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Books about Books
Edited by A. W. Pollard

Early Illustrated Books

Early Illustrated Books

A History of the Decoration and
Illustration of Books in the
15th and 16th Centuries

By Alfred W. Pollard

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

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 Bibliothèque 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 Bibliothèque 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 à 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 à 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 Bibliothèque 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 Vérard, whose enterprise has bequeathed to the Bibliothèque 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 Vérard's

patrons only found among kings, for a record still exists of four books thus ornamented by him for Charles d'Angoulême, at a total cost of over two hundred livres, equivalent to rather more than the same number of pounds sterling of our present money.

Vérard'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 Vérard 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 Vérard's well-known device. Vérard'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 Vérard. 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 Budæus, 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 Angoulême to whom it was dedicated. In another work by Budæus (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.

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.

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 Bechtermüntze, 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 Günther 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 Gespräch 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 Bibliothèque 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 Wolfenbüttel in 1815, but the Bibliothèque 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 repro

duction 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.

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 Lxxʓ,' &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 Löslein 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 mañes 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 Günther 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.

[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, Günther 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 Günther 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 under

standing 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.

During the ten or twelve years of his activity at

Augsburg, which was brought to a close by his death in 1478, Günther 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 Bämler, 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.

Bämler 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 Todsünden 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 Bämler 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 Königshofen's Chronik von allen Königen und Kaisern, printed in 1476, Bämler 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 Bämler's later books, his edition (issued in 1482), of the History of the Crusades (Türken-Kreuzzüge), 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, Bämler 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 Büchlein 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 Römer, were repeatedly published there and

nowhere else. Others, e.g. the Historie des Königs 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 Æsop 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 Günther 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 Steinhöwel's version of the Life and Fables of Æsop, 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 Æsop,

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 Æsop 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.

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 Æsop. From Conrad Dinkmuth we have the first illustrated editions of three notable works, the Seelenwurzgarten, or 'Garden of the Soul' (1483), Thomas Lirar's Schwäbische 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.

At Lübeck 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 naïveté 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 Prüss 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 Könige of Johannes Hildeshemensis, printed by Prüss. 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 Æsop 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 naïveté 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.

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 Reichthümer 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.

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.

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 Grüninger, 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 Lübeck, 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 Dürer himself contributed three illustrations. For three years, from St. Andrew's Day 1486, Dürer 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, 'Gedrücket zu Nurnbergk durch Albrecht Dürer 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 Dürer, 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, Dürer 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 Nürnberg 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 Eichstätt Missal of three years later. For us, however, Dürer'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 Dürer 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 Schäufelein, 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 Schäufelein, and we have already seen that in the same year Dürer 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 Schäufelein, 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.

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 Grüninger and Martin Flach and his son continued to print numerous illustrated works, largely from designs by Hans Baldung Grün, 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 Scævola 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.

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 Æsop 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 Æsop, 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 Antæus, 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 Æsop 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 Æsop 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 Æsopi 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.

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 Æsop 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.'

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 Virtù, 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.

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 ([a]πολια]), '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.

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 Danaë, 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.

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.

[9] The title of the book, printed in red, beneath the first woodcut, reads: 'Meditationes Rever[=e]dissimi patris dñi 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 26¾ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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