. The systematic development of the
title-page begins in the early part of the next decade, when the
custom of printing the short title of the book on a first page,
otherwise left blank, came slowly into use.[4] The two earliest
appearances of these label title-pages in England are (1) in 'A
passing gode lityll boke necessarye & behouefull agenst the
Pestilens,' by 'Canutus, Bishop of Aarhus,' printed by Machlinia,
probably towards the close of his career [1486-90?]; and (2) in one of
the earliest works printed by Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's foreman, after
his master's death. Here, in the centre of the first page, we find a
three-line paragraph reading:
The prouffytable boke for ma[~n]es soule And right comfortable to
the body and specially in aduersitee & tribulation, which boke
is called The Chastysynge of goddes Chyldern.
Other countries were earlier than England both in the adoption of the
label title-page and in filling the blank space beneath the title with
some attempt at ornament. In France the ornament usually took the form
of a printer's mark, more rarely of an illustration; in Italy and
Germany usually of an illustration, more rarely of a printer's mark.
Until the first quarter of the sixteenth century was drawing to a
close the colophon still held its place at the end of the book as the
chief source of information as to the printer's name and place and
date of publication. The author's name, also, was often reserved for
the colophon, or hidden away in a preface or dedicatory letter.
Title-pages completed according to the fashion which, until the
antiquarian revival by William Morris of the old label form, has ever
since held sway, do not become common till about 1520.
Perhaps the chief reason why the convenient custom of the title-page
spread so slowly was that soon after 1470 the Augsburg printers began
to imitate in woodcuts the elaborate borders with which the
illuminators had been accustomed to decorate the first page of the
text of a manuscript or early printed book. When they first appear
these woodcut borders grow out of the initial letter with which the
text begin, and extend only over part of the upper and inner margins.
In other instances, however, they completely surround the first page
of text, and this is nearly always the case with the very beautiful
borders which are found, towards the close of the century, in many
books printed in Italy. In these they are mostly preceded by a 'label'
title-page. The use of borders to surround every page of text was
practically confined[5] to books of devotion, notably the Books of
Hours, whose wonderful career began in 1487 and lasted for upwards of
half a century. Head-pieces are found in a few books, chiefly Greek,
printed at Venice towards the close of the fifteenth century. In the
absence of any previous investigations on the subject, it is
dangerous to attempt to say where tail-pieces first occur, but their
birthplace was probably France.
Pagination and head-lines are said to have been first used by Arnold
ther Hoernen at Cologne in 1470 and 1471; printed signatures by John
Koelhoff at the same city in 1472. The date of Koelhoff's book, an
edition of Nider's _Expositio Decalogi_, has been needlessly held to
be a misprint, though it is a curious coincidence that we find
signatures stamped by hand in one edition of Franciscus de Platea's
_De restitutionibus_, Venice, 1473, and printed close to the text in
the normal way in another edition issued at Cologne the following
year. None of these small matters have any direct bearing on the
decoration of books, but they are of interest to us as pointing to the
printer's gradual emancipation from his long dependence on the help of
the scribe. It is perhaps worth while, for the same reason, to take as
a landmark G[:u]nther Zainer's 1473 edition of the _De regimine
principum_ of Aegidius Columna. This book is possessed of printed
head-lines, chapter headings, paragraph marks, and large and small
initial letters. From first page to last it is untouched by the hand
of the rubricator, and shows that Zainer at any rate had won his
independence within five years of setting up his press. Curiously
enough, to this particular specimen of his work he did not give his
name, though it is duly dated.
[Illustration: From Ptolemy's _Cosmographia_, Ulm, 1482.]
* * * * *
[3] A leaf of the _Rechtstreit_ is in the Taylorian Institute at
Oxford.
[4] It may be noted that in a few books, alike in Germany, Italy, and
France, issued about 1490, a label title is printed on the back of the
last leaf, either instead of, or in addition to, that on the recto of
the first.
[5] They are found also in some Books of Emblems, and in a few books
printed at Lyons in the middle of the sixteenth century.
CHAPTER III
GERMANY--1470-1486
In the fifteenth century Augsburg was one of the chief centres in
Germany for card-making and woodcut pictures. The cutters were jealous
of their privileges, and when, in 1471, G[:u]nther Zainer, a native of
Reutlingen, who had been printing in their town for some years (his
first book was issued in March 1468), asked for admission to the
privileges of a burgher, they not only opposed him, but demanded that
he should be forbidden to print woodcuts in his books. The abbot of
SS. Ulric and Afra, Melchior de Stamheim, who subsequently set up
presses of his own, procured a compromise, and G[:u]nther was allowed to
employ woodcuts freely, so long as they were cut by authorised
cutters.
Zainer's first dated book with illustrations is a translation of the
_Legenda Aurea_ of Jacobus de Voragine, with a small cut prefacing
each of the two hundred and thirty-four biographies. The first part of
this was finished in October 1471, and the second in April 1472. In
1472 came also two editions of the _Belial_ or 'processus Luciferi
contra Jesum Christum,' in which thirty-two cuts help the
understanding of the extraordinary text, and to the same year belongs
Ingold's _Das guldin Spiel_, a wonderful work, in which the seven
deadly sins are illustrated from seven games. As a copy of this book
is available, which has had the good fortune to escape the colourist,
one of its twelve cuts--that showing card-playing, with which an
Augsburg woodcutter would be especially familiar--is here reproduced.
The face of the man at the far end of the table is perhaps the most
expressive piece of drawing in all the series. In 1473 Zainer printed
for the Abbot of SS. Ulric and Afra a _Speculum Humanae Salvationis_,
with numerous Biblical woodcuts. He also issued two editions in 1473
and 1477 of a Bible, with large initial letters, into each of which is
introduced a little picture. At the end of the second of these
editions he adds the fine device, shown on p. 40, which it is strange
that he should not have used more often. In 1474 he printed an account
of the supposed murder of a small boy, named Simon, by the Jews,
illustrated with some quite vivid pictures, and to about this time
belongs his finest work, an undated edition of the _Speculum Humanae
Vitae_, full of numerous delightful cuts illustrating various trades
and callings. In 1477 he illustrated a German edition of the
moralisation of the game of Chess by Jacobus de Cessolis, of which
Caxton had helped to print an English version a year or two before.
[Illustration: From Ingold's _Guldin Spiel_, Augsburg, 1472.]
[Illustration: Device of G[:u]nther Zainer.]
During the ten or twelve years of his activity at Augsburg, which
was brought to a close by his death in 1478, G[:u]nther Zainer printed
probably at least a hundred works, of which about twenty, mostly
either religious or, according to the ideas of the time, amusing, have
illustrations. Of the works printed during the second half of his
career, the majority have woodcut initials, large or small, and a few
also woodcut borders to the first page. The initials (which sometimes
only extend through a part of a book, blanks being left when the stock
failed), if seen by themselves, are rather clumsy, but harmonise well
with the remarkably heavy gothic type which Zainer chiefly used during
this period of his career. If his engraved work cannot be praised as
highly artistic, it was at least plentiful and bold, and admirably
adapted for the popular books in which it mostly appeared.
Johann B[:a]mler, who during twenty years from 1472 printed a long list
of illustrated books at Augsburg, can hardly have set much store by
originality, for in several of these, _e.g._ the _Belial_ (1473), the
_Plenarium_ (1474), the _Legenda Sanctorum_, &c., the cuts are wholly
or mainly copied from those in editions previously issued by Zainer.
B[:a]mler began his own career as an illustrator with some
frontispieces, as we may call them, which come after the table of
contents, and facing the first page of text in the _Summa Confessorum_
of Johannes Friburgensis, the _Goldenen Harfen_ of Nider, and others of
his early books. In 1474 he issued the first of his three editions of
the _Buch von den Sieben Tods[:u]nden und den Sieben Tugenden_. The
'Sins and Virtues' are personified as armed women riding on various
animals, with various symbolical devices on their shields, banners, and
helmets. But the ladies' faces are all very much alike, and the armorial
symbolism is so recondite, that a considerable acquaintance with
medieval 'Bestiaries' would be required to decipher it. Far better than
this conventional work are the cuts in the _Buch der Natur_, printed by
B[:a]mler in the next year. This is a fourteenth-century treatise
dealing with men and women, with the sky and its signs, with beasts,
trees, vegetables, stones, and famous wells, and, as in Zainer's
_Spiegel des menschlichen Lebens_, the artist drew from nature far
better than from his imagination. In an edition of K[:o]nigshofen's
_Chronik von allen K[:o]nigen und Kaisern_, printed in 1476, B[:a]mler
inserted four full-page cuts representing Christ in glory, the Emperor
Sigismund dreaming in his bed, St. Veronica holding before her the cloth
miraculously imprinted with the face of Christ, and the vision of Pope
Gregory, when the crucified Christ appeared to him on the altar.
Of B[:a]mler's later books, his edition (issued in 1482), of the History
of the Crusades (_T[:u]rken-Kreuzz[:u]ge_), by Rupertus de Sancto
Remigio, is perhaps the most noticeable. The large cut of the Pope,
attended by a young cardinal, preaching to a crowd of pilgrims, whose
exclamation of 'Deus Vult' is represented by a scroll between them and
the preacher, is really a fine piece of work, though the buildings in
the background, from whose windows listeners are thrusting their heads,
have the usual curious resemblance to bathing-machines. Some of the
smaller cuts also are good, notably one of a group of mounted pilgrims,
which has a real out-of-door effect. After 1482, though he lived another
twenty years, B[:a]mler published few or no new works, being content to
reprint his old editions.
Our next Augsburg printer is Anton Sorg, whose first dated work with
woodcuts is the _Buch der Kindheit unseres Herrn_ (1476). In his
_B[:u]chlein das da heisset der Seelen Trost_, he produced the first
series of illustrations to the Ten Commandments,--large full-page
cuts, rudely executed. His _Passion nach dem Texte der vier
Evangelisten_, first issued in 1480, ran through no less than five
editions in twelve years. In 1481 he produced the first German
translation of the _Travels of Mandeville_, illustrated with numerous
cuts of some merit. By far his most famous work is his edition of
Reichenthal's account of the Council of Constance, illustrated with
more than eleven hundred cuts, chiefly of the arms of the dignitaries
there present. The arms were necessarily intended to be coloured (the
present system of representing the heraldic colours by conventional
arrangements of lines and dots only dates from the seventeenth
century), and this fate has also befallen the larger illustrations,
whose workmanship is, indeed, so rude, that it could scarcely stand
alone. These larger cuts represent processions of the Pope and his
cardinals, the dubbing of a knight, a tournament, the burning of Huss
for heresy, the scattering of his ashes (which half fill a cart) over
the fields, and other incidents of the famous council. But the
interest of the book remains chiefly heraldic.
After 1480, printers of illustrated books became numerous at Augsburg,
Peter Berger, Johann Schobsser, Hans Schauer, and Lucas Zeissenmaier
being rather more important than their fellows. More prolific than
these, but not more enterprising in respect to new designs, was the
elder Hans Schoensperger, who began his long career in 1481. His chief
claim to distinction is his printing of the Emperor Maximilian's
_Theuerdank_, to which we shall refer in the next chapter. Erhard
Ratdolt deserves mention for his ten years' stay at Venice, where, as
we have seen, he issued in 1476 the _Calendar_, which is the first
book with an ornamental title-page. In 1486 he returned to Augsburg at
the invitation of Bishop Friedrich von Hohenzollern to print
service-books, into which in future he put all his best work. His
types and initial letters he brought with him from Italy; for his
illustrations, he had recourse to German artists of no exceptional
ability. A few of his service-books, however, are distinguished by
some interesting, if not very successful, experiments in printing some
of the colours in his woodcuts.
The foregoing sketch of the chief illustrated books published at
Augsburg during the fifteenth century can hardly escape the charge of
dullness. It has been worth while, however, to plod through with it,
because it may serve very well as an epitome of the average illustrated
work done between 1470 and 1490 throughout Germany. Some of the works we
have mentioned remained to the end Augsburg books--_e.g._ the _Buch der
Kunst geistlich zu werden_, the _Buch der Natur_, the _Historie aus den
Geschichten der R[:o]mer_, were repeatedly published there and nowhere
else. Others, _e.g._ the _Historie des K[:o]nigs Apollonius_, were
shared between Augsburg and Ulm, chiefly, no doubt, through the
relationship of the two Zainers. The _Historia Trojana_ of Guido delle
Colonne and the _Geschichte des grossen Alexander_ enjoyed long careers
at Augsburg, and were then taken up by Martin Schott at Strasburg.
Eleven editions of the _Belial_ of Jacobus de Theramo were shared fairly
equally between the two cities. The Bible and the _Legenda Aurea_ were
of too widespread an interest to be monopolised by one or two places. A
few books, like the _[AE]sop_ and the _De Claris Mulieribus_ of
Boccaccio, which start from Ulm, or the early _Fasciculus Temporum_, of
which more than half the early editions belonged to Cologne, trace their
source elsewhere than to Augsburg. But it was at Augsburg that the
majority of the popular illustrated books of the fifteenth century were
first published, and the editions issued in other towns were mostly more
or less servile imitations of them.
Next in importance to Augsburg in the early history of illustrated
books in Germany, ranks the neighbouring city of Ulm, where the names
of wood-engravers are found in the town registers from the early part
of the century, and the printers had thus plenty of good material to
call to their aid. The first illustrated book which we know with
certainty to have been printed at Ulm is the _De Claris Mulieribus_ of
Boccaccio, issued by Johann Zainer, in a Latin edition dated 1473,
and in a German translation, with the same cuts, about the same time.
This Johann Zainer was probably a kinsman of G[:u]nther Zainer of
Augsburg, but very little is known of him. The _De Claris Mulieribus_
begins with a fine engraved border extending over the upper and inner
margins of the first page. It is not merely decorative but pictorial,
the subject represented being the Temptation of Adam and Eve. Eve is
handing her husband an apple from the Forbidden Tree, amid whose
branches is seen the head of the serpent, his body being twisted into
a large initial S, and then tapering away into the upper section of
the border, where it becomes a branch, among the leaves of which
appear emblems of the seven deadly sins. The numerous woodcuts in the
text are quite equal to the average Augsburg work. Our illustration
shows Scipio warning Massinissa to put away his newly married wife,
and the hapless Sophonisba drinking the poison, which is the only
marriage gift her husband could send her.
Zainer's most striking success was achieved by his edition of
Steinh[:o]wel's version of the _Life and Fables of [AE]sop_, of which no
less than eleven editions were printed in various German towns before
the end of the century, for the most part closely copied from the Ulm
original. In this, there are altogether two hundred woodcuts, eleven
of which belong to the story of Sigismund at the end of the book. The
frontispiece is a large picture of [AE]sop, who, here and throughout
the chapters devoted to his imaginary 'life,' is represented as a
knavish clown, a variant of Eulenspiegel or Marcolphus. Some of the
illustrations to the fables are very good, notably those of the Sower
and the Birds, the Huntsman, and King Stork, here reproduced from
Sorg's reprint. The _[AE]sop_ and the Boccaccio _De Claris Mulieribus_
give Johann Zainer a high place among the German printers of
illustrated books. His other work was unimportant and mostly
imitative. His types are much smaller than those used in the early
Augsburg books, and his initials less heavy and massive. They are not
more than an inch high, and consist of a simple outline overlaid with
jagged work.
[Illustration: From Boccaccio _De Clar. Mul._, Ulm, 1473.]
[Illustration: King Log and King Stork, from the Ulm _[AE]sop_.]
In 1482, Leonhard Holl printed at Ulm an edition of Ptolemy's
_Cosmographia_, which contains the first woodcut map and fine initial
letters, one of which, showing the editor, Nicolaus Germanus,
presenting his book to the Pope, is given as a frontispiece to this
chapter. In 1483 he issued the first of many editions of the _Buch der
Weisheit der alten Menschen von Anbeginn der Welt_. The wisdom of the
ancients chiefly takes the form of fables, which are illustrated with
cuts, larger but much less artistic than those of Zainer's _[AE]sop_.
From Conrad Dinkmuth we have the first illustrated editions of three
notable works, the _Seelenwurzgarten_, or 'Garden of the Soul' (1483),
Thomas Lirar's _Schw[:a]bische Chronik_ (1486), and the _Eunuchus_ of
Terence (1486). This last is illustrated with fourteen remarkable
woodcuts, over five inches by seven in size, and each occupying about
three-fourths of a page. The scene is mostly laid in a street, and
there is some attempt at perspective in the vista of houses. The
figures of the characters are fairly good, but not above the average
Ulm work of the time. Two later Ulm books, written by Gulielmus
Caoursin and printed by Johann Reger in 1496, are of great interest,
one giving the _Stabilimenta_ or ordinances, of the Order of St. John
of Jerusalem, the other an account of the successful defence of Rhodes
by its knights against the Turks. Both are richly illustrated with
woodcuts of very considerable artistic merit.
[Illustration: From the _Eunuchus_, Ulm, 1486.]
At L[:u]beck in 1475 Lucas Brandis printed, as his first book, a notable
edition of the _Rudimentum Noviciorum_, an epitome of history, sacred
and profane, during the six ages of the world. The epitome is
epitomised at the beginning of the book by ten pages of cuts, mostly
of circles linked together by chains, and bearing the name of some
historical character. Into the space left by these circles are
introduced pictures of the world's history from the Creation and the
Flood down to the life of Christ, which is told in a series of nine
cuts on the last page. The first page of the text is surrounded,
except at the top, by a border in three pieces, into one section of
which are introduced birds, and into another a blank shield supported
by two lions. The inner margin of the first page of text bears a fine
figure of a man reading a scroll, and the two columns are separated
by a spiral of leaves climbing round a stick. The cuts in the text are
partly repeated from the preliminary pages, partly new, though extreme
economy is shown in their use, one figure of a philosopher standing
for at least twenty different sages. The large initial letters at the
beginning of the various books have scenes introduced into them, the
little battle-piece in the Q of the 'Quinta aetas' being the most
remarkable. Altogether this is a very splendid and noteworthy book,
and one which Brandis never equalled in his later work.
At Nuremberg in 1472, Johann Sensenschmidt, its first printer, issued a
German Bible, introducing illustrations into the large initial letters.
At Cologne first one printer and then another published illustrated
editions (ten in all) of the _Fasciculus Temporum_, though the cuts in
these are mostly restricted to a few conventional scenes of cities, and
representations of the Nativity and Crucifixion and of Christ in glory.
At Cologne also, about 1480, there appeared two great German dialect
Bibles in two volumes, in the type and with borders which are found in
books signed by Heinrich Quentel, to whose press they are therefore
assigned. There are altogether one hundred and twenty-five cuts,
ninety-four in the Old Testament (thirty-three of which illustrate the
life of Moses), and thirty-one in the New. They are of considerable
size, stretching right across the double-columned page, and are the
work of a skilful, but not very highly inspired, artist. They have
neither the na[:i]vet['e] of the early Augsburg and Ulm workmen, nor the
richness of the later German work. They were, however, immensely popular
at the time. In 1483 Anton Koberger copied them at Nuremberg, omitting,
however, the borders which occur on the first and third pages of the
first volume, and at the beginning of the New Testament, and rejecting
also nineteen of the thirty-one New Testament illustrations. The cuts
were used again in other editions, and influenced later engravers for
many years. Hans Holbein even used them as the groundwork for his own
designs for the Old Testament printed by Adam Petri at Basel in 1523.
At Strassburg, illustrated books were first issued by Knoblochtzer in
1477, and after 1480, Martin Schott and Johann Pr[:u]ss printed them in
considerable numbers. Both these printers, however, were as a rule
contented to reproduce the woodcuts in the different Augsburg books,
and the original works issued by them are mostly poor. An exception
may be made in favour of the undated _Buch der Heiligen drei K[:o]nige_
of Johannes Hildeshemensis, printed by Pr[:u]ss. This has a good border
round the upper and inner margins of the first page of text woodcut
initials, and fifty-eight cuts of considerable merit.[6]
At Mainz, Peter Schoeffer was very slow in introducing pictures into
his books, making no use of them until he took to Missal printing in
1483, when a cut of the Crucifixion became almost obligatory. In 1479,
however, a remarkable reprint of the _Meditationes_ of Cardinal
Turrecremata had been issued at Mainz by Johann Numeister or
Neumeister, a wandering Mainz printer, who had previously worked at
Foligno, and is subsequently found at Albi, but now while revisiting
his native place published there reduced adaptations of the cuts in
the editions printed by Hahn at Rome (see Chapter V), worked on soft
metal instead of on wood.
In addition to the places we have mentioned, illustrated books were
issued during this period by Bernhard Richel at Basel, by Conrad Fyner
at Esslingen, and by other printers in less important German towns.
But those we have already discussed are perhaps sufficient as
representatives of the first stage of book-illustration in Germany.
They have all this much in common that they are planned and carried
out under the immediate direction of the printers themselves, each of
whom seems to have had one or more wood-engravers attached to his
office, who drew their own designs upon the wood and cut them
themselves. There is a maximum of outline-work, a minimum of shading
and no cross-hatching. Every line is as direct and simple as
possible. At times the effect is inconceivably rude, at times it is
delightful in its child-like originality, and the craftsman's efforts
to give expression to the faces are sometimes almost ludicrously
successful. To the present writer these simple woodcuts are far more
pleasing than all the glories of the illustrated work of the next
century. They are in keeping with the books they decorate, in keeping
with the massive black types and the stiff white paper. After 1500, we
may almost say after 1490, we shall find that the printing and
illustrating of books are no longer closely allied trades. An artist
draws a design with pen and ink, a clever mechanic imitates it as
minutely as he can on the wood, and the design is then carelessly
printed in the midst of type-work, which bears little relation to it.
Paper and ink also are worse, and types smaller and less carefully
handled. Everything was sacrificed to cheapness, and the result was as
dull as cheap work usually is. By the time that the great artists
began to turn their attention to book-illustration, printing in
Germany was almost a lost art.
* * * * *
[6] Many of Knoblochtzer's books also have very pretentious borders,
though the designs are usually coarse. A quarto border used in his
_Salomon et Marcolfus_ with a large initial letter, and a folio one in
his reprint of _[AE]sop_ perhaps show his best work. These are
reproduced, with many other examples of his types, initials, and
illustrations in _Heinrich Knoblochtzer in Strassburg von Karl
Schorbach und Max Spirgatis_. (Strassburg, 1888.)
CHAPTER IV
GERMANY, FROM 1486
The second period of book-illustration in Germany dates from the
publication at Mainz in 1486 of Bernhard von Breydenbach's celebrated
account of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Two years previously Schoeffer
had brought out a _Herbarius_ in which one hundred and fifty plants were
illustrated, mostly only in outline, and in 1485 he followed this up
with another work of the same character, the _Gart der Gesundheyt_,
which has between three and four hundred cuts of plants and animals, and
a fine frontispiece of botanists in council. This in its turn formed the
basis of Jacob Meidenbach's enlarged Latin edition of the same work,
published under the title of _Hortus Sanitatis_, with additional cuts
and full-page frontispieces to each part. These three books in the
na[:i]vet['e] and simplicity of some of their illustrations, belong to
the period which we have reviewed in our last chapter, but in other cuts
a real effort seems to have been made to reproduce the true appearance
of the plant, and the increased care for accuracy links them with the
newer work. It is, however, the _Opus transmarinae peregrinationis ad
sepulchrum dominicum in Jherusalem_ which opens a new era, as the first
work executed by an artist of distinction as opposed to the nameless
craftsmen at whose woodcuts we have so far been looking.
When Bernhard von Breydenbach went on his pilgrimage in 1483 he took
with him the artist, Erhard Reuwich, and while Breydenbach made notes
of their adventures, Reuwich sketched the inhabitants of Palestine,
and drew wonderful maps of the places they visited. On their return to
Mainz in 1484, Breydenbach began writing out his Latin account of the
pilgrimage, and Reuwich not only completed his drawings, but took so
active a part in passing the work through the press that, though the
types used in it apparently belonged to Schoeffer, he is spoken of as
its printer. The book appeared in 1486, and as its magnificence
deserved, was issued on vellum as well as on paper. Its first page was
blank, the second is occupied by a frontispiece, in which the art of
wood-engraving attained at a leap to an unexampled excellence. In the
centre of the composition is the figure of a woman, personifying the
town of Mainz, standing on a pedestal, below and on either side of
which are the shields of Breydenbach and his two noble companions, the
Count of Solms and Sir Philip de Bicken. The upper part of the design
is occupied by foliage amid which little naked boys are happily
scrambling. The dedication to the Archbishop of Mainz begins with a
beautiful, but by no means legible, R, in which a coat of arms is
enclosed in light and graceful branches. This, and the smaller S which
begins the preface are the only two printed initials in the volume.
All the rest are supplied by hand.
The most noticeable feature in the book are seven large maps, of
Venice, Parenzo in Illyria, Corfu, Modon, near the bay of Navarino,
Crete, Rhodes, and Jerusalem. These are of varying sizes, from that of
Venice, which is some five feet in length, to those of Parenzo and
Corfu, which only cover a double-page. They are panoramas rather than
maps, and are plainly drawn from painstaking sketches, with some
attempt at local colour in the people on the quays and the shipping.
Besides these maps there is a careful drawing, some six inches square,
of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, headed 'Haec est dispositio et
figura templi dominici sepulchri ab extra,' and cuts of Saracens (here
shown), two Jews, Greeks, both seculars and monks, Syrians and
Indians, with tables of the alphabets of their respective languages.
Spaces are also left for drawings of Jacobites, Nestorians, Armenians,
and Georgians, which apparently were not engraved.
[Illustration: Saracens from Breydenbach.]
After Breydenbach and his fellows had visited Jerusalem they crossed
the desert to the shrine of St. Katharine on Mount Sinai, and this
part of their travels is illustrated by a cut of a cavalcade of Turks
in time of peace. There is also a page devoted to drawings of animals,
showing a giraffe, a crocodile, two Indian goats, a camel led by a
baboon with a long tail and walking stick, a salamander and a
unicorn. Underneath the baboon is written 'non constat de nomine'
('name unknown'), and the presence of the unicorn did not prevent the
travellers from solemnly asserting,--'Haec animalia sunt veraciter
depicta sicut vidimus in terra sancta!' At the end of the text is
Reuwich's device, a woman holding a shield, on which is depicted the
figure of a bird. The book is beautifully printed, in a small and very
graceful gothic letter. It obtained the success it deserved, for there
was a speedy demand for a German translation (issued in 1488), and at
least six different editions were printed in Germany during the next
twenty years, besides other translations.
Alike in its inception and execution Breydenbach's _Pilgrimage_ stands
on a little pinnacle by itself, and the next important books which we
have to notice, Stephan's _Schatzbehalter oder Schrein der wahren
Reichth[:u]mer des Heils und ewiger Seligkeit_ and Hartmann Schedel's
_Liber Chronicarum_, usually known as the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, are
in every respect inferior, even the unsurpassed profusion of the
woodcuts in the latter being almost a sin against good taste. Both
works were printed by Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, the one in 1491,
the other two years later, and in both the illustrations were
designed, partly or entirely, by Michael Wohlgemuth, whose initial W
appears on many of the cuts in the _Schatzbehalter_. Of these there
are nearly a hundred, each of which occupies a large folio page, and
measures nearly seven inches by ten. The composition in many of these
pictures is good, and the fine work in the faces and hair show that we
have travelled very far away from the outline cuts of the last
chapter. On the other hand, there is no lack of simplicity in some of
the scenes from the Old Testament. In his anxiety, for instance, to do
justice to Samson's exploits, the artist has represented him
flourishing the jawbone of the ass over a crowd of slain Philistines,
while with the gates of Gaza on his back he is casually choking a lion
with his foot. In the next cut he is walking away with a pillar, while
the palace of the Philistines, apparently built without any ground
floor, is seen toppling in the air. In contrast with these primitive
conceptions we find the figure of Christ often invested with real
dignity, and the representation of God the Father less unworthy than
usual. In the only copy of the book accessible to me the cuts are all
coloured, so that it is impossible to give a specimen of them, but the
figure of Noah reproduced from the _Nuremberg Chronicle_ gives a very
fair idea of the work of Wohlgemuth, or his school, at its best.
The _Chronicle_, to which we must now turn, is a mighty volume of
rather over three hundred leaves, with sixty-five or sixty-six lines
to each of its great pages. It begins with the semblance of a
title-page in the inscription in large woodcut letters on its first
page, 'Registrum huius operis libri cronicarum cum figuris et
ymaginibus ab inicio mundi,' though this really amounts only to a
head-line to the long table of contents which follows. It is
noticeable, also, as showing how slowly printed initials were adopted
in many towns in Germany, that a blank is left at the beginning of
each alphabetical section of this table, and a larger blank at the
beginning of the prologue, and that throughout the volume there are no
large initial letters. This is also the case with the
_Schatzbehalter_, the blanks in the British Museum copy being filled
up with garish illumination. After the 'table' in the _Chronicle_
there is a frontispiece of God in Glory, at the foot of which are two
blank shields held by wild men. The progress of the work of creation
is shown by a series of circles, at first blank, afterwards more and
more filled in. In the first five the hand of God appears in the upper
left-hand corner, to signify His creative agency. The two chief
features in the _Chronicle_ itself are its portraits and its maps. The
former are, of course, entirely imaginary, and the invention of the
artist was not equal to devising a fresh head for every person
mentioned in the text, a pardonable economy considering that there are
sometimes more than twenty of these heads scattered over a single page
and connected together by the branches of a quasi-genealogical tree.
The maps, if not so good as those in Breydenbach's _Pilgrimage_, are
still good. For Ninive, for 'Athene vel Minerva,' for Troy, and other
ancient places, the requisite imagination was forthcoming; while the
maps of Venice,[7] of Florence, and of other cities of Italy, France,
and Germany, appear to give a fair idea of the chief features of the
places represented. Nuremberg, of course, has the distinction of two
whole pages to itself (the other maps usually stretch across only the
lower half of the book), and full justice is done to its churches of
S. Lawrence and S. Sebaldus, to the Calvary outside the city walls,
and to the hedge of spikes, by which the drawbridge was protected from
assault.
[Illustration: From the _Nuremberg Chronicle_.]
We shall have very soon to return again to Wohlgemuth and Nuremberg,
but in the year which followed the production of the great _Chronicle_
Sebastian Brant's _Narrenschiff_ attracted the eyes of the literary
world throughout Europe to the city of Basel, and we also may be
permitted to digress thither. In the year of the _Chronicle_ itself a
Basel printer, Michael Furter, had produced a richly illustrated work,
the _Ritter vom Thurn von den Exempeln der Gottesfurcht und
Ehrbarkeit_, the cuts in which have ornamental borders on each side of
them. Brant had recourse to Furter a little later, but for his
_Narrenschiff_ he went to Bergmann de Olpe, from whose press it was
published in 1494. The engraver or engravers (for there seem to have
been at least two different hands at work) of its one hundred and
fourteen cuts are not known, but Brant is said to have closely
supervised the work, and may possibly have furnished sketches for it
himself. Many of the illustrations could hardly be better. The satire
on the book-fool in his library is too well known to need description;
other excellent cuts are those of the children gambling and fighting
while the fool-father sits blindfold,--of the fool who tries to serve
two masters, depicted as a hunter setting his dog to run down two
hares in different directions,--of the fool who looks out of the
window while his house is on fire,--of the sick fool (here shown) who
kicks off the bedclothes and breaks the medicine bottles while the
doctor vainly tries to feel his pulse,--of the fool who allows earthly
concerns to weigh down heavenly ones (a miniature city and a handful
of stars are the contents of the scales),--of the frightened fool who
has put to sea in a storm, and many others. The popularity of the book
was instantaneous and immense. Imitations of the Basel edition were
printed and circulated all over Germany: in 1497 Bergmann published a
Latin version by Jacob Locher with the same cuts, and translations
speedily appeared in almost every country in Europe. It is noteworthy
that in the _Narrenschiff_ we have no longer to deal with a great
folio but with a handy quarto, and that, save for its cuts and the
adjacent brokers, it has no artistic pretensions.
[Illustration: The Sick Fool]
In the same year (1494) as the _Narrenschiff_, Bergmann printed
another of Brant's works, his poems 'In laudem Virginis Mariae' and of
the Saints, with fourteen cuts, and in 1495 his _De origine et
conservatione bonorum regum et laude civitatis Hierosolymae_, which
has only two, but these of considerable size. In the following year
Brant transferred his patronage to Michael Furter, who printed his
_Passio Sancti Meynhardi_, with fifteen large cuts, by no means equal
to those of the _Narrenschiff_. In 1498 the indefatigable author
employed both his printers, giving to Bergmann his _Varia Carmina_ and
to Furter his edition of the _Revelatio S. Methodii_, which is
remarkable not only for its fifty-five illustrations, but for Brant's
allusion to his own theory, 'imperitis pro lectione pictura est,' to
the unlearned a picture is the best text. After 1498 Brant removed to
Strassburg, where his influence was speedily apparent in the
illustrated books published by Johann Gr[:u]ninger, who in 1494 had
issued as his first illustrated book an edition of the _Narrenschiff_,
and in 1496 published an illustrated and annotated _Terence_. He
followed these up with other editions of the _Narrenschiff_, Brant's
_Carmina Varia_, and a _Horace_ (1498), with over six hundred cuts,
many of which, however, had appeared in the printer's earlier books.
In 1501 he produced an illustrated _Boethius_, and in the next year
two notable works, Brant's _Heiligenleben_ and an annotated _Virgil_,
each of them illustrated with over two hundred cuts, of which very few
had been used before.
The year 1494 was notable for the publication not only of the
_Narrenschiff_, but of a Low Saxon Bible printed by Stephan Arndes at
L[:u]beck, where he had been at work since 1488. The cuts to this book
show some advance upon those in previous German Bibles, but they are
not strikingly better than the work in the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, to
whose designers we must now return. In 1496 we find Wohlgemuth
designing a frontispiece to an _Ode on S. Sebaldus_, published by
Conrad Celtes, a Nuremberg scholar, with whom he had previously
entered into negotiations for illustrating an edition of _Ovid_, which
was never issued. In 1501 Celtes published the comedies of Hroswitha,
a learned nun of the tenth century, who had undertaken to show what
charming religious plays might be written on the lines of Terence. By
far the finest of the large cuts with which the book is illustrated is
the second frontispiece, in which Hroswitha, comedies in hand, is
being presented by her Abbess to the Emperor. The designs to the plays
themselves are dull enough, a fault which those who are best
acquainted with the good nun's style as a dramatist will readily
excuse. Her one brilliant success, a scene in which a wicked governor,
who has converted his kitchen into a temporary prison, is made to
inflict his embraces on the pots and pans, instead of on the holy
maidens immured amidst them, was not selected for illustration.
The woodcuts to the plays of Hroswitha were designed by Wohlgemuth or
his scholars, and this was also the case with those in the _Quatuor
libri amorum_, published by Celtes in 1502, to which Albrecht D[:u]rer
himself contributed three illustrations. For three years, from St.
Andrew's Day 1486, D[:u]rer had served an apprenticeship to Wohlgemuth,
and when he returned to Nuremberg after his 'Wanderjahre,' during which
he seems to have executed a single woodcut of no great merit for an
edition of the _Epistles of S. Jerome_, printed by Nic. Kesler, at
Basel, in 1492, he too began to work as an illustrator. His first
important effort in this character is the series of sixteen
wood-engravings, illustrating the Apocalypse, printed at Nuremberg in
1498. The first leaf bears a woodcut title _Die heimliche Offenbarung
Johannis_, and on the verso of the last cut but one is the colophon,
'Gedr[:u]cket zu Nurnbergk durch Albrecht D[:u]rer maler, nach Christi
geburt M.CCCC und darnach im xcviij iar.' It has also in one or more
editions some explanatory text, taken from the Bible, but in spite of
these additions it is a portfolio of engravings rather than a book, and
as such does not come within our province. On the same principle we can
only mention, without detailed description, the _Epitome in Divae
Parthenices Mariae historiam_ of 1511, the _Passio Domini nostri Jesu_,
issued about the same date, and the _Passio Christi_, or 'Little
Passion,' as it is usually called, printed about 1512. All these have
descriptive verses by the Benedictine monk Chelidonius (though these do
not appear in all copies), but they belong to the history of
wood-engraving as such, and not to our humbler subject of
book-illustration. Still less need we concern ourselves with the
'Triumphal Car' and 'Triumphal Arch' of the Emperor Maximilian, designed
by D[:u]rer, and published, the one in 1522, the other not till after
the artist's death. Besides these works and the single sheet of the
Rhinoceros of 1513, D[:u]rer designed frontispieces for an edition of
his own poems in 1510, for a life of S. Jerome by his friend Lazarus
Spengler in 1514, and for the _Reformation der Stadt N[:u]rnberg_ of
1521. In 1513 also he drew a set of designs for half-ornamental,
half-illustrative borders to fill in the blank spaces left in the Book
of Prayers printed on vellum for the Emperor Maximilian in 1514. By him
also was the woodcut of Christ on the Cross, which appears first in the
Eichst[:a]tt _Missal_ of three years later. For us, however, D[:u]rer's
importance does not lie in these particular designs, but in the fact
that he set an example of drawing for the wood-cutters, which other
artists were not slow to follow.
In directing the attention of German artists to the illustration of
books, the Emperor Maximilian played a more important part than D[:u]rer
himself. As in politics, so in art, his designs were on too ambitious
a scale, and of the three great books he projected, the _Theuerdank_,
the _Weisskunig_, and the _Freydal_, only the first was brought to a
successful issue. This is a long epic poem allegorising the Emperor's
wedding trip to Burgundy, and though attributed to Melchior Pfintzing
was apparently, to a large extent, composed by Maximilian himself.
The printing was entrusted to the elder Hans Schoensperger of
Augsburg, but for some unknown reason, when the book was completed in
1517, the honour of its publication was allowed to Nuremberg. A
special fount of type was cut for it by Jost Dienecker of Antwerp, who
indulged in such enormous flourishes, chiefly to any _g_ or _h_ which
happened to occur in the last line of text in a page, that many
eminent printers have imagined that the whole book was engraved on
wood. The difficulties of the setting up, however, have been greatly
exaggerated, for the flourishes came chiefly at the top or foot of the
page, and are often not connected with any letter in the text. In the
present writer's opinion it is an open question whether the type,
which is otherwise a very handsome one, is in any way improved by
these useless appendages. They add on an average about an inch at the
top and an inch and a half at the foot to the column of the text,
which is itself ten inches in height, and contains twenty-four lines
to a full page. The task of illustrating this royal work was entrusted
to Hans Sch[:a]ufelein, an artist already in the Emperor's employment,
and from his designs there were engraved one hundred and eighteen
large cuts, each of them six and a half inches high by five and a half
broad. The cuts, which chiefly illustrate hunting scenes and knightly
conflicts, are not conspicuously better than those produced about the
same time by other German artists, but they have the great advantage
of having been carefully printed on fine vellum, and this has
materially assisted their reputation.
The _Weisskunig_, a celebration of Maximilian's life and travels, and
the _Freydal_, in honour of his knightly deeds, were part of the same
scheme as the _Theuerdank_. The two hundred and thirty-seven designs
for the _Weisskunig_ were mainly the work of Hans Burgkmair,[8] an
Augsburg artist of repute; its literary execution was entrusted to the
Emperor's secretary, Max Treitzsaurwein, who completed the greater
part of the text as early as 1512. But the Emperor's death in 1519
found the great work still unfinished, and it was not until 1775 that
it was published as a fragment, with the original illustrations
(larger, and perhaps finer, than those in the _Theuerdank_), of which
the blocks had, fortunately, been preserved. The _Freydal_, though
begun as early as 1502, was left still less complete; the designs for
it, however, are in existence at Vienna. The 'Triumph of the Emperor
Maximilian,' another ambitious work, with one hundred and thirty-five
woodcuts designed by Burgkmair, was first published in 1796.
The death of Maximilian in 1519 and the less artistic tastes of
Charles V. caused German illustrators to turn for work to the Augsburg
printers, and during the next few years we find them illustrating a
number of books for the younger Schoensperger, for Hans Othmar, for
Miller, and for Grimm and Wirsung, all Augsburg firms. The most
important result of this activity was the German edition of Petrarch's
_De Remediis utriusque Fortunae_, for which in the years immediately
following the Emperor's death an artist named Hans Weiditz, whose
identity has only lately been re-established, drew no less than two
hundred and fifty-nine designs. Owing to the death of the printer,
Grimm, the book was put on one side, but was finally brought out by
Heinrich Steiner, Grimm's successor, in 1532. In the interim some of
the cuts had been used for an edition of Cicero _De Senectute_, and
they were afterwards used again in a variety of works. Despite the
excellence of the cuts the _Petrarch_ is a very disappointing book. To
do justice to the fine designs the most delicate press work was
necessary, and, except when the pressmen were employed by an Emperor,
the delicacy was not forthcoming; it may be said, indeed, that it was
made impossible by the poorness and softness of the paper on which the
book is printed. At this period it was only the skill of individual
artists which prevented German books from being as dull and
uninteresting as they soon afterwards became.
Books of devotion in Germany never attained to the beauty of the
French _Horae_, but they did not remain uninfluenced by them. In or
before 1496 we find a _Nouum B. Mariae Virginis Psalterium_ printed at
Zinna, near Magdeburg, with very beautiful, though florid, borders. In
1513 there appeared at Augsburg a German prayer-book, entitled _Via
Felicitatis_, with thirty cuts, all with rich conventional borders,
probably by Hans Sch[:a]ufelein, and we have already seen that in the
same year D[:u]rer himself designed borders for the Emperor's own
_Gebetbuch_. In 1515, again, Burgkmair had contributed a series of
designs, many of which had rich architectural borders, to a _Leiden
Christi_, published by Schoensperger at Augsburg. In 1520 the same
artist designed another set of illustrations, with very richly
ornamented borders of flowers and animals, for the _Devotissimae
Meditationes de vita beneficiis et passione Jesu Christi_, printed by
Grimm. The use of borders soon became a common feature in German
title-pages, especially in the small quartos in which the Lutherans
and anti-Lutherans carried on their controversies; but it cannot be
said that they often exhibit much beauty.
The innumerable translations of the Bible, which were another result
of the Lutheran controversy, also provided plenty of work for the
illustrators. The two Augsburg editions of the New Testament in 1523
were both illustrated, the younger Schoensperger's by Sch[:a]ufelein,
Silvan Othmar's by Burgkmair. Burgkmair also issued a series of
twenty-one illustrations to the Apocalypse, for which Othmar had not
had the patience to wait.
[Illustration: Border attributed to Lucas Cranach.]
At Wittenberg the most important works issued were the repeated
editions of Luther's translation of the Bible. Here also Lucas
Cranach, who had previously (in 1509) designed the cuts for what was
known as the _Wittenberger Heiligthumsbuch_, in 1521 produced his
_Passional Christi und Antichristi_, in which, page by page, the
sufferings and humility of Christ were contrasted with the luxury and
arrogance of the Pope. At Wittenberg, too, the thin quartos with
woodcut borders to their title-pages were peculiarly in vogue, the
majority of the designs being poor enough, but some few having
considerable beauty, especially those of Lucas Cranach, of which an
example is here given. Meanwhile, at Strassburg, Hans Gr[:u]ninger and
Martin Flach and his son continued to print numerous illustrated
works, largely from designs by Hans Baldung Gr[:u]n, and a still more
famous publisher had arisen in the person of Johann Knoblouch, who for
some of his books secured the help of Urs Graf, an artist whose work
preserved some of the old-fashioned simplicity of treatment. At
Nuremberg illustrated books after Koburger's death proceeded chiefly
from the presses of Jobst Gutknecht and Peypus, for the latter of whom
Hans Springinklee, one of the minor artists employed on the
_Weisskunig_, occasionally drew designs. At Basel Michael Furter
continued to issue illustrated books for the first fifteen years of
the new century, Johann Amorbach adorned with woodcuts his editions of
ecclesiastical statutes and constitutions, and Adam Petri issued a
whole series of illustrated books, chiefly of religion and theology.
To Basel Urs Graf gave the most and the best of his work, and there
the young Hans Holbein designed in rapid succession the cuts for the
New Testament of 1522, for an _Apocalypse_, two editions of the
Pentateuch, and a Vulgate, besides numerous ornamental borders. Some
of these merely imitate the rather tasteless designs of Urs Graf, in
which the ground plan is architectural, and relief is given by a
profusion of naked children, not always in very graceful attitudes.
Holbein's best designs are far lighter and prettier. The foot of the
border is usually occupied by some historical scene, the death of John
the Baptist, Mucius Sc[ae]vola and Porsenna, the death of Cleopatra, the
leap of Curtius, or Hercules and Orpheus. In a title-page to the
_Tabula Cebetis_ he shows the whole course of man's life--little
children crowding through the gate, which is guarded by their
'genius,' and the fortune, sorrow, luxury, penitence, virtue, and
happiness which awaits them. The two well-known borders for the top
and bottom of a page, illustrating peasants chasing a thieving fox and
their return dancing, were designed for Andreas Cratander, for whom
also, as for Valentine Curio, Holbein drew printers' devices.
Ambrosius Holbein also illustrated a few books, the most noteworthy in
the eyes of Englishmen being the 1518 edition of More's _Utopia_,
printed by Froben. His picture of Hercules Gallicus, dragging along
the captives of his eloquence, part of a border designed for an
_Aulus Gellius_ published by Cratander in 1519, is worthy of Hans
himself. While the German printers degenerated ever more and more,
those of Basel and Zurich maintained a much higher standard of
press-work, and from 1540 to 1560, when the demand for illustrated
books had somewhat lessened, produced a series of classical editions
in tall folios, well printed and on good paper, which at least command
respect. They abound with elaborate initial letters, which are,
however, too deliberately pictorial to be in good taste. In Germany
itself by the middle of the sixteenth century the artistic impulse had
died away, or survived only in books like those of Jost Amman, in
which the text merely explains the illustrations. It is a pleasure to
go back some seventy or eighty years and turn our attention to the
beginning of book-illustration in Italy.
* * * * *
[7] Dr. Lippmann was of opinion that the map of Venice was adapted
from Reuwich's; that of Florence from a large woodcut, printed at
Florence between 1486 and 1490, of which the unique example is at
Berlin; and that of Rome from a similar map, now lost, which served
also as a model for the cut in the edition of the _Supplementum
Chronicarum_, printed at Venice in 1490.
[8] Burgkmair had already done work for the printers, notably for an
edition of Jornandes _De Rebus Gothorum_, printed in 1516, on the
first page of which King Alewinus and King Athanaricus are shown in
conversation, the title of the book being given in a shield hung over
their heads.
CHAPTER V
ITALY--I
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED BOOKS AND THOSE OF VENICE
Surrounded by pictures and frescoes, and accustomed to the utmost
beauty in their manuscripts, the Italians did not feel the need of the
cheaper arts, and for the first quarter of a century after the
introduction of printing into their country, the use of engraved
borders, initial letters, and illustrations was only occasional and
sporadic. Perhaps not very long after the middle of the century an
Italian block-book of the Passion had been issued, probably at Venice,
as it was there that most of the cuts were used again in 1487 for an
edition of the _Devote Meditatione_, attributed to S. Bonaventura. A
copy of this is in the British Museum; of the block-book eighteen
leaves are preserved at Berlin. Despite some ungainliness in the
figures and rather coarse cutting, the pictures are vigorous and
effective, but quite unlike any later Venetian work. Something of the
same kind may be said of those in an edition of the _Meditationes_ of
Cardinal Turrecremata, printed by Ulrich Hahn at Rome in 1467, the
first work printed in Italy with movable type, in which woodcut
illustrations were used. The cuts are thirty-four in number, and
professed to illustrate the same subjects as the frescoes recently
painted by the cardinal's order in the Church of San Maria di Minerva
at Rome.[9] The execution is so rude, that it is impossible to say
whether they are the work of a German influenced by Italian models, or
of an Italian working to please a German master, nor is the point of
the slightest importance. Thirty-three of the cuts were used again in
the editions printed at Rome in 1473 and 1478, and it is from the 1473
edition that the accompanying illustration of the Flight into Egypt is
taken. This in its original size is one of the best of the series, but
the reduction necessary for its appearance on one of our pages has had
a more than usually unfortunate effect, both on the cut itself and on
the printer's type which appears below it.
[Illustration: From the _Meditationes_ of Turrecremata, Rome, 1473.]
In 1481, the courtier-printer, Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, issued
an edition of the _Opuscula_ of Philippus de Barberiis adorned with
twenty-nine cuts representing twelve prophets, twelve sibyls, St. John
the Baptist, the Holy Family, Christ with the Emblems of His Passion,
the virgin Proba, and the philosopher Plato. Plato, Malachi, and Hosea
are all represented by the same cut, another serves for both Jeremiah
and Zechariah, and two of the Sibyls are also made to merge their
individualities. With the exception of the figure of Christ, which is
merely painful, the cuts are pleasantly and even ludicrously rude.
Nevertheless, they are not without vigour, and are, to my thinking,
greatly preferable to the more conventional figures of the twelve
Sibyls and Proba which appeared shortly afterwards in an undated
edition of the same book, printed by Sixtus Riessinger. In this
edition the figures are surrounded by architectural borders, and we
have also a border to the first page and several large initial
letters, all in exact imitation of the interlacement work, which is
the commonest form of decoration in Italian manuscripts of the time.
Riessinger's mark, a girl holding a black shield with a white arrow on
it, and a scroll with the letters S.R.D.A. (Sixtus Riessinger de
Argentina), is found in the 'register' at the end of the book. To
Riessinger we also owe a _Cheiromantia_, with figures of hands, which
I have not seen, while from Lignamine's press there was issued an
edition of the _Herbarium_ of Apuleius Barbarus (who was, of course,
confused with his famous namesake), which has rude botanical figures
and, at the end of the book, a most man-like portrait of a mandrake,
with a dog duly tugging at one of his fibrous legs. The list of
illustrated books printed at Rome before 1490 also includes[10] some
little editions, mostly by Silber or Plannck, of the _Mirabilia
Romae_, a guidebook to the antiquities of the city, in which there are
a few cuts of pilgrims gazing at the cloth of S. Veronica, of SS.
Peter and Paul, of Romulus and Remus, and other miscellaneous
subjects. The interest of all these books is purely antiquarian.
If we turn from Rome to the neighbouring city of Naples, we shall find
evidence of much more artistic work. In 1478 Sixtus Riessinger printed
there for Francesco Tuppo an edition of Boccaccio's _Libro di florio e
di bianzefiore_, or _Philocolo_, illustrated with forty-one woodcuts,
of no great technical merit, but by no means without charm. Two years
later a representation of the supposed origin of music by the figures
of five blacksmiths working at an anvil occurs in an edition of the
_Musices Theoria_ of Francesco Gafori, printed in 1480 by Francesco di
Dino. Much more important than this is a handsome edition of _[AE]sop_
published in 1485 by Francesco Tuppo, and printed for him by an
anonymous firm known to bibliographers as the 'Germain fidelissimi.'
This contains eighty-seven large cuts heavily cut, but well drawn and
with a massive vigour, one of which, representing the death of [AE]sop,
occupies a full page. The cuts illustrating the fabulist's life have
rather commonplace borders to them, but when the fables themselves are
reached, these are replaced by much more important ones. Into an upper
compartment are introduced figures of Hercules wrestling with Ant[ae]us,
Hercules riding on a lion, and a combat between mounted pigmies. The
fables have also a large border surrounding the first page of text,
used again in the Hebrew Bible of 1488. The ground-work of all the
borders is black, but this has not always enabled them to escape the
hand of the colourist. The book is also adorned by two large and two
smaller printed initials. To the same artist as the illustrator of the
_[AE]sop_ must be attributed the title-cut of Granollach's _Astrologia_,
issued in or about the same year. In 1486, again, Matthias Moravus
printed one of the few Italian _Horae_, a charming little book, three
inches by two, with sixteen lines of very pretty Gothic type, printed
in red and black, to each of its tiny pages, and four little woodcuts,
which in the only copy I have seen have been painted over. A daintier
prayer-book can hardly be conceived.
When we turn from the south to the north of Italy, we find that an
Italian printer at Verona had preceded the German immigrants in
issuing an important work with really fine woodcuts as early in 1472.
This is the _De Re Militari_ of Robertus Valturius, written some few
years previously, and dedicated to Sigismund Malatesta. In this fine
book, printed by John of Verona, there are eighty-two woodcuts
representing various military operations and engines, all drawn in
firm and graceful outline, which could hardly be bettered. The designs
for these cuts have been attributed to the artist Matteo de' Pasti,
whose skill as a painter, sculptor, and engraver, Valturius had
himself commended in a letter written in the name of Malatesta to
Mahomet II. The conjecture rests solely on this commendation, but
seems intrinsically probable. The book has no other adornment save
these woodcuts and its fine type. Another edition was printed in the
same town eleven years later by Boninus de Boninis.
Besides the _Valturius_, the only other early Verona book with
illustrations known to me is an edition of _[AE]sop_ in the Italian
version of Accio Zucco, printed by Giovanni Alvisio in 1479. This has
a frontispiece in which the translator is seen presenting his book to
a laurel-crowned person sitting in a portico, through which there is a
distant view. This is followed by a page of majuscules containing the
title of the book, but ending with a 'foeliciter incipit.' On the back
of this is a tomb-like erection, bearing the inscription 'Lepidissimi
[AE]sopi Fabellae,' which gives it the rank of the second ornamental
title-page (see p. 32 for the first). Facing this is a page surrounded
by an ornamental border, at the foot of which is the usual shield
supported by the usual naked boys. Within the border are Latin verses
beginning:
"Vt iuuet et prosit conatum pagina praesens
Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis,"
the lines being spaced out with fragments from the ornamental borders
which surround each of the pictures in the body of the book. These, on
the whole, are not so good as those in the Naples edition of 1485, but
were helped out, at least in some copies, by rather pretty colouring.
The chief feature in the book is the care bestowed upon the
preliminary leaves.
In Florence, before 1490, we have no example of wood-engraving
employed in book illustration, but in 1477, Nicolaus Lorenz of Breslau
issued there the first of three books with illustrations engraved on
copper. This is an edition of Bettini's _Monte Santo di Dio_ with
three plates, representing respectively (1) the Holy Mountain, up
which a man is climbing by the aid of a ladder of virtues; (2) Christ
standing in a 'mandorla' or almond-shaped halo formed by the heads of
cherubs; and (3) the torments of Hell. This was followed in 1481 by a
_Dante_ with the commentary of Landino, with engravings illustrating
the first eighteen cantos. Spaces were left for engravings at the head
of the other cantos, but the plan was too ambitious, and they were
never filled up. Some copies of the book have no engravings at all,
others only two, those prefixed to Cantos 1 and 3, the first of which
is most inartistically introduced on the lower margin of the page,
tempting mutilation by the binder's shears. The other venture of
Nicolaus Lorenz, which has engraved work, is the _Sette Giornate della
Geographia_ of Berlinghieri, in which he introduces numerous maps.
At Milan only two illustrated books are known to have been issued
before 1490, both of which appeared in 1479. The rarer of these, which
is seldom found in perfect condition, is the _Summula di pacifica
Conscientia_ of Fra Pacifico di Novara, printed by Philippus de
Lavagna, and illustrated with three copper-plates, one of which
represents the virtues of the Madonna, the others containing diagrams
exhibiting the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. The other book is
a _Breviarium totius juris canonici_, printed by Leonard Pachel and
Ulrich Scinzenceller, with a woodcut portrait of its author, 'Magister
Paulus Florentinus ordinis Sancti Spiritus,' otherwise Paolo
Attavanti.
The illustrated books printed in Italy which we have hitherto noticed
are of great individual interest, but they led to the establishment of
no school of book-illustration, and the value of wood engravings was
as yet so little understood that the cuts in them often failed to
escape the hands of the colourists. At Venice, on the other hand,
where Bernhard Maler and Erhard Ratdolt introduced the use of printed
initials and borders in 1476, we find a continuous progress to the
record of which we must now turn. The border to the title-page of the
Kalendars of 1476 has already been noticed: both the Latin and the
Italian editions also contained printed initials of a rustic shape,
resembling those in some early books in Ulm, but larger and better.
The next year the partners made a great step in advance in the
initials and borders of an _Appian_, and an edition of Cepio's _Gesta
Petri Mocenici_. These were followed by an edition of _Dionysius
Periegetes_, and in 1478 by the _Cosmographia_ of Pomponius Mela.
Three distinct borders are used in these books, all of them with light
and graceful floral patterns in relief on a black ground. The large
initials are of the same character, and both these and the borders are
unmistakably Italian. In 1478 Ratdolt lost the aid of Bernhard Maler,
who up to that date seems to have been the leading spirit of the firm,
and the books subsequently issued are much less decorative. In 1479
another German, Georg Walch, issued an edition of the _Fasciculus
Temporum_ with illustrations mostly poor enough, but with a quaint
little attempt at realism in one of Venice. These cuts of Walch's, and
also a decorative initial, Ratdolt was content to copy on a slightly
larger scale in an edition of his own the next year. He also printed
an undated _Chiromantia_, with twenty-one figures of heads, a reprint
of which bearing his name and that of Mattheus Cerdonis de
Windischgretz was issued at Padua in 1484. In 1482, came the _Poetica
Astronomica_ of Hyginus, with numerous woodcuts of the astronomical
powers, those of Mercury (here very slightly reduced) and Sol being
perhaps the best. To the same year belongs a reprint of the
_Cosmographia_ of Pomponius Mela with a curious map and a few good
initials, also a _Euclid_ with mathematical diagrams and a border and
initials from the _Appian_ of 1477.
[Illustration: From the _Hyginus_ of 1482.]
After 1482 Ratdolt does not seem to have printed any new illustrated
books, and in 1486 he ceased printing at Venice and returned, as we
have seen, to Augsburg. Subject to the doubt as to whether he has not
been credited with praise which really belongs to Bernhard Maler, his
brief Italian career entitles him to a place of some importance among
the decorators of books, for though his illustrations were
unimportant, his borders and initials are among the best of the
fifteenth century.
In 1482 Octavianus Scotus printed three Missals with a rude cut of the
Crucifixion, and these were imitated by other printers in 1483, 1485,
and 1487.
The year 1486 was marked by the publication, by Bernardino de
Benaliis, of an edition of the _Supplementum Chronicarum_ of Giovanni
Philippo Foresti of Bergamo, with numerous outline woodcuts of cities,
for the most part purely imaginary and conventional, the same cuts
being used over and over again for different places. Four years later
a new edition was printed by Bernardino de Novara, in which more
accurate pictures were substituted in the case of some of the more
important towns, notably Florence and Rome. In both issues the first
three cuts, representing the Creation, the Fall, and the sacrifice of
Cain and Abel, are copied from those in the Cologne Bible.
The year after his edition of the _Supplementum_, Bernardinus de
Benaliis printed an _[AE]sop_ with sixty-one woodcuts adapted from those
in the Veronese edition of 1479. Of this edition Dr. Lippmann, who
had the only known copy under his charge at Berlin, remarks that 'the
style of engraving is, to a large extent, cramped and angular, and the
entire appearance of the work is that of a genuine chapbook.'
[Illustration: From the _Devote Meditatione_, Venice, 1508 [1489].]
In 1488 we arrive at the first of the numerous illustrated editions of
the _Trionfi_ of Petrarch. This was printed by Bernardino de Novara,
and has six full-page cuts, measuring some ten inches by six, and
illustrating the triumphs of Love, of Chastity, Death, Fame, and Time,
and of the true Divinity over the false gods. The designs are
excellent, but the engraver had very imperfect control over his point,
and his treatment of the eyes of the figures introduced is by itself
sufficient to spoil the pictures. Curiously enough, the ornamental
border of white figures on a black ground is certainly better cut than
the pictures themselves.
The same inferiority of the engraver to the designer is seen in the
illustrations to the 1489 edition of the _Deuote Meditatione sopra la
passione del nostro signore_ attributed to S. Bonaventura. The first
illustrated edition of this book, with eleven illustrations taken
(slightly cut down) from the block book of the Passion already
mentioned, had been printed in 1487 by Ieronimo de Santis. The 1489
edition was printed by Matteo di Codecha (or Capcasa) of Parma, who
republished the book no less than six times during the next five years,
after which the cuts were used by other printers,--_e.g._ by Gregorio di
Rusconi, from whose edition in 1508 our illustration of the mocking of
Christ is taken. It is interesting to compare this Venetian series with
the Florentine edition published a little later by Antonio Mischomini,
whose engraver, while taking many hints from the designs of his
predecessor, greatly improved on them. The next year witnessed the
first Venetian edition of another work in which the artists of the two
cities were to be matched together. This is the _Fior di Virt[u']_,
whose title-cut of Fra Cherubino da Spoleto gathering flowers in the
convent garden shows a great advance on previous Venetian work.
Unfortunately the British Museum copy has been slightly injured, so that
I am obliged to take my reproduction from the second of two similar
editions published by Matteo Codecha in 1492, 1493. These have each
thirty-six vignettes in the text, illustrating the examples in the
animal world of the virtues which the author desired to inculcate.
[Illustration: From the _Fior di Virt[u']_, Venice, 1493.]
We must now turn to the first illustrated edition of Malermi's Italian
version of the Bible, printed in 1490. After the woodcut basis for the
six little illuminations in the Spencer copy of Adam of Ammergau's
edition of 1471, the first Biblical woodcuts at Venice are a series of
thirty-eight small vignettes which decorate an edition of the
_Postilla_ or sermons, of Nicolaus de Lyra, printed for Octavianus
Scotus in 1489. In the Bible itself, printed the next year by Giovanni
Ragazzo for Lucantonio Giunta, the illustrations are on a very lavish
scale, numbering in all three hundred and eighty-three, of which a few
are duplicates, and about a fourth are adapted in miniature from the
cuts in the Cologne Bibles, which formed a model for so many other
editions. Some of the best cuts in this and other Venetian books are
signed with a small _b_, which by some writers has been supposed to
stand for the name of the artist who designed them, but is more
probably to be referred to the workshop at which they were engraved.
The craftsmen employed on the New Testament were quite unskilled, but
many of the illustrations to the Old Testament are delightful. The
first page of the Bible is occupied by six somewhat larger cuts,
illustrating the days of Creation, joined together within an
architectural border. Other editions containing the same cuts, with
additions from other books, were issued in 1494, 1498, and 1502. A
rival edition, printed by Guglielmo de Monteferrato, with a new set of
cuts of a similar character appeared in 1493.
These three religious works, the _Meditatione_, the _Postilla_, and
the Malermi Bible thoroughly established the use of vignettes, or
small cuts worked into the text, as an alternative to full-page
illustrations, like those in the _Petrarch_, and it was natural that
this method of decoration should soon be applied to the greatest of
Italian works, the _Divina Commedia_. In producing an illustrated
Dante, Venice had been anticipated not only by the Florentine edition
of 1481, though the engravings in this are only found in the first few
cantos, but by a very curious edition published at Brescia in 1487,
with full-page cuts, surrounded by a black border with white
arabesques. These large cuts, which measure ten inches by six, are
very coarsely executed, and have no merit save what the earlier ones
derive from their imitation of those in the Florentine edition. In the
course of the year 1491 two illustrated _Dantes_ were published at
Venice, the first on March 3rd by Bernardino Benali and Matteo
[Codecha] da Parma, the second on November 18th by Pietro Cremonese.
The earlier edition has a fine woodcut frontispiece illustrating the
first canto, but the vignettes which succeed it are so badly cut as to
lose all their beauty. In the later edition the same designs appear to
have been followed, but the vignettes are larger and much better cut,
so that they are at least somewhat less unworthy of their subject.
Both editions have printed initials, but of the poorest kind, and in
both the text is hidden away amid the laborious commentary of Landino.
After Dante's _Divina Commedia_ it is natural to expect an edition of
Boccaccio's _Decamerone_, and this duly followed the next year from
the press of Gregorius de Gregoriis. The first page is occupied by a
woodcut of the ten fine ladies and gentlemen who tell the stories,
seated in the beautiful garden to which they had retired from the
plague which was raging around them. Beneath this are seventeen lines
of text, with a blank left for an initial H, and woodcut and text are
surrounded by an architectural border, at the foot of whose columns
little boys standing on the heads of lions are blowing horns, while in
the lower section of the design the usual blank shield is approached
from either side by cupids riding on rams. The blank for the initial
is a great blot on the page, as any coloured letter would have
destroyed the delicacy of the whole design. In the body of the work
each of the ten books is headed by a double cut, in one part of which
the company of narrators is standing in front of a gateway, while one
of their number is playing a guitar; in the other they are all seated
before a fountain, presided over by a wreath-crowned master of the
story-telling. The vignettes which illustrate the different tales vary
very much in quality, though some, like the little cut of the Marquis
and his friends approaching Griselda as she brings water from the
well, could hardly be bettered.
The _Boccaccio_ of 1492 heralded a long series of illustrated books
from the press of Gregorius de Gregoriis and his brother John. Most of
these were devotional in their character, _e.g._ the _Zardine de
Oratione_, the _Monte dell' Oratione_, the _Vita e Miracoli del Sancto
Antonio di Padova_, the _Passione di Cristo_, &c. The _Novellino_ of
Masuccio Salernitano formed a pendant to the _Boccaccio_, and was
published in the same year. To the Gregorii we also owe the
magnificent border, in white relief on a black ground, to the Latin
_Herodotus_ of 1494, repeated again in the second volume of the works
of S. Jerome published in 1497-98. Equally famous with any of these is
the same printer's series of editions of the _Fascicolo de Medicina_
of Johannes Ketham. In the first of these, printed in 1491, the
illustrations are confined to cuts of various dreadful-looking
surgical instruments; but in 1493 large pictures were added, each
occupying the whole of a folio page, and representing a dissection, a
consultation of physicians, the bedside of a man struck down by the
plague. The dissection was printed in several colours, but this
experiment was abandoned, and a new block was cut for the subsequent
editions. In some of his later books Gregorius repaired the mistake of
the _Boccaccio_, and used excellent woodcut initials.
The _Herodotus_ of 1494 has only its magnificent border by way of
illustration, but other classical authors received much more generous
treatment during this decade. An Italian _Livy_, with numerous
vignettes, was printed in 1493 by Giovanni di Vercelli, and a Latin
one in 1495 by P. Pincio, Lucantonio Giunta in each case acting as
publisher.[11] In 1497 Lazarus de Soardis printed for Simon de Luere a
_Terence_ with numerous vignettes; and in the same year there appeared
an illustrated edition, several times reprinted, of the
_Metamorphoses_ of Ovid, the printer being Giovanni Rossi and the
publisher once more Lucantonio Giunta. The cuts in this work measure
something over three inches by five, and have little borders on each
side of them; but the fineness of the designs is lost by poor
engraving. Some of them are signed _ia_, others N.
We now approach one of the most famous books in the annals of Venetian
printing, the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ printed by Aldus in 1499, at
the expense of a certain Leonardo Crasso of Verona, 'artium et iuris
Pontificis consultus,' by whom it was dedicated to Guidobaldo, Duke of
Urbino. The author of the book was Francesco Colonna, a Dominican
friar, who had been a teacher of rhetoric at Treviso and Padua, and
was now spending his old age in the convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in
Venice, his native city. Colonna's authorship of the romance is
revealed in an acrostic formed by the initial letters of the
successive chapters, which make up the sentence, 'Poliam Frater
Franciscus Columna peramavit': 'Brother Francesco Colonna greatly
loved Polia.' Who Polia was is a little uncertain. In the opening
chapter she tells her nymphs that her real name was Lucretia, but she
has been identified with a Hippolita Lelio, daughter of a jurisconsult
at Treviso, who entered a convent after having been attacked by the
plague, which visited Treviso from 1464 to 1468. On the other hand, it
is plausibly suggested that Polia ([Greek: polia]), 'the grey-haired
lady,' is only a symbol of Antiquity, and at the beginning of the book
there is at least a pretence of an allegory, though this is not
carried very far.
[Illustration: From the _Hypnerotomachia_, Venice, 1499.]
In the story Polifilo, a name intended to mean 'the lover of Polia,'
imagines himself in his dream as passing through a dark wood till he
reaches a little stream, by which he rests. The valley through which
it runs is filled with fragments of ancient architecture, which form
the subjects of many illustrations. As he comes to a great gate he is
frightened by a dragon. Escaping from this, he meets five nymphs (the
five senses), and is brought to the court of Queen Eleuterylida (Free
Will). Then follows a description of the ornaments of her palace and
of four magnificent processions, the triumphs of Europa, Leda, and
Dana[:e], and the festival of Bacchus. After this we have a triumph of
Vertumnus and Pomona, and a picture of nymphs and men sacrificing
before a terminal figure of Priapus. Meanwhile Polifilo has met the
fair Polia, and together they witness some of the ceremonies in the
Temple of Venus, and view its ornaments and those of the gardens round
it. The first book, which is illustrated with one hundred and
fifty-one cuts, now comes to an end. Book II describes how the
beautiful Polia, after an attack of the plague, had taken refuge in a
temple of Diana; how, while there, she dreamt a terrifying dream of
the anger of Cupid, so that she was moved to let her lover embrace
her, and was driven from Diana's temple with thick sticks; lastly, of
how Venus took the lovers under her protection, and at the prayer of
Polifilo caused Cupid to pierce an image of Polia with his dart,
thereby fixing her affections as firmly on Polifilo as he could
wish--if only it were not all a dream! This second book is illustrated
with only seventeen woodcuts, but as these are not interrupted by any
wearisome architectural designs, their cumulative effect is far more
impressive than those of the first, though many of the pictures in
this--notably those of Polifilo in the wood and by the river, his
presentation to Eleuterylida, the scenes of his first meeting with
Polia, and some of the incidents of the triumphs--are quite equal to
them. Unfortunately, the best pictures in both books are nearly
square, so that it is impossible to reproduce them in an octavo except
greatly reduced.
The woodcuts of the _Polifilo_ have been ascribed to nearly a dozen
artists, but in every case on the very slenderest grounds. Some of the
cuts, like some of those in the Mallermi Bible, are marked with a
little _b_; but this, as has been said, is almost certainly indicative
of the engraver's workshop from which they proceeded, rather than of
the artist who drew the designs. The edition of 1499 is a handsome
folio; the text is printed in fine Roman type, with three or four
different varieties of beautiful initial letters. The title and
headings are printed in the delicate majuscules which belong to the
type, and have a very graceful appearance. A second edition of the
_Polifilo_ was published in 1545, with, for the most part, the same
cuts. This was followed in the next year by a French translation by
Jean Martin, printed at Paris by Jacques Kerver, and republished three
times during the century. For the French editions the cuts were freely
imitated, the rather short, plump Italian women reappearing as ladies
of even excessive height. In England in 1592 Simon Waterson printed an
abridged translation with the pretty title, _Hypnerotomachia, or the
Strife of Love in a Dreame_, with a few cuts copied from the Italian
originals. The book, now extremely rare, was apparently not well
received, for Waterson, abandoning all hope of a second edition,
speedily parted with his wood-blocks. Four of the cuts are found amid
the most incongruous surroundings in the _Strange and wonderful
tidings happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, in
his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries_, though this
egregious work was printed by A. I. for William Barley in 1595, only
three years after the _Strife of Love in a Dreame_.
As we have noted, Aldus printed the _Hypnerotomachia_ on commission,
and save for two discreditably bad cuts in his _Musaeus_ and a rather
fine portrait of S. Catherine of Siena in his edition of her Letters
printed in 1500, he troubled himself with no other illustrations. In
his larger works he revived the memory of the stately folios of
Jenson, and in his popular editions sought no other adornment than the
beauty of his italic type. If pictures were needed to make a book more
acceptable to a rich patron, he did not disdain to have recourse to
the illuminator. Some of his Greek books have most beautiful initial
letters, and in the Aristotle of 1497 he employs good head-pieces,
though these fall far short of the large oriental design, printed in
red, placed by his friendly rival, Zacharias Kaliergos, at the top of
the first page of the _Commentary_ of Simplicius on Aristotle of 1499.
[Illustration]
The influence of Aldus certainly helped to widen the gulf which
already existed between the finely printed works intended for scholars
and wealthy book-lovers and the cheaper and more popular ones in which
woodcuts formed an addition very attractive to the humbler
book-buyers. Perhaps this in part accounts for the great deterioration
in Italian illustrated books after the close of the fifteenth century.
The delicate vignettes and outline cuts only appear in reprints, and
in new works their place is taken by heavily shaded engravings, mostly
of very little charm. The numerous liturgical works published by
Lucantonio Giunta and his successors perhaps show this work at its
best. They are mostly printed in Gothic type with an abundant use of
red ink, and the heaviness of the illustrations is thus all the better
carried off. But as the century advanced Venetian printing
deteriorated more and more rapidly: partly from excessive competition;
partly, as Mr. Brown has shown in his _The Venetian Printing Press_,
from too much interference on the part of the Government; partly, we
must suppose, simply from the decline of good taste, though it is
noticeable that between 1540 and 1560, when the insides of books had
become merely dull, is a brilliant period in the history of Venetian
binding. Whatever the cause, within a few years after the close of the
fifteenth century the glories of Venetian printing had disappeared.
[Illustration: From the _Epistole_ of Pulci, Florence, _c._ 1495.]
* * * * *
[9] The title of the book, printed in red, beneath the first woodcut,
reads: 'Meditationes Rever[=e]dissimi patris d[~n]i Johannis de turre
cremata sacros[~c]e Romane eccl'ie cardinalis posite & depicte de
ipsius m[~a]dato [~i] eccl'ie ambitu Marie de Minerva, Rome.'
[10] Maps hardly come under the head of illustrations, but we may note
the appearance in 1478 of the edition of Ptolemy's _Cosmographia_, by
Arnold Buckinck, with maps engraved by Conrad Sweynheim, the partner
of Pannartz.
[11] In the intervening year Giunta had published the _Santa
Catharina_, printed by Matteo Codecha, some copies of which have the
false date MCCCCLXXXIII.
CHAPTER VI
ITALY--II
FLORENCE AND MILAN--ITALIAN PRINTERS' MARKS
We must now return from Venice to Florence, where, after the
experiments with engravings on copper in 1477 and 1481, no illustrated
books had been published until on March 27, 1490, Francesco di Dino
(whom we have already seen at work at Naples ten years earlier)
brought out an edition of the _Specchio di Croce_ of Domenico Cavalca,
with a frontispiece representing the Crucifixion. In September of the
same year an edition of the _Laudi_ of Jacopone da Todi (the
Franciscan author of the _Stabat Mater_), was printed by Francesco
Buonaccorsi, which contains on the verso of its eighth leaf a most
beautiful outline woodcut,[12] St. Jacopone kneeling by a little
lectern, his book on the ground, while above him is a vision of the
Madonna enshrined in a 'mandorla,' supported below by three cherubs
and above by four maturer angels. In 1491 we make the acquaintance of
Lorenzo di Morgiani and Giovanni Tedesco da Maganza, or Johann Petri
of Mainz, from whose press some of the most important of the
Florentine illustrated books were issued. The first result of their
activity was a new edition of Bettini's _Monte Santo di Dio_, in which
the three copperplates of the edition of 1477 were freely imitated
upon wood. In the same year they printed a little treatise on
Arithmetic, written by Philippo Calandro and dedicated to Giuliano dei
Medici. This is the most delightful of all arithmetic books. It has a
title-cut of 'Pictagoras Arithmetice Introductor,' and the earlier
pages of the book are surrounded by a characteristic Renaissance
border. Towards the end of the work there is a series of illustrated
problems, only a little more absurd than those which still occur in
children's school-books. One of these, however, is so good that we
must permit ourselves a little digression to quote it in a free
translation:--
"A squirrel flying from a cat climbed to the top of a tree 26-3/4
arm's-lengths (_braccia_) in height. The cat, wanting to seize the
squirrel, began to climb the tree, and each day leaped up half an
arm's length, and each night descended a third of one. The squirrel,
on its part, believing that the cat had gone away, wanted to get
down from the tree, and each day descended a quarter of an arm's
length, and each night went back one-fifth of one: I want to know in
how many days the cat will reach the said squirrel?"
The answer is 121 days; but the picture must have been taken on the
first or second, for the cat is still very plump, and so large in
proportion to the tree that if he had but stood on his hind legs he
ought to have reached the top! Others of the pictures are without this
charming touch of absurdity, perhaps the most perfect being a little
cut of a traveller on horseback, as to the expenses of whose journey
the teacher was anxious for some information from his young friends.
These little cuts are all about an inch square, and drawn in outline.
Another edition of the Arithmetic, in Roman type instead of black
letter, but otherwise very similar, was issued in 1518 by Bernardo
Zucchetta.
With the year 1492 we come to the first dated editions of the
illustrated Savonarola tracts, which play no inconsiderable part in
the history of book illustration in Italy. Their existence is in
itself the best refutation of the popular belief that the reformer's
influence was wholly hostile to the interests of art, though the
number of artists who reckoned themselves, formally or informally,
among his followers should have sufficed to prevent the belief growing
up. These tracts, save for the cuts with which they are adorned, are
insignificant in appearance, being for the most part badly printed,
and with few and poor initial letters. The woodcuts, seldom more than
two in a tract, are, however, charming, and have won for them much
attention.
[Illustration: From an undated Savonarola tract, Florence, _c._ 1495.]
The first publisher of these tracts seems to have been Antonio
Mischomini, who on June 26, 1492, issued a
Trac
tato
dello
Amore Di Iesu Christo Composto
da frate Hieronymo da Ferrara del
l'ordine
de frati
predica
tori pri
ore di San
Marcho di
F I R E N Z E
with the title arranged cross-wise, as here shown. On the back of the
title is a picture of the Crucifixion, with the Blessed Virgin and S.
John standing by the Cross. This was followed on June 30th by the
_Tractato della humilta_, with a large title-cut representing the dead
Christ before His Cross, an angel supporting each arm. Neither of
these cuts shows typical Florentine work, for the blank spaces have
all to be cleared away by the engraver, and there is an abundance of
shading. The first design was clearly spoilt in the cutting, the
second is of great beauty. The typical Florentine work, in which white
lines are cut out from a black ground, as well as black lines from a
white, appears in the _Tractato ouero Sermone della oratione_,
finished by Mischomini on October 20th. Here the title-cut shows the
scene at Gethsemane: the three disciples asleep in the foreground,
Christ in prayer, and the hands of an angel holding a cup appearing
in a corner above. The picture, as always in distinctively Florentine
work, is surrounded by a little border or frame, in which a small
white pattern is picked out from a black ground.
The other illustrated Savonarola tracts bearing an early date, with
which I am acquainted, are the _De Simplicitate Christianae Vitae_,
printed 'impensis Ser Petri Pacini,' August 28th, 1496, and the
_Predica dell arte del bene Morire_, preached on Nov. 2 of that year,
taken down at the time by Ser Lorenzo Violi, and doubtless published
immediately afterwards. The _De Simplicitate_ has on its first page a
picture of a Dominican friar writing in his cell, a sand-glass at his
side, a crucifix in front of his desk, and books and his gown
scattered on a table. The illustrations to the _Arte del bene Morire_
comprise a hideous outline cut of Death, scythe on shoulder, flying
over ground strewn with corpses (this is enclosed in a large black
border used by Mischomini in 1492), and cuts of Death showing a young
man Heaven and Hell,[13] of a sick man with his good and bad angels
watching him and Death standing without the door, and of a dying man
attended by a friar, Death sitting now at his bed's foot, and the
angels watching as before.
Turning now to the undated tracts, we find that the _Expositione del
Pater Noster_ contains (1) a very beautiful variant of the
representation of the scene on Gethsemane, the angel appearing on the
left instead of the right,[14] (2) a cut of S. James writing at a
table, (3) a small cut of David in prayer, and some still smaller
pictures of prophets and of the Crucifixion. At the end of the book is
an _Epistola a una devota donna Bolognose_, which is headed and ended
by a cut of a Dominican preaching in the open air to a congregation of
nuns. An undated edition of the _Tractato della Humilta_ has Images of
Pity at the beginning and end, the former surrounded by a black
border. Yet another edition has an outline cut of Christ holding His
Cross, while blood streams from His hand into a chalice. An edition of
the _Tractato dello Amore di Iesu_ has two outline cuts, one large,
one small, showing the Blessed Virgin and S. John standing by the
Cross. A tract on self-examination, addressed to the Abbess of the
Convent of the Murate at Florence, shows an aged friar being welcomed
at the convent. Other tracts have pictures of a priest elevating the
Host, a man praying before an altar, a man and woman praying, &c. One
of the rarest is the superb cut to the _Dyalogo della Verita
prophetica_, in which a friar is preaching to seven questioners
arranged in a half-circle under a tree, a view of Florence occupying
the background. Cuts in other books show Savonarola meeting a devil
and an astrologer, and represent him preaching to an intent
congregation. With these tracts we must join the defence of Savonarola
by his follower Domenico Benivieni, who appears in the title-cut in
earnest disputation with a group of Florentines, while later on in the
book there is a full-page illustration of the reformer's vision of the
regeneration of the world and the Church, in which the stream of
Christ's blood as He hangs on the Cross is being literally used for
the washing away of sins. This book was published by Francesco
Buonaccorsi in 1496.
[Illustration: From Savonarola's _Operetta sopra i dieci commandamenti
di Dio_, 1495.]
Florentine book-illustration reached its highest in an edition of the
_Epistole e Evangelii_,[15] or liturgical Gospels and Epistles,
printed in 1495 by Lorenzo Morgiani and Johann Petri at the instance
of the Ser Piero Pacini da Pescia, who for the next fourteen or
fifteen years seems to have been an active promoter of illustrated
books. Only two copies of the edition of the _Epistole e Evangelii_
are known to exist, but the owner of one of them, Mr. C. W. Dyson
Perrins, has reproduced all the woodcuts in it in very finely executed
facsimile, together with a reprint of the text, for presentation to
the Roxburghe Club, so that the illustrator's work can now be studied
with comparative ease. The title-page shows S. Peter and S. Paul
standing in a circle enclosed in an arabesque border of white floral
ornaments and dolphins on a black ground. At the corners of the border
are figures of the four Evangelists. In the text there are twelve
dozen large woodcuts and two dozen half-length figures of prophets,
evangelists, and epistle-writers. Of the larger cuts eleven represent
S. Paul writing and one S. Peter, most of the rest scenes from the
life of Christ, several of those representing the Passion having
previously appeared in an undated edition of the _Meditatione_
attributed to S. Bonaventura from the press of Mischomini. The cuts
form a treasure-house of Florentine art, and were frequently drawn
upon by the printers of the later _Rappresentationi_, at which we
shall soon have to look.
[Illustration: From the _Giuocho delli Scacchi_, Florence, 1493.]
We must return now to Antonio Mischomini, who published many other
illustrated books besides the Savonarola tracts. In 1492 he printed an
edition of Cristoforo Landino's _Formulare di lettere e di orationi
uolgari_, with a large title-cut of a very young teacher addressing a
class, and at the end of the book his mark (a cross-surmounted M
within two squares and a circle), surrounded by the arabesque border
which we have already noticed in the _Arte del bene Morire_ of 1496.
The next year (_i.e._ 1493) he printed the _Libro di Giuocho delli
Scacchi_ of Jacobus de Cessolis, with a large title-cut (repeated at
the end of the book) representing courtiers playing in the presence of
a king, and thirteen smaller cuts personifying the various pieces.
These comprise a king and queen, a judge, a knight, a 'rook,' or vicar
of the king to visit in his stead all parts of the realm, and the
eight 'popolari' or pawns, a labourer, smith, wool-merchant,
money-changer, physician, tavern-keeper (here shown), city-guard, and
a runner to be at the rook's service. Chess-players may be interested
to know that the pawns actually in use in 1493, as shown on the board
in the title-cut, had already lost this excessive individuality, and
resemble those of our own day.
[Illustration: From the _Fior di Virt[u']_, Florence, 1498.]
In 1494 Mischomini printed the commentary on the Ten Commandments by
Frate Marco dal Monte Sancta Maria, which has a title-cut of the friar
preaching, and three full-page allegorical illustrations freely copied
from those in an edition printed at Venice. The first of these
represents 'la figura della vita eterna' by a picture of the glories
of heaven,[16] and the earthly devotions by which they are to be
attained; the second, which is in three divisions, the traversing of
the Desert of Sin; and the third, Mount Sinai, up which Moses is seen
climbing. In the same year, 1494, Mischomini also published a
catechism known as the _Lucidario_, to which he prefixed a title-cut
showing Damocles at his feast, the sword hanging over his head, and in
another compartment some little rabbits running happily in a wood.
Damocles and the rabbits have nothing whatever to do with the
Catechism, and the occurrence of the cut proves that before this date
Mischomini must have printed an edition of the _Fior di Virt[u']_, to
which it rightfully belongs. We have already looked at the Venetian
editions of this book, and shall not be surprised to find that the
Florentine printers had the good sense to copy their charming
title-cut, though they did not improve it by their addition of an
incongruous border of pilasters, a vernicle, and an Image of Pity. The
first Florentine edition of this book, with which I am acquainted, has
a fitfully rhyming colophon, adapted from that of the Venetian edition
of 1493, showing that it was printed at Florence in 1498, and ought,
at any rate, to be read on feast-days. To entice readers to persevere
in this task, there are thirty-five illustrations, some of which, like
the one in the _Lucidario_, are divided into two parts, so as to
secure a contrast or comparison between an animal and a man--as, for
example, between a humble sheep and a proud general riding in triumph,
or, as shown in our illustration, between the constancy of the
ph[oe]nix, who permits herself to be burnt to ashes rather than quit
her nest, and that of an Emperor Constantine who (by a gross
plagiarism upon Solon) quitted his country for ever, after making his
counsellors swear to observe his laws unaltered until his return. The
book was printed yet a third time, probably about 1515, by Gian
Stephano da Pavia, at the request of Bernardo Pacini. The printer of
the 1498 edition is not known; it cannot have been Mischomini, who
seems to have brought his brilliant career to a close about 1495. The
foregoing notice of his illustrated books is by no means exhaustive.
Passing mention has been made in the chapter on Venice of one other
important one, the undated _Meditatione_, attributed to S.
Bonaventura, with cuts of peculiar interest, from the opportunity they
afford of comparing the different styles in vogue in the two cities.
Three other Florentine books issued during the fifteenth century remain
to be mentioned, none of which I have seen. The first of these, an
undated edition of Domenico Capranica's _Arte di bene Morire_ (not to be
confounded with Savonarola's), published by Morgiani and Johann Petri
about 1495, contains twelve large cuts and twenty-two small ones. The
larger cuts are interesting, because ten of them are based on those
found in the old block books of the _Ars Moriendi_, the other two coming
from Savonarola's book of the same name. The smaller ones seem brought
together rather at haphazard. The other two books, an _[AE]sop_, printed
in 1495 by Francesco Buonaccorsi for Piero Pacini, and the _Morgante
Maggiore_ (a long poem on the adventures of Orlando) of Ludovico Pulci,
printed in 1500, both exist only in single copies in foreign libraries,
but a good many illustrations from both have been reproduced by Dr.
Kristeller.
[Illustration]
Of illustrated books printed at Florence after 1500, the most
important is an edition of the _Quatriregio del decorso della vita
humana_ of Federico Frezzi, printed, this also, 'ad petitione di Ser
Piero Pacini di Pescia,' as late as 1508, though there is ground for
believing that this may really be a reprint from a fifteenth century
edition now no longer extant. Like the author of the
_Hypnerotomachia_, Frezzi was a Dominican, and was consecrated Bishop
of Foligno, his native place, in 1403. He attended the Council of
Constance, and died there in 1416. He was a man of great learning and
a book-collector, but rather a dull poet. His _Quatriregio_ is an
imitation of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, and is divided into four books
treating successively of the kingdoms 'of the god Cupid,' 'of Satan,'
'of the Vices,' and 'of the goddess Minerva and of Virtue.' It was
first printed in 1481, and went through three other editions before
it was honoured with illustrations. The importance of this illustrated
edition has perhaps been overrated. Taken individually, the best of
the cuts are not superior to those in earlier Florentine books of less
pretensions, while the cumulative effect of the series of one hundred
and twenty-six (several of which, it should be said, are duplicates)
is seriously diminished, partly by the monotonous recurrence of the
same figure in every cut, partly by the coarseness and angularity with
which most of the blocks have been engraved. It must be mentioned that
the cut on the first page of the poem is signed with the initials L.
V., which were at one time interpreted as standing for Luca Egidio di
Venturi, _i.e._ Luca Signorelli, whose recognised signature, however,
was L. C. (Luca di Cortona).
Two other great series of Florentine illustrated books still remain to
be considered. The first of these is the _Rappresentazioni_, sacred
and secular, which enjoyed a life extending over two centuries, and
must be reckoned as the most artistic of chapbooks. In 1852 M. Colomb
de Batines published at Florence a bibliography of these 'Antiche
Rappresentazioni Italiane,' to which I am indebted for the following
details concerning their chief authors. The plays are almost uniformly
written in _ottava rima_, and poorly printed in double columns. A
large number of them, at least a score, were written and printed
during the fifteenth century, but these earliest editions are, as a
rule, not illustrated. Maffeo Belcari (1410-1484) apparently was the
first author who obtained the honours of print. His play of _Abraham_
appeared in 1485, after which it was reprinted some twenty times, the
latest known edition belonging to the eighteenth century. Belcari also
wrote on the Annunciation, on S. John the Baptist visited by Christ in
the Desert, and on S. Panuntius. Lorenzo de' Medici himself wrote a
play of S. John and S. Paul, Bernardo Pulci (d. 1501) produced one on
the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, while his wife Antonia was quite a
prolific dramatist, claiming as her own plays on S. Domitilla, S.
Guglielma, the Patriarch Joseph, S. Francis, and the Prodigal Son.
During the fifteenth century anonymous plays were written on the
Nativity, on the life of Queen Hester, on the Angel Raphael, on the
conversion of three robbers by S. Francis, and on S. Eustachio, S.
Antony, and S. Antonia. Plays on the Last Judgment, on S. Agatha, S.
Agnes, S. Catharine, S. Cecilia, S. Christina, &c., also appeared at
an early date. An angel, as a rule, acts as Prologue, and the action
of the drama is divided between numerous characters. Most of the plays
were, doubtless, intended to be acted on the feast-day of the Saint
whose life they celebrate, and in a church bearing the Saint's name,
but the multiplicity of the editions show that they also won the
favour of a reading public.
A few undated editions of these little books, from the types used in
their press work, may be assigned to the end of the fifteenth
century. The first printer who is known to have made a specialty of
the _Rappresentazioni_ is Francesco Benvenuto, who began printing them
in 1516, and enjoyed a career of thirty years. M. Colomb de Batines
mentions several of his editions, but they are very scarce, and I have
only myself seen a _Raphael_ of 1516 with a title-cut of Tobit and the
Angel enclosed in a border, partly the same as that of the _Fior di
Virt[u']_ of 1498, a _Barlaam_ and _Josafat_, also of 1516, with six
illustrations (including our friend Damocles and the Rabbit, whose
fate seems to have been to be lugged in inappropriately), and a
_Miracolo di Tre Peregrini che andauano a sancto Iacopo di Galitia_,
with a solitary cut of the Saint rescuing one of the pilgrims who is
being unjustly hanged. The great majority of the extant
_Rappresentazioni_ were printed between 1550 and 1580, mostly
anonymously, though Giovanni Baleni and a printer 'Alle Scale di
Badia' were responsible for a great many of them. Of course, in many
cases the cuts were sadly the worse for wear, but they held on
wonderfully, and even in the seventeenth century editions a tolerable
impression is sometimes met with. Many of them, also, were recut,
sometimes skilfully, so that it is not uncommon to find a better
example in a later edition than in an earlier. The illustrations here
shown are from an undated edition of Lorenzo de' Medici's
_Rappresentatione di San Giovanni e Paulo_, the careful printing of
which is an argument for its belonging to the beginning of the
sixteenth century, and a picture of the martyrdom of S. Dorothea from
an edition of her _Rappresentatione_ printed in 1555.
[Illustration: Martyrdom of S. Dorothea.]
With these religious _Rappresentazioni_ M. Colomb de Batines joins a
few secular poems, whose title to be considered dramatic is not very
clear. Of those which he mentions, the earliest is the _Favola d'
Orfeo_, by Angelo Politiano, which forms part of _La Giostra di
Giuliano di Medici_, printed without name or date, probably about
1495, with ten excellent cuts, that of Aristeo pursuing the flying
Eurydice being, perhaps, the best. _La Giostra di Lorenzo di Medici_,
celebrated by Luigi Pulci, has only a single cut, but that a fine
one--a meeting of knights in an amphitheatre. Among other secular
chapbooks which enjoyed a long popularity was a series of
'contrasti,'[17] the contrast of Carnival and Lent, of Men and Women,
of the Living and the Dead, of the Blonde and the Brunette, and of
Riches and Poverty. I give here the first of the two cuts of the
_Contrasto di Carnesciale e la Quaresima_, undated, but probably
early. With these little poems we must join the metrical _Novelle_ and
_Istorie_, now chiefly known through the discovery in the University
Library at Erlangen of a little collection of twenty-one tracts, all
undated, and without any indication of their printers, but which may
mostly be assigned to the end of the fifteenth century. Among them are
the _Novella di Gualtieri e Griselda_, the _Novella di due Preti et un
Cherico_, the _Novella della Figliuola del Mercatante_, &c.
[Illustration]
The charm of these little Florentine books is so great, and of late
years has won such steadily increasing recognition, that I do not
think an apology is needed for the length at which they have here been
treated. None the less, we must remember that they were essentially
popular books, and that the wealthy book lovers of the time probably
regarded them very slightly. Mischomini himself did not turn his
attention to them till he had been printing nearly a dozen years, and
even after 1492 his more expensive books, the great _Plotinus_, for
instance, issued in that year, kept strictly to the traditions of
twenty years earlier, and were wholly destitute of ornament, even of
printed initials. The two classes of books--those on good paper and in
a large handsome type, and those on poor paper with small type
carelessly printed, but with delightful woodcuts--were issued side by
side, but the beauties of the two were never combined, and the
Florentine printers would doubtless have been greatly surprised if
they had been told that it was the chapbooks which were to win the
day. Even in the little italic editions issued by the Giuntas, in
imitation of Aldus, which appealed to an intermediate class of
purchasers, woodcuts occur but rarely, and the only instance I can
call to mind is a _Dante_, printed by Philippo Giunta in 1506, which,
besides some plans of the _Inferno_, &c., has a single cut
illustrating the first canto.
We have devoted so much space to Venice and Florence that the
illustrated books of other towns must be noticed with rather unfair
brevity. Brescia may be taken as an example of a town at which the
native artist did his best. We have already remarked the publication
there of a _Dante_ in 1487. The same year witnessed the appearance of
an _[AE]sop_, rudely imitated from the Verona edition, and in 1491
Baptista da Farfengo printed another book in which we have been
interested, a _Fior di Virt[u']_, with a title-cut of a student, head on
hand, reading at a desk. On a ledge on the wall are two flower-pots,
the flowers in which reach up to a very decorative ceiling. This is
quite a nice example of Brescian art, but the productions of the town
have not been specially studied, and further research might show that
they deserve more serious praise. At Ferrara artists of the schools of
Venice and Florence appear to have combined in the production of some
very notable books. Two of these were published by Lorenzo di Rossi in
1497. The first is an edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome, with
numerous vignettes and three frontispieces, the third of which,
somewhat in the style of the Venetian Boccaccio, bears the date 1493,
divided between its two columns. This frontispiece appears also in
the other work, the _De pluribus claris selectisque mulieribus_ of
Philippus Bergomensis, the illustrations in the text of which show
Florentine influence in their black backgrounds. This book has a
title-page printed in large Gothic letters cut in wood, similar to
that of the _Nuremberg Chronicle_.
No illustrated books appear to have been issued at Milan during the
eighties, but in 1492 Philippo Mantegazza printed the _Theorica
Musice_ of Gafori with some coarse cuts, and this was followed in 1494
by the _Triumfi_ of Petrarch, printed by Antonio Zaroto with the usual
six full-page illustrations. As befits the reputation of Milan as a
musical centre, the works of Gafori were often printed there. In 1496
Guillaume Le Signerre of Rouen printed there the first edition of the
_Practica Musice_, with a curious title-page representing the
relations of the Muses and the heavenly bodies, and fine ornamental
borders to two pages of text. At the base of one of these are little
scenes of choir-boys practising and a music-mistress giving a lesson.
The style of the borders is distinctly Venetian. In another work of
Gafori's printed at Milan, the _De Harmonia Instrumentorum_ of 1518
(reprinted two years later at Turin), the cuts exhibit the heavy
Milanese shading, one of them representing a lesson on the organ, and
the other a performer playing.
In 1496 Le Signerre printed a devotional work, the _Specchio di Anima_
of Besalii, with seventy-eight full-sized cuts to its eighty-eight
pages. Most of the cuts relate to the passion of Christ, and they are
described by Dr. Lippmann as 'vigorously executed in coarse thick
outlines, with scarcely any shading.' Some of these cuts reappear
three years later in the same printer's _Tesauro Spirituale_, of which
the unique copy is in the Berlin Print-Room. In 1498 Le Signerre
printed an _[AE]sop_, the cuts in which are surrounded by small black
borders relieved in white. The illustrations themselves are poor. At
the end of the book is the printer's mark, a crowned stork in a shield
within a circle, on either side of which stand a fox and a monkey. In
this same year Le Signerre transferred his press to Saluzzo, where in
1499 he issued the _Tesauro Spirituale_, and four years later an
edition of the _De Veritate Contricionis_ of Vivaldus, with a fine
frontispiece representing S. Jerome in the desert. The border shows
typical Milanese ornament, and recalls the illumination to the
_Sforziada_, mentioned in our first chapter. In 1507 a still finer
work, an edition of the _Opus Regale_, also by Vivaldus, was printed
at Saluzzo by Jacobus de Circis. This contains a fine picture of Saint
Louis of France in prayer, and also a large portrait of the Marquis
of Saluzzo, Louis II., whose taste has won for the town its little
niche in the history of printing.
[Illustration: Mark of Bazalerius de Bazaleriis.]
[Illustration: Mark of Stephanus Guillireti.]
[Illustration: Mark of Francis de Mazalis.]
Italian printers' devices are very decorative and interesting, and may
now be studied in Dr. Paul Kristeller's 'Die italienischen
Buchdrucker- und Verlegerzeichen,' which gives nearly a complete
collection of those in use before 1525, to the number of between three
and four hundred. In the great majority of devices the ground is
black, with a simple design, mostly including a circle and a cross,
outlined in white. The mark of Bazalerius de Bazaleriis of Bologna and
Reggio, taken from a copy of the _Epistolae_ of Philelphus, printed by
him in 1489, shows this class of design in almost its simplest form.
In that of Stephanus Guillireti, who printed at Rome from 1506 to
1524, we have the addition of a shield (the arms on which, unluckily,
have not been identified) and floral sprays. These floral sprays
become the chief feature in the design of Franciscus de Mazalis of
Reggio, who printed from 1493 to 1504; though the initials, circle,
and cross of the simpler devices are all retained. An even more
beautiful example of this class of mark was used by Egmont and
Barrevelt, the printers of the Sarum Missal, who added to its
attractiveness by the use of red ink, instead of black. Red ink also
adds immensely to the effect of the well-known mark of Nikolaos
Blastos, which occurs in a copy of the Commentary of Simplicius upon
Aristotle, printed by Zacharias Kaliergos at Venice in 1499. The
delicate tracery of this design is unsurpassed by any work of the
time. The mark of Nicolaus Gorgonzola, who printed at Milan from 1504
to 1533, in its floral ornaments, is very similar in style to those of
Mazalis and Egmont, but, as in the mark of Blastos, the cross and
circle have disappeared, and the name is set out in full, instead of
by its initials.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Mark of Niccolo Zoppino.]
Purely ornamental designs, of the styles illustrated in these five
examples, form the majority among Italian devices, but more pictorial
ones were by no means unknown. One of the best of these was that used
by 'Simon de Gabiis dictus Bevilaqua,' who printed at Venice from 1485
to about 1512. Another good device is that of Ser Piero di Pacini of
Pescia, the publisher of so many of the Florentine illustrated books.
This consists of a crowned dolphin on a black ground, with sometimes a
smaller device of a bird, placed on each side of it.
[Illustration: Mark of Hieronymus Francisci Baldassaris.]
As examples of later styles, though not very beautiful in themselves,
we add here the rather clumsy woodcut of S. Nicholas adopted by
Niccol[o'] d'Aristotele da Ferrara, called 'il Zoppino,' who printed at
Venice from 1508 to about 1536, and the very florid device of
Hieronymus Francisci Baldassaris, a printer at Perugia from about 1526
to 1550. The arms there shown are those of the city of Perugia, while
the F. and the cross above it reproduce the mark used by the printer's
father, Francesco, the founder of the firm. The Aldine anchor and the
_fleur-de-lys_ of Lucantonio Giunta and his successors are too well
known to need reproduction or comment, though both stand rather apart
from the ordinary run of Italian marks.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
[12] This, and nearly all the Florentine illustrations mentioned here,
will be found reproduced in Dr. Paul Kristeller's _Early Florentine
Woodcuts_, published in 1897, after this chapter was written.
[13] There are two variants of this cut, the smaller introducing a
little landscape background.
[14] There is yet a third variant, which may be recognised by the
angel appearing on the right, but showing his whole body, not the
hands only, as in the 1492 cut.
[15] A reprint was issued in 1515.
[16] In contrast to the prevailing anthropomorphism of the time, the
First Person of the Trinity is represented by a 'loco tondo et vacuo,'
a blank circle, with a halo of angels round it. On either side of this
circle stand Christ and the Blessed Virgin.
[17] El Contrasto di Carnesciale e la Quaresima; El Contrasto degli
Huomini e delle Donne; El Contrasto del Vivo e del Morto; El Contrasto
della Bianca e della Brunetta; La Contenzione della Poverta contra la
Richezza, &c.
CHAPTER VII
FRANCE--FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The earliest productions of the French press will not bear comparison
with those of either the German or the Italian: they have neither the
massive dignity of the one, nor the artistic grace of the other. The
worthy professors at the Sorbonne, who called to their aid the Swiss
or German printers, Crantz Gering and Friburger, bestowed, as we have
seen in our first chapter, considerable trouble on the decoration by
hand of special copies for presentation to influential friends or
patrons, but in other respects, their books were wholly destitute of
ornament. When, after little more than two years, they gave up their
press, the three printers started again on their own account with a
rather ugly gothic type, nor did Gering, who afterwards worked both by
himself and in combination with other printers, produce a really
handsome book until about 1480. The semi-gothic types of another firm
of German printers in Paris, Peter Caesaris and Stoll, are much more
attractive, but the average French work during the seventies is dull.
The first attempt at decoration appears to have been made, not at the
capital, but at Lyons, where, in August 1478, an anonymous printer,
probably Martin Husz, completed a double-column edition of _Le Miroir de
la redemption humaine_, translated from the Latin by Julien Macho, with
cuts previously used in a German edition of the _Speculum_, printed at
Basel in 1476. In 1478, also, Barth['e]lemy Buyer printed an edition of
the romance of _Baudoin, Comte de Flandre_, with no cuts, but with rude
printed initials. In an edition of _Les Quatre Filz Aymon_, unsigned and
undated, but printed at Lyons about 1480, the first page bears four
grotesque woodcuts representing the reception of the youths by
Charlemagne, the buffet which the Emperor's son gave one of them over a
game of chess, the fatal blow with the golden chess-board by which the
buffet was returned, and then the four youths fighting amid a crowd. On
the next page a larger picture shows their expulsion from Charlemagne's
court. Throughout the book are curious woodcut initials, interwoven with
grotesque faces. About 1481 Ortuin and Schenck produced (anonymously) an
edition of the _Roman de la Rose_ with eighty-six small woodcuts, which
were imitated in later editions both at Lyons and Paris, and were not
without a certain rude merit. In 1483 Mathieu Husz and Pierre Hongre
issued a _L['e]gende dor['e]e_, with large pictures of Christ in Glory
on the Last Day, and of the Crucifixion, and numerous very rough cuts at
the head of the different chapters. In the same year, Husz published, in
conjunction with Jean Schabeler, an illustrated translation of
Boccaccio's _De Casibus illustrium virorum_ ('Du dechier des nobles
hommes et femmes'). Meanwhile, at Albi, in Languedoc, of all places in
the world, Neumeister had reprinted in 1481 an illustrated edition of
the _Meditationes_ of Turrecremata, which he had produced two years
previously at Mainz. In 1484 we hear of illustrated books in three other
towns. At Rennes, Pierre Bellescull['e]e and Josses printed the
_Coutumes de Bretagne_, with a woodcut of the arms of Brittany, used
again the next year in the same printers' _Floret en francoys_, a book
noticeable for having a woodcut title printed in white on a black
ground. At Vienne, Pierre Schenck printed another edition, in
double-columns, of _L'Abuz['e] en court_, with small cuts at the chapter
headings. At Chamb['e]ry, Antoine Neyret finished, on July 6th, an
edition of the _Exposition des ['E]vangiles en romant_ of Maurice de
Sully, and in the following November the romance of _Baudoin comte de
Flandre_. The Bishop's sermons have, on the first page, a large initial
I and a very rough cut of the disciples loosing the ass and her colt for
Christ's use. With their other illustrations I am not acquainted. The
romance of Count Baldwin has a full-page cut of the Count riding on a
gaily-decked charger, and thirteen smaller illustrations of his
adventures, of which, however, several are repeated. The execution of
them all is as rude as can well be conceived. Two years later, Neyret
printed the first edition of a very famous book, _Le Livre du Roi Modus
et de la reine Ratio_, 'lequel fait mencion commant on doit deviser de
toutes mani[e']res de chasses.' The cuts in this are numerous, and their
representations of the various hunting scenes are more than sufficiently
grotesque.
The list of books we have named could certainly be extended,
especially as regards those printed at Lyons, but it is sufficiently
full to enable us to draw some useful conclusions from it. The
illustrations are, almost without exception, poor in design and badly
cut, and are mostly accompanied by inferior types and press-work. Some
of them are imitated from the books of foreign printers, and they
contain little evidence of the growth of any French school of
illustrators. On the other hand, they testify to the spread of a
demand for illustrated books, at least in the provinces, which local
printers were doing their best to satisfy. At Paris the demand,
apparently, had not yet arisen. In the first dated book which bears
the name of Jean du Pr['e], a _Missale ad usum ecclesiae Parisiensis_,
printed by him in conjunction with Didier Huym in September 1481,
there is a large woodcut of God the Father and the Crucifixion,
illustrating the Canon. Two months later Du Pr['e] printed a Verdun
missal with a really fine metal cut of a priest at Mass, and a little
figure rising up to represent his soul in prayer. In February 1483-4
appeared his first illustrated secular work, _De la ruine des nobles
hommes_, another translation from Boccaccio's _De Casibus_, with a
woodcut of varying merit at the head of each book. These have a
special interest for English students, as some years later they were
borrowed by Pynson to illustrate his edition of Lydgate's version of
the same work.
In May 1484 Jacques Bonhomme issued Millet's _L'Histoire de la
destruction de Troye la Grant_, with numerous woodcuts of battles,
frequently used in later works; and the following year Guyot Marchant
produced the first of numerous editions of a _Danse Macabre_
illustrated with a wonderful series of pictures, full of grotesque
vigour and skilfully cut, showing Death as a grinning skeleton seizing
on his prey in every class of society. Marchant followed this up with
a _Danse Macabre des femmes_ (somewhat less good) in 1491, and also
with a _Compost et Calendrier des Bergers_, which was no less
successful.
Meanwhile the greatest Paris publisher of the century, Antoine
V['e]rard, had come on the scene. Although some of the innumerable works
which bear his name are said to have been printed '_par_ Antoine
V['e]rard,' it is clear that the expression must not be taken too
literally, and that he was a 'libraire,' _i.e._ a bookseller or
publisher, rather than a printer. His first dated book is an edition,
enriched with a single woodcut, of Laurent du Premier Fait's French
version of the _Decamerone_, and the colophon tells us that it was
printed for Antoine V['e]rard, 'libraire, demeurant sur le Pont Notre
Dame, [a'] l'image de Saint Jean l'Evang['e]liste,' on November 22,
1485. The types used in the book have been identified as belonging to
Jean du Pr['e], and the association of the two men seems to have led to
important results. The next year we find Du Pr['e] printing an edition
of S. Jerome's _Vie des anciens saintz P[e']res_, with a delightful
frontispiece of the saint preaching from a lectern in the open air,
numerous smaller cuts, and initial letters with interwoven faces. During
1486 also, he assisted Pierre G['e]rard (who earlier in the year had
printed by himself an edition of Boutillier's _La Somme Rurale_ with a
single cut), in producing at Abbeville the first really magnificent
French illustrated book, S. Augustine's _Cit['e] de Dieu_, in which paper
and print and woodcuts of artistic value all harmonise.[18] Two years
later he joined with another provincial printer, Jean le Bourgeois, in
producing a still more splendid book, the romance of _Lancelot du Lac_,
the first volume of which was finished by Le Bourgeois at Rouen on
November 24th, and the second by Du Pr['e] at Paris on September 16th. In
1488 also, Du Pr['e] produced his first 'Book of Hours,' but the French
_Horae_ form so important an episode in the history of the decoration of
books, that we must reserve their treatment for a separate chapter, in
which, besides those of Du Pr['e] and V['e]rard, we shall have to speak of
the long series inaugurated by Philippe Pigouchet and Simon Vostre in
1491.
At starting, V['e]rard's resources were probably small, and for a year
or two he produced little beyond his _Horae_. In 1487, however, he
published a French _Livy_, with four small cuts, representing a battle,
a siege, a king and his court, and some riders, whose hats have a very
ecclesiastical shape, entering a town. The next year produced a work
entitled _L'art de Chevalerie selon V['e]g[e']ce_, really an edition of
the _Faits d'arme et de chevalerie_ of Christine de Pisan. This has a
single large cut representing a king and his court. The _Livre de
Politiques d'Aristote_, published in 1489, has a large frontispiece of
the translator, Nicholas Oresme, presenting his book to Charles VIII, in
which the characteristic style of V['e]rard's artist is fully developed.
In 1490, an edition of _Lucain, Suetone et Saluste_, which I have not
seen, was printed for V['e]rard by Pierre Le Rouge. To 1491 probably
belongs his French _Seneca_, and in this year he must have obtained the
aid of the king or of some very rich patron, for his activity from 1492
to the end of the century is quite amazing. It is from about 1493, also,
that we may date the production of those magnificent special copies on
vellum, enriched with elaborate, if not very artistic, miniatures, to
which we have already alluded in our first chapter.
The chief book of 1492 was undoubtedly the series of treatises making up
the _Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir_, of which a detailed
description will be given later on. These treatises were printed for
V['e]rard by Cousteau and Menard, the first part being finished on July
18th, the last on December 19th. Next to them in importance is a
_Josephus de la bataille judaique_, one of V['e]rard's large folios,
with columns of printed text, not reckoning any margin, nearly twelve
inches long. The frontispiece is a fine cut of a triumphal entry of a
king who should be French, since he wears the lilies. The design,
however, must have been made for this book, for a label in the middle of
the picture bears the name 'Josephus,' while in the _Gestes Romaines_
and _Lancelot_, in both of which the cut reappears, the label is left
blank. The 'Entry' is also used again, three times in the _Josephus_
itself, at the beginning of the fourth, fifth, and seventh books. An
entry of a different kind, that of Joshua and his staff into Jericho, is
depicted in the cut (here reproduced) which heads the prologue. This is
faced by the first page of text, headed by a cut of an author presenting
his book to an ecclesiastic. Both pages are surrounded by fine borders
of flowers, women, and shield. The head-cut to the second book shows a
monk handing a book to a king; that used for the third and sixth
(repeated again in the _Lancelot_ of 1494) shows a king on his throne
surrounded by his courtiers, a sword of justice is in his hand, and a
suppliant kneels before him. Small cuts, fitting into the columns, head
the different chapters in each book, but are of no great merit.
Occasionally a border about an inch wide runs up the side of one of the
columns of text, usually on the outer margin, but sometimes on the
inner. Altogether the book is a very notable one.
[Illustration: From V['e]rard's _Josephus_, 1492. (Much reduced.)]
In 1493, V['e]rard's activity was still on the increase, and we have at
least eight illustrated books of his bearing the date of this year. In
the romance of _Le Jouvencel_ and Bonnor's _Arbre des Batailles_, both
in 4to, the cuts, all of them small, are nearly identical, and are
repeated again and again in each book. Much more important than these
are the editions of the _Chronicques de France_ (printed for V['e]rard
by Jehan Maurand), and a translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid,
issued under the very taking title of _La Bible des Poetes_. This is
another of V['e]rard's great folios, with profuse illustrations, large
and small, and in its vellum edition is a very gaudy and magnificent
book. In 1494 V['e]rard published his _Lancelot_; and in 1495, a
_L['e]gende Dor['e]e_ and S. Jerome's _Vie des P[e']res en fran[c,]ois_.
This last book was finished on October 15, but its appearance was
preceded by that of the first volume of the publisher's most ambitious
undertaking, an edition of the _Miroir Historial_ of Vincent de
Beauvais. This enormous chronicle is in thirty-two books, which
V['e]rard divided between five great folio volumes, averaging about
three hundred and twenty leaves, printed in long double columns. The
whole work thus contains about the same amount of matter as some fifty
volumes of the present series, yet it was faultlessly printed on the
finest vellum, and with innumerable woodcuts, subsequently coloured, in
considerably less than a year. The first volume was finished on
September 29, 1495, and the colophon which announces the completion of
the last, '[a'] l'honneur et louenge de nostre seigneur iesucrist et de
sa glorieuse et sacr['e]e mere et de la court celeste de paradis,' bears
date May 7th, 1496. In the face of such activity and enterprise, I feel
ashamed of having girded at the good man for having used some of the
_Ovid_ cuts as a basis to his illuminations in this gigantic work.
After 1496 to the end of the century, V['e]rard's dated books are very
few. The only one I have met with myself is a _Merlin_ of 1498. It is
possible that he produced less (the _Miroir_ may not have proved a
financial success), but it is quite as likely that he merely
discontinued his wholesome practice of dating his books, and that the
_Boethius_, the _Roman de la Rose_, the _Gestes Romaines_, the romances
of _Tristram_ and _Gyron_, and other undated works, whose colophons show
that they were printed while the Pont Notre Dame was still standing,
_i.e._ before October 25th, 1499, belong to these years. After 1500
V['e]rard's enterprise certainly seems less. He continued to issue
editions of poets and romances, but they are much less sumptuous than of
yore, and in place of his great folios we have a series of small
octavos, mostly of works of devotion, with no other ornament than the
strange twists of the initial L, which adorns their title-pages. The
example here given is from an undated and unsigned edition of the _Livre
du Faulcon_, but the letter itself frequently occurs in V['e]rard's
undoubted books. The first hint for this grotesque form of ornament may
have been found in the small initials of Du Pr['e]'s 1486 edition of S.
Jerome's _Vie des anciens saintz P[e']res_, and variants of the L were
used by other publishers besides V['e]rard, _e.g._ by Jacques Maillet at
Lyons, and Pierre Le Rouge and Michel Le Noir at Paris. The most
noticeable examples of the L, besides the one here given, are the
man-at-arms L of the 1488 edition of the _Mer des Histoires_ (P.
Lerouge), the monkey-and-bagpipes L, here shown, from Maillet's 1494
edition of the _Recueil des Histoires Troyennes_, a St.
George-and-the-Dragon L in a Lyons reprint of the _Mer des Histoires_,
and the January-and-May L which, I believe, was first used by V['e]rard
for a 1492 edition of the _Matheolus_, or 'quinze joies du mariage,' but
of which a counterpart existed at Lyons.
[Illustration: Initial L used by V['e]rard.]
[Illustration: Initial L used by Maillet.]
It seems probable that the attention which V['e]rard paid to his vellum
editions, in which the woodcuts were only useful as guides to the
illustrator, made him less careful than he would otherwise have been
to secure the best possible work in his ordinary books. Certainly I
think his most interesting cuts are to be found not in his later
books but in the collection of six treatises which he had printed by
Gillet Cousteau and Jehan Menard in 1492, and republished, somewhat
less sumptuously, the next year, under the collective title _L'art de
bien vivre et de bien mourir_, the reprint coming from the press of
Pierre Le Rouge. The cuts in this collection have a special interest
for us, because some of them were afterwards used in English books,
and we may therefore be allowed to examine them at some length.
[Illustration: From V['e]rard's _Art de bien vivre_. (Reduced.)]
In the 1492 edition the first title-page _Le liure intitule lart de
bien mourir_ heralds only the first work, an adaptation of the old
_Ars Moriendi_ showing the struggle between good and bad angels for
the possession of the dying soul. The devils tempt the sufferer to
hasten his end ('interficias teipsum' one of them is saying, the words
being printed on a label), they remind him of his sins ('periuratus
es'), tempt him to worldly thoughts ('intende thesauro'), persuade his
physicians to over-commiseration ('Ecce quantam penam patitur'), or
flatter him with undeserved praise ('coronam meruisti'). To each of
these assaults his good angels have a 'bonne inspiracion' by way of
answer, and the devils have to confess 'spes nobis nulla' and to see
the little figure of the soul received into heaven. The second
treatise is called at the beginning _L'eguyllon de crainte divine pour
bien mourir_, but on the title-page placed on the back of the last
leaf 'les paines denfer et les paines de purgatoire.' Its
illustrations consist of large cuts in which devils are inflicting
excruciating and revolting tortures on their victims. Its colophon
gives the printers' names and the date July 18, 1492. The next three
parts of the book are _Le Trait['e] de l'avenement de l'Antechrist, Les
Quinze Signes_, or Fifteen Tokens of Judgment, and _Les Joies du
Paradis_. The printing of these was finished on October 28. Only the
middle treatise is much illustrated, but here the artist had full play
for his powers in representing the fish swimming on the hills, the
seas falling into the abyss, the sea-monsters covering the earth, the
flames of the sea, the trees wet with blood, the crumbling of cities,
the stones fighting among themselves, and the other signs of the Last
Day. Perhaps the best of this set of cuts is that representing the
'esbahissement' or astonishment of the men and women who had hidden
themselves in holes in the earth, when at last they ventured forth.
But in the last treatise, the _Art de bien vivre_, quaintness and
horror are replaced by really beautiful work. The cuts here are
intended to illustrate the Ave Maria, Lord's Prayer, Creed, Ten
Commandments, and Seven Sacraments. Those in the last series are the
largest in the book, each of them occupying a full page. The Creed has
a series of smaller cuts of inferior work. But the picture which
precedes this, representing the twelve apostles, and the pictures of
the Angelic Salutation, of the Pope invoking the Blessed Virgin (here
shown), and of Christ teaching the Apostles, show the finest work,
outside the _Horae_, in any French books during the fifteenth century.
These blocks appear also in two English books printed at Paris, in
1503, _The Traytte of god lyuyng and good deyng_, and _The Kalendayr
of Shyppars_, and in many of the English editions of the latter work
from Pynson's in 1506 onward.
Pierre Lerouge, one of V['e]rard's printers, produced at least one fine
book quite independently of him. This is the first illustrated edition
of _La Mer des Hystoires_, the French version of the _Rudimentum
Noviciorum_ (see p. 50), the general plan of which it follows, though
not slavishly. Pierre Lerouge printed his edition for a publisher
named Vincent Commin. It is in two tall folios, with the man-at-arms
L to decorate its title-pages, and splendid initials P, I, and S, the
first having within it a figure of a scribe at work, the S being
twisted into the form of a scaly snake, and the body of the I
containing a figure of Christ. The cuts and borders of the book are
not very remarkable. In 1498 V['e]rard published a new edition of it,
having obtained the use of the old blocks. A Lyons reprint was issued
about 1500, and other editions during the sixteenth century. Two other
printers who cannot be said to have learnt anything from V['e]rard are
Jean Bonhomme, who as early as 1486 printed an illustrated edition of
a very popular book, _Le livre des profits champ[^e]tres_, translated
from the Latin of Petrus Crescentius, and Germain Bineaut, who in 1490
printed a _Pathelin le grant et le petit_ which is said to have
woodcuts. Guyot Marchant's series of editions of the _Danse Macabre_
or 'danse des Morts,' has been already mentioned. An edition of the
same work, printed at Lyons, February 18, 1499 (no printer's name), a
copy of which is among the books which entered the British Museum
under the bequest of Mr. Alfred Huth, is especially interesting as
containing cuts of the shops of a printer and a bookseller, at both of
which Death is at work.
[Illustration: From a Lyons _Danse Macabre_, 1499. (Much reduced.)]
Another edition of the _Danse_ was printed by Nicole de la Barre at
Paris in 1500, and others of the same character in the early years of
the next century. We shall have to recur to the book again both with
reference to the _Horae_ and for the later Lyons editions, the cuts in
which followed designs by Holbein.
The only other Paris printer whom we have space here to mention is
Jean Trepperel, whose career began in 1492, in which year, according
to Hain, he issued a _Histoire de Pierre de Provence et de la belle
Maguelonne_, probably illustrated. In 1493 he published an edition of
the _Chroniques de France_, with four cuts, one of the founding of a
town, another of an assault, and two battle scenes. They are good of
their kind, especially that which serves for all the founders of
cities from [AE]neas and Romulus to S. Louis, but their repetition
becomes a little wearisome. In an undated issue of Jehan Quentin's
_Orologe de Devotion_ the cuts are all different, but fall into two
series, one badly drawn and infamously engraved, the other showing
really fine work, and having all the appearance of having been
originally designed for a Book of Hours.
The only other fifteenth century book of Trepperel's with which I am
acquainted is a charming quarto edition of the romance of _Paris et
Vienne_, a copy of which is in the Morgan collection. It is undated,
but was printed while the Pont Notre Dame was still standing. The
title-cut shows signs of breakage, and may possibly have been designed
for the earlier edition by Denis Meslier mentioned by Brunet as having
a single cut. The rest of the large cuts in the book have all the
appearance of having been specially designed for the new edition, and
are equal to the best work in the _Horae_. Meanwhile at Lyons the rude
cuts of the books which heralded illustrated work in France had been
replaced by far more artistic productions. In 1488 Michelet Topie de
Pymont and Jacques Herrnberg produced a French version (by Nicole Le
Huen) of Breydenbach's _Peregrinatio_ (see p. 57) with copies of some
of the original cuts, the smaller ones cut on wood, the large maps
engraved on copper. The next year Jacques Maillet brought out a rival
version (by Frere Jehan de Hersin) for which he acquired the original
Mainz woodblocks themselves. To Maillet, also, we owe passable
imitations of some of the less sumptuous books of V['e]rard's. Lastly,
Jean Trechsel struck out a new line in a profusely illustrated
_Terence_ of 1493. At Rouen the Missal and Breviary printed by Martin
Morin were adorned with a curious initial M and B in the same style as
some of the more frequent Ls, and Pierre Regnault did work which
V['e]rard found worthy of his vellum. Paris, however, having once gained
the predominance in illustrated work, had as yet no difficulty in
maintaining her position.
It remains for us to notice briefly the printers' devices in early
French books. These are so numerous that it is possible to divide them
into rough classes. The largest of these is formed by the marks which
have as their central ornament a tree with a shield or label hung on
the trunk, with supporters varied according to the owner's fancy, and
which are not always easy to assign to their right place in the animal
creation. Durand Gerlier preferred rams, Michel Tholoze wild men,
Denys Janot a creature which looks like a kangaroo, Hemon Le Fevre
dancing bears duly muzzled and chained, Simon Vostre leopards,
Thielmann Kerver unicorns, Felix Baligault rabbits, Robert Gourmont
winged stags, Jehan Guyart of Bordeaux dolphins. Most of these devices
have a dotted background, and they are sometimes found printed in red
ink, which adds greatly to their decorative effect. Another class, to
which V['e]rard's well-known device belongs, showed in their upper part
the French lilies crowned and supported by angels. Jean Le Forestier
combined this with the tree of knowledge, choosing lions as its
supporters, but adding also the sacred lamb (for his name 'Jean'), and
similar variations were adopted by other printers. In another large
class the French printers, especially those of Lyons, followed the
simple cross and circle so common in Italy. This was mostly printed in
white on a black ground, as by Pierre Levet, Matthieu Vivian of
Orleans, and Le Tailleur. Less often, as in the marks of Berthold
Rembolt and Georges Wolf, the ground is white and the design black.
Guillaume Balsarin who, as was very common, had two devices, had one
of each kind. Outside these classes the special designs are too many
to be enumerated. The successive Le Noirs punned on their names in at
least six different devices of black heads, and Deny de Harsy with
less obvious appropriateness selected two black men with white
waistbands to uphold his shields. Guyot Marchant's shoemakers, with
the bar of music to complete his pious motto _Sola fides sufficit_,
form one of the earliest and best known of French marks. Pierre
Regnault showed excellent taste in his flower-surrounded P, in which
the letters of his surname may also be deciphered. The scholar-printer
Badius Ascensius chose a useful, if not very pretty, design of
printers at work, the two variants of which first appear respectively
in 1507 and 1521. All these devices and countless others will be found
roughly figured in Silvestre's _Marques Typographiques_, many of them
appear also in Brunet's _Manuel du Libraire_, and those of the chief
fifteenth century printers have been reproduced with absolute fidelity
in M. Thierry-Poux's _Monuments de l'imprimerie fran[c,]aise_. Only the
mark of Du Pr['e] and one of those used by Caillaut are therefore given
here, the first (on p. 141) in honour of a pioneer in French
illustration, the second, as perhaps the most beautiful of any which
the present writer has seen.
[Illustration: Mark of Antoine Caillaut.]
* * * * *
The first Greek book printed in France appeared in 1507, and the
awakening of classical feeling was accompanied, as in other countries,
by the putting away of the last remnants of medi[ae]val art and
literature as childish things. The old romances continued to be
published, chiefly by the Lenoirs, but in a smaller and cheaper form,
and for the most part with old cuts. V['e]rard diminished his output,
and the publishers of the _Horae_ turned in despair to German designs in
place of the now despised native work. Soon only some little octavos
remained to show that there was still an unclassical public to be
catered for. These were chiefly printed by Galliot du Pr['e], with
titles in red and black, and sometimes with little architectural borders
in imitation of the more ambitious German ones. When they disappear we
say farewell to the richness and colour which distinguishes the best
French books of the end of the fifteenth century. Instead of the black
letter and quaint cuts we have graceful but cold Roman types, or pretty
but thin italics, with good initial letters, sometimes with good
head-and tail-pieces, but with few pictures, and with only a neat
allegoric device on the title-page instead of the rich designs used by
the earlier printers.
Geoffroy Tory of Bourges was the first important printer of the new
school. His earliest connection with publishing was as the editor of
various classical works, but he returned from a visit to Italy full of
artistic theories as to book-making, which he proceeded to carry out,
partly in alliance with Simon Colines, for whom he designed a new
device representing Time with his scythe. Tory's own device of the
'pot cass['e],' a broken vase pierced by a _toret_ or auger, is said to
refer to his desolation on the death of his only daughter. Devices of
other printers have been ascribed to him on the ground of the
appearance in them of the little cross of Lorraine, which is found in
some of Tory's undoubted works. It is certain, however, that the cross
was not his individual signature, but only that of his studio.
After the _Horae_, which we shall notice in our next chapter, Tory's
most famous book was his own _Champfleury_, 'auquel est contenu l'art
et science de la vraie proportion des lettres antiques,' printed in
1529. This is a fantastic work, interesting for the prelude in which
he speaks of his connection with the famous Grolier, and for the few
illustrations scattered about the text. The best of these are the
vignettes of 'Hercules Gallicus,' leading in chains the captives of
his eloquence, and of the Triumphs of Apollo and the Muses. The
specimen alphabets at the end of the book also deserve notice. They
show that Tory was better than his theories, for his attempt to prove,
by far-fetched analogies and derivations, that there is an ideal shape
for every letter, is as bad in art as it is false in history.
Tory was succeeded in his office of royal printer by Robert Estienne,
and during the rest of the century the classical editions of this
family of great printers form the chief glories of the French press.
Their books, both large and small, are admirably printed, and in
excellent taste, though with no other ornaments than their printer's
device, and good initials and head-pieces. But it must be owned that
from the reign of Francis I. onwards, the decoration of the text of
most French books is far less interesting than the superb bindings on
which the kings and their favourites began to lavish so much expense.
Only two more Paris books need here be mentioned, both of them printed
in 1546, and both with cuts imitated from the Italian--Jacques
Gohary's translation of the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ and the _Amour
de Cupido et de Psich['e]_ translated from Apuleius. The first of these
was published by Jacques Kerver, the second by Jeanne de Marnef. Of
original Paris work of any eminence we have no record after the death
of Tory.
Meanwhile at Lyons a new school of book-illustration was springing up.
From the beginning of the century the Lyons printers had imitated, or
pirated, the delicate italic books printed by Aldus. The luckless
['E]tienne Dolet added something to the classical reputation of the
town, and by the middle of the century the printers there were turning
out numerous pocket editions of the classics, which they sold to their
customers in 'trade bindings' of calf stamped with gold, and often
painted over with many-coloured interlacements. The fashion for small
books was set, and when illustrations were fitted to them the result was
singularly dainty.
Before considering the editions of Jean de Tournes and his rivals we
must stop to notice the appearance at Lyons in 1538 of the belated
first edition of Holbein's _Dance of Death_, the woodcuts for which,
the work of H. L., whose identity with Hans L[:u]tzelburger has been
sufficiently established, are known to have been in existence as early
as 1527, and were probably executed two or three years before that
date. Several sets of proofs from the woodcuts are in existence, with
lettering said to be in the types of Froben of Basel, who may have
abandoned the idea of publishing them because of the vigour of their
satire on the nobles and well-to-do. The Trechsels, the printers of
the French edition, are known to have had dealings with a Basel
woodcutter with initials H. L., who died before June 1526, and may
have purchased the blocks directly from him, or at a later date from
Froben. In 1538 they issued forty-one woodcuts with a dedication by
Jean de Vauzelles, and a French quatrain to each cut either by him or
by Gilles Corrozet, giving to the book the title _Les Simulachres et
historiees faces de la mort_. Its success was as great as it deserved,
and ten more cuts were added in subsequent editions.
In the same year as the _Dance of Death_ the Trechsels issued another
series of upwards of a hundred cuts after designs by Holbein, the
_Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones_, with explanatory verses by
Gilles Corrozet. These, though scarcely less beautiful, and at the
time almost as successful as those in the _Dance of Death_, are not
quite so well known, and I therefore select one of them, taken from
the reprint of the following year, as an illustration.
[Illustration: From _Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones_, Lyons,
1539.]
The success of these two books invited imitation, and during the next
twenty years many dainty illustrated books were issued by Franciscus
Gryphius, Mac['e] Bonhomme, Guillaume Roville, and Jean de Tournes. In
1540 Gryphius issued a little Latin Testament, with thirty-four lines of
dainty Roman type to a page, which only measures 3-1/2 in. x 2, and in
which are set charming cuts. Bonhomme's chief success was an edition,
printed in 1556, of the first three books of the _Metamorphoses_
translated into French verse by Cl['e]ment Marot and Barth['e]lemy
Aneau. This has borders to every page, and numerous vignettes measuring
only 1-1/2 in. x 2. In the following year this was capped by Jean de
Tournes with another version of the _Metamorphoses_, with borders and
vignettes attributed to Bernard Salomon, usually called 'le petit
Bernard,' and the success of the book caused it to be re-issued in Dutch
and Italian. The borders are wonderfully varied, some of them containing
little grotesque figures worthy of our own Doyle, others dainty
lacework, and others less pleasing architectural essays. This, l
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