.-'&*.
UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
SCHOOL OF
LIBRARY SERVICE
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ard, whose
enterprise has bequeathed to the Bibliotheque
Nationale a whole row of books thus specially
decorated for Charles VIIL, and to the British
Museum a no less splendid set commissioned by
Henry vii. Nor were Ve'rard's patrons only found
among kings, for a record still exists of four books
thus ornamented by him for Charles d'Angouleme,
at a total cost of over two hundred livres, equivalent
1 6 Early Illustrated Books
to rather more than the same number of pounds
sterling of our present money.
Verard's methods of preparing these magnificent
volumes were neither very artistic nor very honest.
The miniatures are thickly painted, so that an under-
lying 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 devour-
ing his children and a rather improper 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 fond-
ling. This process of alteration and painting out was
also employed by Ve"rard to conceal the fact that
these splendid copies were often not of his own
publication, but commissioned by him from other
publishers. Thus Henry vil.'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 Vlll.'s copy
of the Compost et Kalendrier des Bergiers (1493) *
Guiot Marchant's device has been concealed by paint-
ing 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 Verard's well-known
device. Verard's borders, also, are as a rule heavy,
1 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).
Rubrishers and Illuminators 1 7
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 Verard. 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 Phtlologia of
Budaeus, 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 Angou-
leme, to whom it was dedicated. In another work by
Budaeus (himself, as Mr. Elton has told us, 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 illumina-
tion 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
r>
1 8 Early Illustrated Books
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 begin-
ning 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 pro-
Rubrishers and Illuminators 1 9
voked 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. In the case devoted to speci-
mens of illuminated printed books in the King's
Library at the British Museum are exhibited vellum
copies of the Aldine Martial of 1501, and Catullus
of 1502, and side by side with them, printed re-
spectively 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
2O Early Illustrated Books
Italian books from 1490 to 1520. For a long time I
tried hard to persuade myself that these shields were
intended to be filled in with the owner's arms in
colour, but as I have never met with an instance in
which this has been done, and the Italians had, as a
rule, the good taste to avoid mixing colour with their
beautiful engravings, it is best to regard these empty
shields as a mere survival. Two examples of their
use are here shewn, 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 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
2 2 Early Illustrated Books
early book-plate, and the Bagford example of Sir
Nicholas Bacon's plate (reproduced by Mr. Hardy in
his work on Book-Plates in this series), has endured
suspicions on this account. In this instance, how-
ever, the fortunate existence of a slight flaw in the
plate, 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 ownership.
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.
23
24 Early Illustrated Books
We have already noted how the anxiety of the
earliest Mentz 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 can hardly 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 systematically
employed by Schoeffer. Many of the best printers
of later days seem to have deliberately eschewed
it as too garish, and on the other hand we find it
used in the first printed English book, and the first
book printed in France, a proof that its employment
presented no difficulty even to inexpert printers.
The use of a colophon, or crowning paragraph, at
the end of a book, to give the information now con-
tained on our title-pages, dates from the Mentz
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 Buck der vier Historien von
Joseph, Daniel, Esther, und Judith, and the brothers
Bechtermuntze, 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 guessed, or
inferred from the chance entry by a purchaser or
rubricator of the date at which the book came into
feroifto.&mt q
Ctiam dDorio dto aftienfj&eni biic ibciu
i ioHitfe gp&
|S>tl ^ boc opufcatuj fittitiiae coplcta*ij ad
cufcbia^ teirnduftrtc mamtatc Q)4gun
Colophon from Schoeffer's Bible of 1462.
26 Early Illustrated Books
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 in-
stance of a device is known until about 1470, when they
became common, some printers imitating Schoeffer
in the modest size of their badges, while others made
them large enough 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 Giinther 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 sometimes 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 engraved
letters, this ingenious device was a step backward
rather than an improvement.
The Completion of the Printed Book 2 7
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 four
in number, or, if we count different editions separately,
seven, of which only two have dates, viz. : one of the
two editions of Boden's Edelstein, dated 1461, and the
Buck 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
(i) another edition of the Edelstein ; (2) a Biblia
Pauperum ; (3) two closely similar editions of this in
German ; (4) the Rechtstreit des Menschen mit dem
Tode, also called Gesprach 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 Bibliotheque 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 Wolffenbuttel in 1815,
but the Bibliotheque has since acquired another set
of three, and a separate edition of the German Biblia
28 Early Illustrated Books
Pauperum. The only other copies known are those
in the Spencer Collection, and a unique example of
the undated Edelstein at Berlin. 1
These four books contain altogether no less than
20 1 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 un-
dated there are differences in the man's headgear, and
in the book or tablet he is holding, constituting three
different variations. In the Buck der vier Historien
the cuts number 55, six of which, however, are
repeated, making 61 impressions. In the impossi-
bility of obtaining access to the originals, while the
Spencer Collection is in the course of removal, I
reproduce the careful copy of one of these, made for
Camus in 1799, 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
1 A leaf of the Rechtstreit is in the Taylorian Institute at
Oxford.
Early Illustrated Books
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 (i) 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 re-
marriage 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.
Two other illustrated books have been ascribed to
Pfister. The first, in which his type was used, is on
Christ's Passion, and contains nineteen woodcuts of
scenes from the Entry into Jerusalem to the Last
Judgment. The other book is the first edition of
Otto von Passau's Vier und zivanzig Aelten, in which
the initials S. P. and P. A., introduced into a border
and one of the woodcut letters, have been interpreted
The Completion of the Printed Book 3 1
as standing for Sebastian Pfister and Albrecht
Pfister. Examples of these cuts form the first illus-
trations in Muther's Der Deutsche Bucherilhistra-
tion, but they do not resemble Pfister's work, and
it is not certain that they should be dated earlier
than 14/0.
After the introduction of woodcut illustrations, the
next innovation with which we have to concern our-
selves is the adoption of the title-page. Arnold ther
Hoernen of Cologne appears to have been the first
printer lavish enough to devote a whole page to pre-
fixing a title to a book, and is thus the author of the
title-page. A facsimile (made originally for the
present author's pamphlet on the History of the Title-
page) 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, how-
ever, does not seem to have set any store by his
innovation, and the next title-page which has to be
chronicled is 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 sacer-
ab Jpulutnpt2bif abili's-ljlrt fbfto pfU
tnaome* Jo eaftfTime mam fempw: tnrgrrrie no*
multo^ facccfcotu ptefctttm ciirato^ collcctug.^e
ibdrco pec rmpafTone mulriplic otus'fub ^oc att x
rente *4nno ^rmttiO^'ac^^l^.^uiurquiiem
CD ticcttonis otq^ ettam multiplicaertraff 01110 no
f?atuijxn6?nba raoo ft placet tnbm psitcet* ) n
fbiif lafett requtttti
The first printed Title-page. A. ther Hoernen, Cologne, 1470.
The Completion of the Printed Book 33
dotem, Anno Lxxg,' etc. 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 Loslein 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 hie liber est: non est preciosior ulla
Gemma kalendario quod docet istud opus.
Aureus hie 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. 21), 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 de-
sign was employed by printers from Augsburg, the
city in which wood-engraving was first seriously em-
ployed for the decoration of printed books. But
the design itself is distinctly Italian in its spirit,
not German.
C
34 Early Illustrated Books
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. The two
earliest appearances of these label title-pages in Eng-
land are (i) 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?] ; and (2) in one of the
earliest works printed by Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's
apprentice, after his master's death. Here, in the
centre of the first page, we find a three-line para-
graph reading :
The prouffytable boke for manes soule And right com-
fortable 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 illustra-
tion ; in Italy and Germany usually of an illustra-
tion, 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 Completion of the Printed Book 35
the book as the chief source of information as to
the printer's name, and place and date of publi-
cation. 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 Mr. 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 wood-
cuts 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 begins,
and extend only over part of the upper and inner
margins. In other instances, however, they com-
pletely surround the first page of text, and this is
invariably 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 practi-
cally confined 1 to books of devotion, notably the
1 They are found also in some Books of Emblems, and in the various
editions of the Figures from the Metamorphoses, so popular at Lyons
in the middle of the sixteenth century.
36 Early Illustrated Books
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 investiga-
tions on the subject, it is dangerous to attempt to
say where tailpieces 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 held rather needlessly to be a misprint, though
it is a curious coincidence that we find signatures
stamped by hand in one edition of F. 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 printers' gradual emancipation from his long de-
pendence on the help of the scribe. It is perhaps
worth while, for the same reason, to take as a land-
mark Gunther 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
The Completion of the Printed Book 37
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 par-
ticular specimen of his work he did not give his
name, though it is duly dated.
BEATISSIMO PATRI PAVLO SE
CVNDO PONTIFICI MAXIMO.
DONIS NICOLAVSGERMANVS
On me fagit beatifltme patcr.Cuc^ fummo
ingctiio cxquititaqjdoctnnaptDlotncuscDf
mograpbus pinxifle in bis aliquid nouari
attemptarcnus fotctuthic noftcr labor in
multDruttprcbcnliones incuritret. Omnco
cnim g bane noftram picbara quc bis tabu
latfquaa ad tc mitdmu8n& gcbo:cn
xx?i5cr Jterbn homc/ab 5ic gphqen
ftwx>n& alfo mit groffcr Forg bcbat f cn/als ob w
tulle gcboicn vocrden.'Fun&cr ^^r^m &^ eg ^u gemainc
nucj ticnftlicF) Fpc/x>nJ) in erbe:m Fcbpiic/vns/vn &cn
friin&cn ^u r^glgJ5 Fzpem gemut/nit vm rum nocl> \elthd>
ecr Funbcr om bilff ;etun 'nir^m gewoincn.Tun&er \>
gutikait . Vnb fcocl) fol &aa gcbcn atfo Wd>eb en
mie folcljcr bcFcbaidenbaic / 65 toir mit v| gcbcn / nit
fcb cr tn no rurff t Fallen / bar & ur cl? voir Fremder b^
bcgcrcn muftcn*
^ IELIVS
From Boccaccio De Clar. Mul, Ulm, 1473. (Reduced.)
ccnttd tyntinv
Outs cntm malus itift bomoctia3 bonus nift Ijom
vtta^ l?omirtttm ctmo:e6 fatis eft comp2e^cn6ct8-<'
aufus fum b*emtee ftmtles fcrifaece fabulaeC c
cntm bonoztim frae nocetitu gefta ^ tile fecutus vtuat qu
lion b^tet qucm timeat -^(ti^mcftfee via bom 'ftim optim
futfjfmt ct hbed ctncmfetcm timeccnt et ftbt fntticernfettttwi
cam optima x>dlttntateconftlto tfano mbttcti>fupetio2c ftb
petiecuntqut tmpzobozum motes compcfcctct etpum'cct
x 5e& qttta ^auati fyac I^e rnetitebant ^cmi
pgawUtmmo outa tile ecu Jclts etat'fcb quta mfuetx *vt fu!
icge out fttb alteriti Hccctdte ^iittcntgtmte tilts pobtts erat
eonttaft m f mpdfiientiam flebat-^^unc efopus flits t?oro
* Cabala poma te Yarn's et touc*
^ttpltcattcec tout nc ftitc agt foment
oto ttfum 6Bbt^
fe|tt to ahine f
King Log and King Stork, from Sorg's reprint of the Ulm /Esop. (Reduced.)
Germany 1470-1500 53
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 is
given as a frontispiece to this chapter. In 1483
he issued the first of many editions of the Buck 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 ALsop.
From Conrad Dinkmuth we have the first illustrated
editions of three notable works, the Seelenwarzgarten
or 'Garden of the Soul' (1483), Thomas Sirar's
Schwdbischer 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.
At Lubeck in 1475 Lucas Brandis printed, as
his first book, a notable edition of the Rudimenta
Noviciorum, an epitome of history, sacred and pro-
From the EunucAus, Ulm, 1486. (Reduced.)
Germany 1470-1500 55
fane, 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 pre-
liminary 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
(John the type-cutter) issued a German Bible, intro-
ducing illustrations into the large initial leters. At
Cologne about I4/O, 1 Ulrich Zell printed a Horologium
1 I give this date on Dr. Muther's authority ; it is probably too early.
56 Early Illustrated Books
Devotionis with thirty-six small cuts of scenes from
the life of Christ. It was at Cologne also that 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.
About 1480 there appeared a great Bible in two
volumes, in the type and with borders which are
found in books signed by Heinrich Quentel, to whose
press it is therefore only reasonable to assign it
There are altogether one hundred and twenty-five
cuts, ninety-four in the Old Testament (thirty-three of
which illustrate the life of Moses), and thirty-one in
the New. They are of considerable size, stretching
right across the double-columned page, and are the
work of a skilful, but not very highly inspired, artist.
They have neither the na'fvet 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 Koburger used
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 Testa-
ment printed by Adam Petri at Basle in 1523.
Germany 1470-15 oo 57
At Strasburg, illustrated books were first l issued
by Knoblochzer in 1477, and after 1480, Martin
Schott and Johann Priiss 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 Buck der Heiligen drei
Konige of Johannes Hildesberniensis, printed by
Pruss. 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. 2
In addition to the places we have mentioned,
illustrated books were issued during this period by
Bernhard Richel at Basle, by Conrad Fyner at
Esslingen, by George Reyser at Wiirzburg, and by
other printers in less important German towns. But
these are of no general interest, and the books which
we have already discussed are more than 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
1 The Endchrist, Ernst von Bayern and Melusine of an unknown
printer, whose two dated books belong to 1477 and 1478, may possibly
be earlier.
2 Many of Knoblochzer'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 &sop perhaps show his best work. These are reproduced,
with many other examples of his types, initials, and illustrations in
Heinrich Knoblochzer in Strassburg von Karl Schorbath und Jlfax
Spirgatis. (Strassburg, 1888.)
58 Early Illustrated Books
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 1 500, 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.
CHAPTER IV.
GERMANY, FROM 1486.
THE second period of book-illustration in Germany
dates from the publication at Mentz in 1486 of Bern-
hard 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 hun-
dred 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 fronti-
spieces to each part. These three books, however, in
the na'fvete and simplicity of their illustrations, belong
essentially to the period which we have reviewed in
our last chapter. On the other hand, the Opus
transmarince peregrinationis ad sepulchrum dominicum
in JJierusalem 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.
59
6o Early Illustrated Books
When Bernhard von Breydenbach went on his
pilgrimage in 1483 he took with him the painter,
Erhard Reuwick, and while Breydenbach made notes
of their adventures, Reuwick sketched the inhabitants
of Palestine, and drew wonderful maps of the places
they visited. On their return to Mentz in 1484,
Breydenbach began writing out his Latin account of
the pilgrimage, and Reuwick 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 Mentz,
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
Mentz 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
62 Early Illustrated Books
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 Mt. 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 sala-
mander and a unicora 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
Germany, from 1486 63
sunt veraciter depicta sicut vidimus in terra sancta ! '
At the end of the text is Reuwick'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 ten 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
Reichthilmer des Heils und ewiger Seeligkeit and Hart-
mann Schedel's Liber Chronicarum, usually known
as the Nuremberg Chronicle, are in every respect
inferior, even the unsurpassed profusion of the wood-
cuts in the latter being almost a sin against good
taste. Both works were printed by Anton Koburger
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 Schatz-
behalter. 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
64 Early Illustrated Books
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 Philis-
tines, 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 re-
presentation 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,
From the Nuremberg Chronicle.
E
66 Early Illustrated Books
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 Schatz-
behalter, 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 men-
tioned 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 Breyden-
bach's Pilgrimage, are still good. For Ninive, for
' Athene vel Minerva/ for ' Troy, 1 and other ancient
places, the requisite imagination was forthcoming ;
while the maps of Venice, 1 of Florence, and of
1 Dr. Lippmann is of opinion that the map of Venice was adapted
from Reuwick's j that of Florence from a large woodcut, printed at
Florence between 1486 and 1490, of which the unique original 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
Chronuarum, printed at Venice in 1490. But the evidence he pro-
duces is hardly convincing.
Germany, from 1486 67
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 out-
side the city-walls, and to the hedge of spikes, by
which the drawbridge was protected from assault.
No one, I believe, has ever attempted to count the
number of the illustrations in this great book, but
Dr. Muther is probably right in saying that it has
never been equalled in any single volume before or
since.
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 Basle, and we also may be permitted to
digress thither. In the year of the Chronicle itself
a Basle printer, Michael Furter, had produced a
richly illustrated work, the Buck des Ritters von dem
Exempeln des Gotterfurcht 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
68 Early Illustrated Books
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 fight-
ing 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 window
while his house is on fire, of the sick fool (here
shown) who kicks off the bed-clothes and breaks
the medicine bottles while the doctor vainly tries to
feel his pulse, of the fool who allows earthly con-
cerns 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
Basle 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 borders, it has no artistic pretensions.
In the same year (1494) as the Narrenschiff t Berg-
mann printed another of Brant's works, his poems
The Sick Fool.
70 Early Illustrated Books
( In laudem Virginis Mariae ' and of the Saints, with
fourteen cuts, and in 1495 his De origine et conserva-
tione 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,vf\\h fifteen large cuts, by no means equal
to those of the Narrenschiff. In 1498 the indefatig-
able author employed both his printers, giving to
Bergmann his Varia Carmina and to Furter his
edition of the Revelation to S. Methodius in prison,
which is remarkable not only for its fifty-five illus-
trations, 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 re-
moved to Strasburg, where his influence was speedily
apparent in the illustrated books published by Johann
Gruninger, who in 1494 had issued as his first illus-
trated 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 Heiligen-
lebens and an annotated Virgil, each of them illus-
trated with over two hundred cuts, of which very
few had been used before.
The year 1494 was notable for the publication
Germany, from 1486 71
not only of the Narrenschiff, but of a Low Saxon
Bible printed by Stephan Arndes at Lubeck, 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 Nurem-
berg printer, 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 tem-
porary prison, is made to inflict his embraces on the
pots and pans, instead of on the holy maidens im-
mured 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
72 Early Illustrated Books
amorum, published by Celtes in 1502, to which
Albrecht Diirer himself contributed three illustra-
tions. For three years, from St. Andrew's Day
1486, Diirer had served an apprenticeship to Wohl-
gemuth, and when he returned to Nuremberg after
his ' wanderjahre ' he too began to work as an illus-
trator. His earliest 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
Johannes^ and on the verso of the last cut but one
is the colophon, 'Gedriicket zu Nurnbergk durch
Albrecht Durer maler, nach Christi geburt M.CCCC
und darnach im xciij 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 prin-
ciple we can only mention, without detailed de-
scription, the Epitome in Divae Parthenices Mariae
historiam of 1511, the Passio Domini nostri Jesu t
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, de-
Germany ', from 1486 73
signed by Diirer, 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,
Diirer 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 Sladt Nuremburg 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 Maxi-
milian in 1514. By him also was the woodcut of
Christ on the Cross, which appears first in the
Eichstadt Missal of three years later. For us,
however, Diirer'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
painters were not slow to follow.
In directing the attention of German artists to the
illustration of books, the Emperor Maximilian played
a part more important than Diirer himself. As in
politics, so in art, his designs were on too ambitious
a scale, and of the three great books he pro-
jected, 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 intrusted to the elder Hans Schon-
sperger of Augsburg, but for some unknown reason,
74 Early Illustrated Books
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 hand-
some 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 in-
trusted to Hans Schaufelein, 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 hunt-
ing scenes and knightly conflicts, are not conspicu-
ously 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.
Germany r , from 1486 75
The Wetsskunig, 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 Theuer-
dank. The two hundred and thirty-seven designs
for the Weisskunig were mainly the work of Hans
Burgkmair, an Augsburg artist of repute ; its literary
execution was intrusted 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 15 19 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 both Burgkmair x
and Schaufelein to turn for work to the Augsburg
printers, and during the next few years we find them
1 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 con-
versation, the title of the book being given in a shield hung over their
heads. In the same year Daniel Hopfer designed very fine, though florid,
borders for two Augsburg books, the Chronicon Abbatis Urspergensis ,
printed by Johann Muller, and the Sassenspigel, printed by Sylvan
Othmar.
76 Early Illustrated Books
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 Burgkmair 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. Many of them may be ranked
with Burgkmair's best work, nevertheless the Petrarch
is a very disappointing book. To do justice to the
fine designs the most delicate-press work was neces-
sary, 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. As early as 1492 we
find a Novum B. Mariae Virginis Psalterium printed
at Tzenna, near Wittenberg, with very beautiful,
Germany, from 1486 77
though florid, borders. In 1513 there appeared at
Augsburg a German prayer-book, entitled Via Felici-
tatis, with thirty cuts, all with rich conventional
borders, probably by Hans Schaufelein, and we have
already seen that in the same year Diirer 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 15 20 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 Schoen-
sperger's by Schaufelein, Silvan Othmar's by Burgk-
mair. 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 pre-
Border atuibuted to Lucas Cranach.
Germany, from 1486 79
viously (in 1509) designed the cuts for what was
known as the Wittenberger Heiligsthumbuch, in 1521
produced his Passional Christi und Antichrist^ 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 pecu-
liarly 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 Strasburg,
Hans Gruninger and Martin Flach and his son con-
tinued to print numerous illustrated works, largely
from designs by Hans Baldung Griin, 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 Basle
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 Basle Urs Graf gave
the most and the best of his work, and there the
8o Early Illustrated Books
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
Scaevola 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
Germany \ from 1486 81
more, those of Basle 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, how-
ever, 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 sur-
vived 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.
CHAPTER V.
ITALY I.
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED BOOKS AND THOSE OF
VENICE.
IN 1441 a decree of the Signoria forbade the im-
portation of German playing-cards into Venice. The
decree proves the existence of a native industry able
to enforce its claim for protection, but the earliest
positive date we can connect with any Italian
engraving on metal is eleven years later (the first
dated example of the work of Finiguerra), and the
extant examples of Italian wood-engraving all appear
to be considerably later. 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.
I have already noticed Dr. Lippmann's discovery of
a woodcut border in a copy of the Subiaco Lactantius
of 1465, and have expressed my belief that, like the
designs stamped by hand in some early Venetian
books, it must be regarded as an addition peculiar to
82
Italy The First Illustrated Books 83
this one copy, or, at most, shared by only a few, and
that it was added after the book had left the printer's
hands. If this be so, the edition of the Meditationes
of Cardinal Turrecremata, printed by Ulrich Hahn
at Rome in 1467, retains its time-honoured claim to
be the first work printed in Italy in which wood-
engraving was employed. The cuts are thirty-four
in number, and professed to illustrate the same sub-
jects as the frescoes recently painted by the cardinal's
order in the Church of San Maria di Minerva at
Rome. 1 Dr. Lippmann, who has certainly a ten-
dency to overestimate the artistic influence of his
compatriots in Italy, pronounces these cuts to be
' thoroughly Germanic ' in their execution, an opinion
which the Vicomte Delaborde vehemently contests.
There is nothing impossible in the theory that Hahn
may have cut them himself, but 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 (one of the best of the series)
is taken, no copy of the editio princeps being easily
available for reproduction.
1 The title of the book, printed in red, beneath the first woodcut,
reads: ' Meditationes Reveredissimi patris dni Johannis de turrecremata
sacrosce Romane eccl'ie cardinalis posite & depicte de ipsius madato
I eccl'ie ambitu Marie de Minerva, Rome.'
qutd ajia-Rcm profecto operan0,que me profundiflt*
maadmiratienefufpmd^ftercKterimen6,nepueruperdat,in.
tu cu puero a matte due fujis-O res ftupcnda-in6ne puer iftc
cit par uulu s iltc ; qui paucos ante dice natue e(V nobiauiu6 impcn
um uc ppbcta (anct us aicYuper bumcrfi etue^eue fornapatcr fu
run fcculi,priceps paas-lflimifl profccco arbitratue ce Herpdie po
renciam.uc metiiercc.ne paruulu perderecv rut efr potedae immeri*
fa/maieftas mftnitai -i infuperabUie forcirudo*O cu deue omnipotef
T clcn icnnlTi me pater,que ncceffitas fuit ; ut Uitig by Gian Stephano da Pavia, at the request of
Bernardo Pacini. The printer of the 1498 edition is
not known ; it cannot have been Mischomini, who
seems to have brought his brilliant career to a close
about 1495. The foregoing notice of his illustrated
books is by no means exhaustive. Passing mention
has been made in the chapter on Venice of one other
important one, the undated Meditatione, attributed to
S. Bonaventura, with cuts of peculiar interest, from
the opportunity they afford of comparing the different
styles in vogue in the two cities.
Three other Florentine books issued during the
fifteenth century remain to be mentioned, none of
which I have seen. The place of the first of these,
Italy Florence 125
an undated edition of Domenico Capranica's Arte di
bene Morire (not to be confounded with Savonarola's),
is supplied very well by an edition of 1513, which
contains twelve large cuts and twenty-two small
ones, answering apparently to the thirty-four cuts
assigned by Mr. Richard Fisher, in the Catalogue of
his collection, to the first edition. The larger cuts
are interesting, because they are based on those found
in the old block books of the Ars Moriendi. The
smaller ones seem brought together rather at hap-
hazard, and lead one to think that Mr. Fisher's pro-
posed date of circa 1490 is probably some five years
too early. The other two books, an ALsop, printed in
1495 by Francesco Buonaccorsi for Piero Pacini, and
the Morgante Maggiore (a long poem on the adven-
tures of Orlando) of Ludovico Pulci, printed in 1500,
both exist only in single copies in foreign libraries.
The former could hardly fail to be interesting ; the
illustrations to the latter, according to Dr. Lippmann,
are numerous but not very good, and with this in-
formation we must console ourselves.
Of illustrated books printed at Florence after 1500,
the most important is an edition of the Quatriregio del
decorso delta vita humana of Federico Frezzi, printed,
this also, ' ad petitione di Ser Piero Pacini di Pescia/
in 1508. Like the author of the Hypnerotomachia,
Frezzi was a Dominican, and was consecrated Bishop
of Foligno, his native place, in 1403. He attended
the Council of Constance, and died there in 1416.
He was a man of great learning and a book-collector,
1 26 Early Illustrated Books
but rather a dull poet. His Quatriregio is an imita-
tion of Dante's Divina Commedia, and is divided into
four books treating successively of the kingdoms ' of
the god Copid,' ' of Satan,' ' of the Vices,' and ' of the
goddess Minerva and of Virtue.' It was first printed
in 1481, and went through three other editions before
it was honoured with illustrations in 1 508. The im-
portance of this illustrated edition has perhaps been
overrated. Taken individually, the best of the cuts
are not superior to those in earlier Florentine books
of less pretensions, while the cumulative effect of the
series of one hundred and twenty-six (several of
which, it should be said, are duplicates) is seriously
diminished, partly by the monotonous recurrence of
the same figure in every cut, partly by the coarseness
and angularity with which most of the blocks have
been engraved. It must be mentioned that the cut
on the first page of the poem is signed with the
initials L. V., which were at one time interpreted as
standing for Luca Egidio di Venturi, i.e. Luca Signo-
relli, whose recognised signature, however, was L. C.
(Luca di Cortona).
Two other great series of Florentine illustrated
books still remain to be considered. The first of
these is the Rappresentationi, sacred and secular,
which enjoyed a life extending over two centuries,
and must be reckoned as the most artistic of chap-
books. In 1852 M. Colomb de Batines published at
Florence a bibliography of these 'Antiche Rappre-
sentazioni Italiane,' to which I am indebted for the
a raprcfcntatione AfanGfouannf & Paulo
1 28 Early Illustrated Books
following details concerning their chief authors. The
plays are almost uniformly written in ottava rima, and
poorly printed in double columns. A large number
of them, at least a score, were written and printed
during the fifteenth century, but these earliest editions
are, as a rule, not illustrated. Maffeo Belcari (1410-
1484) apparently was the first author who obtained
the honours of print. His play of Abraham appeared
in 1485, after which it was reprinted some twenty
times, the latest known edition belonging to the
eighteenth century. Belcari also wrote on the
Annunciation, on S. John the Baptist visited by
Christ in the Desert, and on S. Panuntius. Lorenzo
de' Medici himself wrote a play of S. John and S.
Paul, Bernardo Pulci (d. 1501) produced one on
the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, while his wife
Antonia was quite a prolific dramatist, claiming as
her own plays on S. Domitilla, S. Guglielma, the
Patriarch Joseph, S. Francis, and the Prodigal Son.
A Passion play by Giuliano Dati, printed in 1501, was
one of the earliest to obtain illustration. During
the fifteenth century anonymous plays were written
on the Nativity, on the life of Queen Hester, on the
Angel Raphael, on the conversion of three robbers
by S. Francis, and on S. Eustachio, S. Antony,
and S. Antonia. Plays on the Last Judgment, on
S. Agatha, S. Agnes, S. Catharine, S. Cecilia, S.
Christina, etc., also appeared at an early date.
An angel, as a rule, acts as Prologue, and the
action of the drama is divided between numerous
Italy Florence 129
characters. Most of the plays were, doubtless, in-
tended to be acted on the feast-day of the Saint whose
life they celebrate, and in a church bearing the Saint's
name, but the multiplicity of the editions shows that
they also won the favour of a reading public.
A small proportion of these little books are un-
dated, and from the comparative excellence of their
press-work may be assigned to the beginning of the
sixteenth century. The first printer who is known
to have made a specialty of the Rappresentationi is
Francesco Benvenuto, who began printing them in
1516, and enjoyed a career of thirty years. M.
Colomb de Batines mentions several of his editions,
but they are very scarce, and I have only myself
seen a Raphael of 1516 with a title-cut of Tobit and
the Angel enclosed in a border, partly the same as
that of the Fior di Virtu of 1498, a Barlaam and
Josafat, also of 1516, with six illustrations (including
our friend Damocles and the Rabbit, whose fate
seems to have been to be lugged in inappropriately),
and a Miracolo di Tre Peregrini che andauano a
sancto lacopo di Galitia, with a solitary cut of the Saint
rescuing one of the pilgrims who is being unjustly
hanged. The great majority of the extant Rappre-
sentationi were printed between 1550 and 1580, mostly
anonymously, though Giovanni Baleni and a printer
' Alle Scale di Badia ' were responsible for a great
many of them. Of course, in many cases the cuts
were sadly the worse for wear, but they held on
wonderfully, and even in the seventeenth century
I
1 30 Early Illustrated Books
editions a tolerable impression is sometimes met with.
Many of them, also, were recut, sometimes skilfully,
so that it is not uncommon to find a better example
in a later edition than in an earlier. The illustra-
tions here shown are from an undated edition of
Lorenzo de' Medici's Rappresentationi di San Giovanni
e Paulo (p. 127), the careful printing of which is an
argument for its belonging to the beginning of the
sixteenth century, and a picture of the martyrdom of
S. Dorothea from an edition of her Rappresentationc,
printed in 1555.
With these religious Rappresentationi M. Colomb
de Batines joins a few secular poems, whose title
to be considered dramatic is not very clear. Of
those which he mentions, the earliest is the Favola
a" Orfeo, by Angelo Politiano, which forms part
of La Giostra di Giuliano di Medici, printed with-
out name or date, probably about 1495, with ten
excellent cuts, that of Aristeo pursuing the flying
Eurydice being, perhaps, the best. La Giostra di
Lorenzo di Medici, celebrated by Luigi Pulci, has
only a single cut, but that a fine one, a meeting of
knights in an amphitheatre. Among other secular
chapbooks which enjoyed a long popularity was a
series of ' contrast!,' x the contrast of Carnival and
Lent, of Men and Women, of the Living and the
Dead, of the Blonde and the Brunette, and of Riches
1 El Contrasto di Camesciale e la Quaresima ; El Contrasto degli
Huomini e delle Donne ; El Contrasto del Vivo e del Morto; El Con-
trasto della Bianca e della Brunetta ; La Contenzione della Poverta
contra la Richezza, etc.
Martyrdom of S. Dorothea.
132 Early Illustrated Books
and Poverty. I give here the first of the two cuts of
the Contrasto di Carnesciale e la Quaresima, undated,
but probably early. With these little poems we must
join the metrical Novelle and Istorie, to which atten-
tion has lately been called by the discovery in the
University Library at Erlangen of a little collection
of twenty-one tracts, all undated, and without any
indication of their printers, but which may safely be
assigned to the early part of the sixteenth century
Among them are the Novella di Gualtieri e Griselda,
the Novella di due Preti et un Cherico> the Novella
della Figliuola del Mercatante, etc. Dr. Varnhagen
has printed an account of these Erlangen tracts, with
reproduction of their cuts, one or two of which
frequently occur in the Rappresentationi.
The charm of these little Florentine books is so
great, and of late years has won such steadily in-
creasing recognition, that I do not think an apology
is needed for the length at which they have here been
treated. None the less, we must remember that they
were essentially popular books, and that the wealthy
book-lovers of the time probably regarded them very
slightly. Mischomini himself did not turn his atten-
tion to them till he had been printing nearly a dozen
years, and even after 1492 his more expensive books,
the great Plotinus, for instance, issued in that year,
kept strictly to the traditions of twenty years earlier,
and were wholly destitute of ornament, even of
printed initials. The two classes of books those
on good paper and in a large handsome type, and
edition of the Exposition des Evangiles en romant of
Maurice de Sully, and in the following November the
romance of Baudoin comte de Flandre. The Bishops'
sermons have, on the first page, a large initial I and
a very rough cut of the disciples loosing the ass and
her colt for Christ's use. With their other illustra-
tions I am not acquainted. The romance of Count
Baldwin has a full-page cut of the count riding on a
gaily-decked charger, and thirteen smaller illustra-
tions of his adventures, of which, however, several are
repeated. The execution of them all is as rude as can
well be conceived. Two years later, Neyret printed
the first edition of a very famous book, Le Livre du
Roi Modus et de la Reine Ratio, ' lequel fait mencion
commant on doit deviser de toutes manieres de
chasses.' The cuts in this are numerous, and their
representations of the various hunting scenes are
more than sufficiently grotesque.
The list of books we have named could certainly
be extended, especially as regards those printed at
148 Early Illustrated Books
Lyons, but it is sufficiently full to enable us to draw
some useful conclusions from it. The illustrations
are, almost without exception, poor in design and
badly cut, and are mostly accompanied by inferior
types and press-work. Some of them are imitated
from the books of foreign printers, and they contain
no evidence whatever of the growth of any French
school of illustrators. On the other hand, they
testify to the spread of a demand for illustrated books,
at least in the provinces, which local printers were
doing their best to satisfy. At Paris the demand,
apparently, had not yet arisen. In the first dated
book which bears the name of Jean Du Pre*, a Missale
ad usum ecclesiae Parisiensis, printed by him in con-
junction with Desire" Huym in 1481, there are said to
be two woodcuts illustrating the Canon. With the
exception of the devices of a few printers, such as
Guyot Marchant and Berthold Rembolt, these are
the only woodcuts in books printed at Paris before
1485, of which I have found record. Probably there
are others, but I do not think there can be many,
and we may reasonably conclude that the lead in
book-illustration was taken by the provinces, and that
the Paris printers waited some fifteen years before
daring to enter into competition with the beautiful
manuscripts which were still being produced in
great numbers, and in the most sumptuous style of
decoration.
It is at this conjuncture that Antoine Verard enters
on the scene. Although some of the innumerable
France 149
works which bear his name are said to have been
printed ' par Antoine Ve"rard,' it is clear that the
expression must not be taken too literally, and that
he was a ' libraire,' i.e. a bookseller or publisher,
rather than a printer. His first dated book l is an
edition, e"nriched with a single woodcut, of Laurent
du Premier Fait's French version of the Decamerone,
and the colophon tells us that it was printed for
Antoine Verard, 'libraire, demeurant sur le Pont
Notre Dame, a 1'image de Saint Jean 1'Evangeliste,'
on November 22, 1485. The types used in the book
have been identified as belonging to Jean Du Pre, and
the association of the two men seems to have led to
important results. The next year we find Du Pre
printing an edition of S. Jerome's Vie des anciens
saints Peres, with a delightful frontispiece of the saint
preaching from a lectern in the open air, numerous
smaller cuts, and initial letters with interwoven faces.
During 1486 also, he assisted Pierre Gerard (who
earlier in the year had printed by himself an edition
of Boutillier's La Somme Rurale with a single cut), in
producing at Abbeville the first really magnificent
French illustrated book, S. Augustine's Cite de Dieu,
in which paper and print and woodcuts of artistic
1 Hain assigns to Verard a French Josef hits, dated December 7, 1480,
Bonnor's VArbre de Batailles, 1481, and the Liber Parabolarum of
Alanus, March 20, 1484, o.s. But he had not seen any of these books,
nor, indeed, more than three out of his list of Verard's works. I,
therefore, follow the statement of M. Thierry-Poux. It may be noted
that Verard undoubtedly printed editions of all the three books named,
but at much later dates.
1 50 Early Illustrated Books
value all harmonise. 1 Two years later he joined
with another provincial printer, Jean le Bourgeois, in
producing a still more splendid book, the romance of
Lancelot du Lac, the first volume of which was finished
by Le Bourgeois at Rouen on November 24th, and the
second by Du Pr at Paris on September i6th. In
1488 also, Du Pre" produced his first 'Book of Hours,'
but the French Horae form so important an episode in
the history of the decoration of books, that we must
reserve their treatment for a separate chapter, in
which, besides those of Du Pre* and Verard, who led
the way with an edition in 1487, we shall have to
speak of the long series inaugurated by Philippe
Pigouchet and Simon Vostre in the next year.
At starting, Verard's resources were probably small,
and for a year or two he produced little beyond his
Horae. In 1487, however, he published a French
Livy, with four small cuts, representing a battle, a
siege, a king and his court, and some riders, whose
hats have a very ecclesiastical shape, entering a town.
The next year produced a work entitled L'Art de
Chevalerie selon V^gece, really an edition of the Faits
darme et de chevalerie of Christine de Pisa. This
has a single large cut representing a king and his
court. The Livre de Politiques dAristote, published
1 The only other Abbeville illustrated book is the 1487 Triomphc des
Neuf Preux, with conventional portraits of most of the heroes (their
legs wide apart), and a bullet-headed Du Guesclin, which looks almost
as if it might be based on some authentic tradition. In a 1508 reprint
by Michel le Noir at Paris, while some of the old cuts were retained
this Du Guesclin was replaced by a much more showy figure.
France 151
in 1489, has a large frontispiece of the translator,
Nicholas Oresme, presenting his book to Charles VIIL,
in which the characteristic style of Verard's artist is
fully developed. In 1490, an edition of Lucain,
Suetone, et Saluste, which I have not seen, was printed
for Ve"rard by Pierre Le Rouge. To 1491 probably
belongs his French Seneca, and in this year he must
have obtained the aid of the king or of some very
rich patron, for his activity from 1492 to the end of
the century is quite amazing. It is from about this
same year, also, that we may date the production of
these magnificent special copies on vellum, enriched
with elaborate, if not very artistic, miniatures, to
which we have already alluded in our first chapter.
The chief book of 1492 was undoubtedly the series
of treatises making up the Art de bien vivre et de
bien mourir, of which a detailed description will be
given later on. These treatises were printed for
Ve*rard by Cousteau and Menard, the first part being
finished on July iSth, the last on December I9th.
Next to them in importance is a Josephus de la bataille
judaique, one of Verard's large folios, with columns
of printed text, not reckoning any margin, nearly
twelve inches long. The frontispiece is a fine cut of
a triumphal entry of a king who should be French,
since he wears the lilies. The design, however, must
have been made for this book, for a label in the
middle of the picture bears the name 'Josephus,'
while in the Gestes Romaines and Lancelot, in both of
which the cut reappears, the label is left blank. The
152 Early Illustrated Books
' Entry ' is also used again, three times in the Josephus
itself, at the beginning of the fourth, fifth, and seventh
books. An entry of a different kind, that of a king
and his staff into a captured town, is depicted in the
cut (here reproduced) which heads the prologue.
This is faced by the first page of text headed by a
cut of an author presenting his book to an ecclesiastic.
Both pages are surrounded by fine borders of flowers,
women, and shield. The head-cut to the second
book shows a monk handing a book to a king, that
used for the third and sixth (repeated again in the
Lancelot of 1494), shows a king on his throne sur-
rounded by his courtiers, a sword of justice is in
his hand, and a suppliant kneels before him. Small
cuts, fitting into the columns, head the different
chapters in each book, but are of no great merit.
Occasionally a border about an inch wide runs up
the side of one of the columns of text, usually on the
outer margin, but sometimes on the inner. Altogether
the book is a very notable one.
In 1493, Ve'rard's activity was still on the increase,
and we have at least eight illustrated books of his
bearing the date of this year. In the romance of Le
Jouvencel and Bonnor's Arbre des Batailles, both in
4to, the cuts, all of them small, are nearly identical,
and are repeated again and again in each book.
Much more important than these are the editions of
the Chronicques de France (printed for VeYard by
Jehan Maurand), and a translation of the Metamor-
phoses of Ovid, issued under the very taking title of
From Verard's Josephus, 1492. (Much reduced.)
154 Early Illustrated Books
La Bible des Poetes. This is another of Verard's
great folios, with profuse illustrations, large and
small, and in its vellum edition is a very gaudy and
magnificent book. In 1494 Ve"rard published his
Lancelot ; and in 1495, a L^gende Dorte and S.
Jerome's Vie des Peres en fran$ois. This last book
was finished on October 15, but its appearance was
preceded by that of the first volume of the publisher's
most ambitious undertaking, an edition of the Miroir
Historial of Vincent de Beauvais. This enormous
chronicle is in thirty-two books, which Ve"rard divided
between five great folio volumes, averaging about
three hundred and twenty leaves, printed in long
double columns. The whole work thus contains
about the same amount of matter as some fifty
volumes of the present series (which, however, is
mercifully limited to six), yet it was faultlessly
printed on the finest vellum, and with innumerable
woodcuts, subsequently coloured, in considerably less
than a year. The first volume was finished on Sep-
tember 29, 1495, and the colophon which announces the
completion of the last, 'a 1'honneur et louenge de nostre
seigneur iesucrist et de sa glorieuse et sacre"e mere
et de la court celeste de paradis,' bears date May /th,
1496. In the face of such activity and enterprise, I
feel ashamed of having girded at the good man fair
having used some of the Ovid cuts as a basis to his
illuminations in this gigantic work.
After 1496 to the end of the century, Verard's
dated books are very few. The only one I have met
France 1 5 5
with myself is a Merlin of 1498. It is possible that
he produced less (the Miroir may not have proved
a financial success), but it is quite as likely that he
merely discontinued his wholesome practice of dating
his books, and that the Boethius, the Roman de la
Rose, the Gestes Romaines, the romances of Tristram
and Gyron, and other undated works, whose colophons
show that they were printed while the Pont Notre
Dame was still standing, i.e. before October 25th,
1499, belong to these years. After 1500 Verard's
enterprise certainly seems less; He continued to
issue editions of poets and romances, but they are
much less sumptuous than of yore, and in place of
his great folios we have a series of small octavos,
mostly of works of devotion, with no other ornament
than the strange twists of the initial L, which adorns
their title-pages. The example here given is from
an undated and unsigned edition of the Livre du
Faulcon, but the letter itself frequently occurs in
Verard's undoubted books. The first hint for this
grotesque form of ornament may have been found
in the small initials of Du Pre's 1486 edition of
S. Jerome's Vie des anciens saintz Pres, and variants
of the L were used by other publishers besides
Ve"rard, e.g. by Jacques Maillet at Lyons, and Pierre
Le Rouge and Michel Le Noir at Paris. The most
noticeable examples of the L, besides the one here
given, are the man-at-arms L of the 1488 edition of
the Mer des Histoires (P. Lerouge), the monkey-and-
bagpipes L, here shown, from Maillet's 1494 edition
Initial L used by Veraid.
Initial L used by Maillet.
158 Early Illustrated Books
of the Recueil des Histoires Troyennes, a St. George-
and-the-Dragon L in a Lyons reprint of the Mer des
Histoires, and the January-and-May L which, I
believe, was first used by Ve"rard for a 1492 edition
of the Matheolus, or 'quinze joies du mariage,' but
which turns up alternately at Lyons and at Paris in
the most puzzling manner.
It seems probable that the attention which Ve"rard
paid to his vellum editions, in which the woodcuts
were only useful as guides to the illustrator, made him
less careful than he would otherwise have been to secure
the best possible work in his ordinary books. Cer-
tainly I think his most interesting cuts are to be
found not in his later books but in the collection of
six treatises which he had printed by Gillet Cous-
teau and Jehan Menard in 1492, and republished,
somewhat less sumptuously the next year, under the
collective title L'Art de bien vivre et de bien mourir,
the reprint coming from the press of Pierre Le Rouge.
The cuts in this collection have a special interest
for us, because some of them were afterwards used
in English books, and we may therefore be allowed
to examine them at some length.
In the 1492 edition the first title-page Le liure
intitule lart de bien mourir heralds only the first
work, an adaptation of the old Ars Moriendi show-
ing the struggle between good and bad angels for
the possession of the dying soul. The devils tempt
the sufferer to hasten his end (' interficias teipsum '
one of them is saying, the words being printed on a
France 159
label), they remind him of his sins (' periuratus es '),
tempt him to worldly thoughts (' intende thesauro '),
persuade his nurses to over-commiseration (' Ecce
quantam penam patitur '), or flatter him with unde-
served praise (' coronam meriusti '). To each of
these assaults his good angels have a ' bonne in-
spiration ' by way of answer, and the devils have to
confess ' spes nobis nulla ' and to see the little figure
of the soul received into heaven. The second treatise
is called at the beginning L'eguyllon de crainte divine
pour bien mourir, but on the title-page placed on
the back of the last leaf ' les paines denfer et les
paines de purgatoire.' Its illustrations consist of large
cuts in which devils are inflicting excruciating and
revolting tortures on their victims. Its colophon gives
the printers' names and the date July 18, 1492. The
next three parts of the book are Le Traiti de Vavene-
ment de V Antechrist, Les Quinze Signes, or Fifteen
Tokens of Judgment, and Les Joies du Paradis. The
printing of these was finished on October 28. Only
the middle treatise is much illustrated, but here the
artist had full play for his powers in representing
the fish swimming on the hills, the seas falling into
the abyss, the sea-monsters covering the earth, the
flames of the sea, the trees wet with blood, the
crumbling of cities, the stones fighting among them-
selves, and the other signs of the Last Day. Perhaps
the best of this set of cuts is that representing the
' esbahissement ' or astonishment of the men and
women who had hidden themselves in holes in the
160 Early Illustrated Books
earth, when at last they ventured forth. But in the
last treatise, the Art de bien vivre, quaintness and
horror are replaced by really beautiful work. The
cuts here are intended to illustrate the Ave Maria,
Lord's Prayer, Creed, Ten Commandments, and Seven
Sacraments. Those in the last series are the largest
in the book, each of them occupying a full page.
The creed has a series of smaller cuts of inferior
work. But the picture which precedes this, repre-
senting the twelve apostles, and the pictures of
the Angelic Salutation, of the Pope invoking the
Blessed Virgin (here shown), and of Christ teaching
the Apostles, show the finest work, outside the Horae,
in any French books during the fifteenth century.
These blocks, or close imitations of them, with those
of the ' pains of hell/ were used again the next year
by Guyot Marchant in his Compost et Kalendrier des
Bergiers in which, as we have seen (p. 16), Ve"rard
painted out Marchant's device in the copy on vellum
which he illuminated for Charles vin. They appear
also in two English books printed at Paris, in 1 503,
The Traytte of god lyuyng and good deyng, and The
Kalendayr of Shyppars, and in all the English
editions of the latter work from Pynson's in 1506
onward. They are fairly well reproduced in Dr.
Sommer's reprint already mentioned (p. 16 note).
Verard employed so many of the Paris printers on
his different books, that it is by no means easy to
disentangle their separate careers. Thus a border
and a cut from the Abbeville Citt de Dteu, printed
f> a inrtt mn tit me 6t
ttitu pnr pout ncus pe
cttun
p*te eg paraSte tentfhe com*
tncbittft.
gefiqaeanecc}e foufee fee
parties rrtfemflfe.
* tnficommebfr ef?fa
ft* fetgnrar efhroec^e
eefonnuxecntte touted autu'
/ri te fruit S fon S?rtr
0ertof^.^>airtcfe martr
mere S ^teu p:t? pour noue pe^
. ecge niawe e Qifant.
4 ue grafia pfena bne fen?/ Be >
ncSicta tu I mutietiBue.&t fal
fr-eft;ii6rf0 en fear Stfifafiot)
Siff 6rrtrSirfue frucf ue S^fcie
ft(t. -OofJremcre faicfc egftfe
p a aSiouff e i6u^. ^)3ctfl maria
me qui fcettft fafuec fa gftmro
fe mere be Stew 8e fafat pfa^ ejc
grea6fe a effe ^ be ce/Je pzefen >
t e faf tit aftorj/facjffe 8teu fe pe ?
reabicfeee(compofee (lOefh
:o
Cr i abire f o\it t nff 0fe.3e f e fa
fur rrinnr pfattTcOe grace nof?
gega6jiefqaanf au^r frowpzr
miecee partiee. ^f par ma ba*
mefatrtrteeft^a6ef6 ef famcfe
egftfc qaartf aujt an free pfiee.
From Verard's Art de bien vivrc. (Reduced.)
1 62 Early Illustrated Books
by Jean Du Pre, subsequently passed into his pos-
session, and on the other hand, as we have seen,
some of the cuts of the Art de bien vivre et de bien
mourir appear again in Guyot Merchant's Compost
des Bergiers. Pierre Lerouge, one of Ve"rard's printers,
produced at least one fine book quite independently
of him. This is the first illustrated edition of La
Mer des Hystoires, the French version of the Rudi-
menta Noviciorum (see p. 53), the general plan of
which it follows, though not slavishly. Pierre Lerouge
printed his edition for a publisher named Vincent
Commin. It is in two tall folios, with the man-at-
arms L to decorate its title-pages, and splendid
initials P, I, and S, the first having within it a figure
of a scribe at work, the S being twisted into the form
of a scaly snake, and the body of the I containing
a figure of Christ. The cuts and borders of the book
are not very remarkable. In 1498 Ve"rard published
a new edition of it, having obtained the use of the
old blocks. A Lyons reprint was issued about 1500,
and other editions during the sixteenth century.
Two other printers who cannot be said to have learnt
anything from Ve"rard are Jean Bonhomme, who as
early as 1486 printed an illustrated edition of a very
popular book, Le livre des profits champltres of
Pierre de Crescens, and Germain Bineant, who in
1490 printed a Pat helm le grant et le petit which is
said to have woodcuts. These two books I only
know from the descriptions of M. Thierry-Poux. To
Guyot Marchant, whom we have already mentioned,
France 1 63
we owe a very important series of editions, of the
Danse Macabre or ' danse des Morts,' the first of
which, a book of twenty pages with seventeen cuts,
was printed in September 1485, a few weeks before
the appearance of the earliest book with which we
can join Ve"rard's name. It was reprinted by Mar-
chant in the following June (an undated edition
having perhaps intervened) under the title of Miroer
salutaire pour toutes gens, and in 1491 Marchant
followed it up by a Danse Macabre des Femmes in
which the right of the ladies to the attention of these
ghastly skeletons was duly vindicated. An edition
printed at Lyons, February 18, 1499 (no printer's
name), the unique copy of which is owned by Mr.
Huth, is especially interesting as containing cuts of
the shops of a printer and a bookseller, at both of
which Death is at work, eight years earlier than the
device of Badius Ascensius, which is usually quoted
as the earliest representation of a printing press.
The reduced reproduction here given is taken from
a very accurate copy in Noel Humphrey's Masterpieces
of Early Printing, as it is not fair play to the owner
of a unique book to ask for permission to reproduce
the same page more than once from the original.
Another edition of the Danse was printed by
Nicole de la Barre at Paris in 1500, and others of
the same character in the early years of the next cen-
tury. We shall have to recur to the book again both
with reference to the Horae and for the later Lyons
edition, the cuts in which are attributed to Holbein.
.o rrfrc.it raw oimt neut qood catne creator
Tmp:tmcur8 fuo (rquicmtnt
tVnr, toft'Twut cancf ufior)
<$ouru Sou f auft urtairuinrnt
^f autw long fauflt 0OL6 mr tcadrbt) be 6m) PIM
ai/fo to; (tutro mautfnwnt
t o/rt t ptnfcr
ommrnt oua i mrfn
oinn IU-TTKTI t fir |1 paa fcfcc
. ou autona nou recoare
PUIB (rue fa mott noue efpu
ifnipnmf duena tou Cce couta
t>c fa fuinttf tfx ofo^u
Coi$> txtrr t, t portmt-
Put nrc art pfufiruto font gtisis c
MrvK tr> tft cCrrgu
w txmfous bee acie font biuoe
ard's
well-known device belongs, showed in their upper part
the French lilies crowned and supported by angels.
Jean Le Forestier combined this with the tree of
knowledge, choosing lions as its supporters, but add-
ing also the sacred lamb (for his name 'Jean'), and
similar variations were adopted by other printers.
In another large class the French printers, especially
those of Lyons, followed the simple cross and circle so
common in Italy. This was mostly printed in white
on a black ground, as by Pierre Levet, Matthieu Vivian
of Orleans, and Le Tailleur. Less often, as in the
marks of Berthold Rembolt and Georges Wolf, the
ground is white and the design black. Guillaume
Balsarin, who, as was very common, had two devices,
had one of each kind. Outside these classes the
special designs are too many to be enumerated. The
successive Le Noirs punned on their names in at least
six different devices of black heads, and Deny de
Harsy with less obvious appropriateness selected two
black men with white waistbands to uphold his shields.
Guyot Marchant's shoemakers, with the bar of music
to complete his pious motto sola fides sufficit form
one of the earliest and best known of French marks.
Pierre Regnault showed excellent taste in his flower-
surrounded P, in which the letters of his surname
may also be deciphered. The scholar-printer Badius
Mark of Antoine Caillaut.
France 169
Ascensius chose a useful, if not very pretty, design of
printers at work, the two variants of which first
appear respectively in 1507 and 1521. All these
devices and countless others will be found roughly
figured in Silvestre's Marques Typographiques > many
of them appear also in Brunet's Manuel du Libraire,
and those of the chief fifteenth century printers have
been reproduced with absolute fidelity in M. Thierry-
Poux's Monuments de rimprimerie frangaise. Only
the mark of Du Pr and one of those used by Caillaut
are therefore given here, the first (facing p. 145) in
honour of a pioneer in French illustration, the second,
as perhaps the most beautiful of any which the pre-
sent writer has seen.
The first Greek book printed in France appeared
in 1 507, and the awakening of classical feeling was
accompanied, as in other countries, by the putting
away of the last remnants of mediaeval art and litera-
ture as childish things. The old romances continued
to be published, chiefly by the Lenoirs, but in a
smaller and cheaper form, and for the most part with
old cuts. Verard diminished his output, and the
publishers of the Horae turned in despair to German
designs in place of the now despised native work.
Soon only some little octavos remained to show that
there was still an unclassical public to be catered for.
These were chiefly printed by Galliot du Pre", with
titles in red and black, and sometimes with little
architectural borders in imitation of the more ambi-
1 70 Early Illustrated Books
tious German ones. When they disappear we say
farewell to the richness and colour which distinguishes
the best French books of the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury. Instead of the black letter and quaint cuts we
have graceful but cold Roman types, or pretty but
thin italics, with good initial letters, sometimes with
good head- and tail-pieces, but with no pictures, and
with only a neat allegoric device on the title-page
instead of the rich designs used by the earlier printers.
Geoffrey Tory of Bourges was the first important
printer of the new school. His earliest connection
with publishing was as the editor of various classical
works, but he returned from a visit to Italy full of
artistic theories as to book-making, which he pro-
ceeded to carry out, partly in alliance with Simon
Colines, for whom he designed a new device repre-
senting Time with his scythe. Tory's own device of
the ' pot casse"e,' a broken vase pierced by a toret or
auger, is said to refer to his desolation on the death
of his only daughter. Devices of other printers have
been ascribed to him on the ground of the appearance
in them of the little cross of Lorraine, which is found
in some of Tory's undoubted works. It is doubtful,
however, if the cross was his individual signature or
only that of his studio.
After the Horae, which we shall notice in our next
chapter, Tory's most famous book was his own Champ-
fleury, ' auquel est contenu 1'art et science de la vraie
proportion des lettres antiques,' printed in 1 529. This
is a fantastic work, interesting for the prelude, in
France 1 7 1
which he speaks of his connection with the famous
Grolier, and for the few illustrations scattered about
the text. The best of these are the vignettes of
' Hercules Gallicus/ leading in chains the captives of
his eloquence, and of the Triumphs of Apollo and
the Muses. The specimen alphabets at the end of
the book also deserve notice. They show that Tory
was better than his theories, for his attempt to prove,
by far-fetched analogies and false derivations, that
there is an ideal shape for every letter is as bad in
art as it is false in history.
Tory was succeeded in his office of royal printer by
Robert Estienne, and during the rest of the century
the classical editions of this family of great printers
form the chief glories of the French press. Their
books, both large and small, are admirably printed,
and in excellent taste, though with no other orna-
ments than their printer's device, and good initials
and head-pieces. But it must be owned that from
the reign of Francis I. onwards, the decoration of the
text of most French books is far less interesting than
the superb bindings on which the kings and their
favourites began to lavish so much expense.
Only two more Paris books need here be men-
tioned, both of them printed in 1546, and both
with cuts imitated from the Italian Jean Martin's
translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the
Amour de Ciipido et de Psicfu translated from
Apuleius. The first of these was published by
Jacques Kerver, the second by Jeanne de Marnef.
172 Early Illustrated Books
Of original Paris work of any eminence we have no
record after the death of Tory.
Meanwhile at Lyons a new school of book-illustra-
tion was springing up. From the beginning of the
century the Lyons printers had imitated, or pirated,
the delicate italic books printed by Aldus. The
luckless Etienne Dolet added something to the classi-
cal reputation of the town, and by the middle of the
century the printers there were turning out numerous
pocket editions of the classics, which they sold to
their customers in ' trade bindings ' of calf stamped
with gold, and often painted over with many-coloured
interlacements. The fashion for small books was set,
and when illustrations were fitted to them the result
was singularly dainty.
Before considering the editions of Jean de Tournes
and his rivals we must stop to notice the appearance
at Lyons in 1538 of the belated first edition of Hol-
bein's Dance of Death, the woodcuts for which, the
work of H. L., whose identity with Hans Lutzel-
burger has been sufficiently established, are known
to have been in existence as early as 1527, and were
probably executed two or three years before that
date. Several sets of proofs from the woodcuts are
in existence, with lettering said to be in the types of
Froben of Basle, who may have abandoned the idea
of publishing them because of the vigour of their
satire of the nobles and well-to-do. The Trechsels,
the printers of the French edition, are known to have
France 173
had dealings with a Basle woodcutter with initials
H. L., who died before June 1526, and may have pur-
chased the blocks directly from him, or at a later date
from Froben. In 1538 they issued forty-one wood-
cuts with a dedication by Jean de Vauzelles, and a
French quatrain to each cut either by him or by
Gilles Corozet, giving to the book the title Les Simu-
lachres et historiees faces de la mort. Its success was
as great as it deserved, and ten additional cuts were
added in subsequent editions. Modern reprints have
been numerous, and within the last few months the
excellent copies made by Bonner and Byfield for the
Douce edition of 1833 have been re-issued with an
admirable preface by Mr. Austin Dobson.
In the same year as the Dance of Death the Trech-
sels issued another series of upwards of a hundred
cuts after designs by Holbein, the Historiarum
Veteris Testamenti Icones, with explanatory verses by
Gilles Corozet. These, though scarcely less beautiful,
and at the time almost as successful as those in the
Dance of Death, are not quite so well known, and I
therefore select one of them, taken from the reprint
of the following year, as an illustration.
The success of these two books invited imitation,
and during the next twenty years many dainty illus-
trated books were issued by Franciscus Gryphius,
Mace Bonhomme, Guillaume Roville, and Jean de
Tournes. In 1540 Gryphius printed a Latin Testa-
ment, with thirty-four lines of dainty Roman type to
ABSALOM aftu&prudentialoab,&mu'
lien's Thecuiddisreuocatur. I oab mefle fuc/
cenfa, introdu&us Abfalom patre ofcula>
tur.
II. R E G V M X I I I I.
itr 'Ja prudence imcfcmmcf fmt o raOo. jfj i tcunbcbcritn f j
me bofo;ee mo-,f 10: j net icnfa mfctnt mumetilt ;
c ft,
Dives and Lazarus, from Pigouchet's Horat. (Reduced.)
N
The Tree of Jesse, from Pigouchet's Horae.
The French Books of Hours 195
Adoration of the Shepherds. All three plates are of
great beauty, and the last is noticeable for the names
' Mahault,' ' Aloris,' ' Alison,' ' Gobin le Gay,' and
' le beau Roger ' which are assigned to the shepherds
and their wives, and which are the same as those by
which they are known in the French mystery-plays.
The artists who used these dotted backgrounds
evidently viewed the Horae rather from the mystery-
play standpoint. They cared little for the ' types '
which Ve"rard and Du Pr so carefully explained in
their early editions, but delighted in the Dance of
Death and in scenes of hunting and rural life, or
failing these in grotesques. They placed their talents
at the disposal of religion, but they bargained to be
allowed to introduce a good deal of humour as well.
The best French Horae were all published within
about ten years. During this decade, which just
overlaps the fifteenth century, the only serious rival
of Pigouchet was Thielmann Kerver, who began
printing in 1497, and by dint of close imitation ap-
proached very near indeed to Pigouchet's success.
With the lessening of Pigouchet's activity about
1505, there came an after-flood of bad taste, which
swept everything before it. Even Simon Vostre, who
ought to have learnt from his old partner the differ-
ence between beauty and ugliness, was carried away.
He continued printing Horae till about 1520, but he
displaced the beautiful French designs by reproduc-
tions of German work utterly unsuited to the French
types and ornaments. Thus, if we open a Horae for
1 96 Early Illustrated Books
the use of Amiens, published by him in 1513, we find
the old picture of S. John placidly undergoing his
martyrdom replaced by a realistic German design,
in which one ruffian is pouring oil over the saint from
a scuppet, and another blowing the flames with a
pair of bellows. There is plenty of vigour and clever-
ness in the picture, but it is quite out of keeping
with the Horae, and when after turning over some
dozen of similarly conceived designs we come at
last to the old plates of the Death of Uriah and
the Church Militant and Triumphant, it is impossible
not to feel that the French artists had the better
taste.
Along with the substitution of German designs
for French in the larger illustrations there went an
equally disastrous substitution of florid Renaissance
borders of pillars and cherubs for Pigouchet's charm-
ing vignettes and hunting scenes. Thielman Kerver,
who had begun with better things, soon made his
surrender to the new fashion, and his firm continued
to print Horae, for which it is difficult to find a good
word until about 1556. His activity was more than
equalled by Gilles Hardouyn, who with his successors
was responsible for some seventy editions during
the first half of the sixteenth century. Guillaume
Eustace, Guillaume Godard, and Francois Regnault
were less formidable competitors, and besides these
some thirty or forty editions are attributable to
other printers.
On January i6th (or to use the afifected style of
The French Books of Hours 197
the colophon itself, 'xvii. Kal. Febr.), 1525, Geoffrey
Tory, the scholar, artist, and printer, in conjunction
with his friend Simon Colines, brought out a Horae,
which is certainly not open to the charge of bad
taste. The printed page measures 6^ in. by 3f, the
type used is a delicate Roman letter with a slight
employment of red ink, but no hand work, the borders
are in the most delicate style of the Renaissance.
The illustrations number twelve, of which one, that
of the Annunciation, occupies two pages. There are
no unusual subjects, except that in the picture of the
Crucifixion Tory displays his classical pedantry by
surrounding the central picture with four vignettes
illustrating Virgil's ' Sic vos non vobis ' quatrain, on
the sheep, the bees, the birds, and the oxen, whose
life enriches others but not themselves. In the pic-
ture of the Adoration by the Magi, here given, Tory
obtains an unusually rich effect by the figure of
the negro. He repeats this, on a smaller scale, in
the black raven, croaking Cras, Cras, in the picture
of the Triumph of Death. The tone of the other
illustrations is rather thin, and the length of the faces
and slight angularity in the figures (effects which
Tory, the most affected of artists, no doubt deliber-
ately sought for) cause them just to fall short of
beauty. Compared, however, with the contemporary
editions of other printers, Tory's Horae seem possessed
of every beauty. We know of five editions before
his death or retirement in 1533, and of some seven
others before the close of the half-century. After
AdfextamVetfus.
Eus in adiutorium meu intende.
.Domineadadiuuandu mefe
ina. Gloria patri, & filio,& Ipi
ritui fanclo. Sicutcrat inprinci
piojS: nu nc,& fcmpcr, & in (ecu
ta^odbtum. Amen. Alleluia. Hymnus*
r TH
&
From Tory's Horat 1525. (Reduced.)
The French Books of Hours 1 99
1 5 50 the publication of Horae in France almost en-
tirely ceased, but some pretty editions were issued at
Antwerp by the French printer Christopher Plantin
in 1565 and 1575, and perhaps in other years. The
decree of Pope Pius V. making the use of the Office
no longer obligatory on the clergy seems to have
been preceded by a great falling off of the popularity
of the Hours among the laity, in whom the book-
sellers had found their chief customers, and after 1568
a very few editions sufficed to supply the demand of
those who were still wedded to their use.
CHAPTER IX.
HOLLAND.
THIS chapter and the next are to deal respectively
with the early history of book-illustration in Holland
and in Spain, and in each case, though for opposite
reasons, I propose to economise the space left at my
disposal. Hardly any work has yet been done in
cataloguing early Spanish books or their woodcuts,
and in speaking of those which I have seen myself I
can only contribute a few notes for the use of future
investigators. In Dutch books, on the other hand,
the work done by Mr. W. M. Conway in his The
Woodcutters of the Netherlands (Cambridge, 1884) i s
so exhaustive that it is difficult to write on the sub-
ject without borrowing unfairly from a monograph
which every one interested in book-illustration ought
to read for himself.
Mr. Conway has divided his book into three parts,
the first giving the history of the woodcutters, the
second a catalogue of the cuts, and the third a list of
the books containing them. Putting on one side the
blocks imported or directly copied from France and
Germany, he attributes the illustrations in fifteenth-
century Dutch books to some five-and-twenty different
200
Holland 201
workmen and their apprentices. His first group is
formed of
(i.) A Louvain woodcutter who worked for John
and Conrad de Westphalia, for whom he cut two
capital little vignette portraits of themselves, and for
Veldener, for whom he executed the nine illustrations
in an edition of the Fasciculus Temporum, published
on December 29, 1475.
(ii) A Utrecht woodcutter, whose most important
works are a set of cuts to illustrate the Boeck des
gulden throens, published by a mysterious printer,
Gl., in 1480, some additional cuts for a new edition
by Veldener of the Fasciculus Temporum, and a set
of thirty-nine cuts, chiefly on the life of Christ, for the
same printer's Epistolen ende ewangelien of 1481.
(iii.) A Bruges woodcutter, possibly the printer him-
self, who illustrated Colard Mansion's French edition
of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1484) ; and
(iv.) A Gouda woodcutter, by whose aid Gerard
Leeu started on his career as a printer of illustrated
books with the Dialogus Creaturarum (of which he
printed six editions between June 3, 1480, and August
31, 1482), and the Gesten van Romen, Vier Uterste, and
Historia Septem Sapientum.
Of these books, whose illustrations are grouped
together by Mr. Conway as all executed in pure line
work, the most interesting to us are the MetamorpJioses
and the Dialogus. The former is handsomely printed
in red and black in Mansion's large type, and has
seventeen single-column cuts of gods and goddesses
2O2 Early Illustrated Books
and as many double-column ones illustrating the
Metamorphoses themselves. The larger cuts are the
more successful, and are certainly superior to the
average French work of the day, to which they bear
a considerable resemblance. Uncouth as they are,
they were thought good enough by Antoine Ve'rard
to serve as models for his own edition of 1493. The
Metamorphoses > Mansion's first illustrated book, was
also the last work issued from his press ; and part of
the edition was not published till after his disappear-
ance from Bruges. The hundred and twenty-one cuts
in Leeu's Dialogus Creaturarum are the work of a far
more inspired, if very child-like, artist With a mini-
mum of strokes the creatures about whom the text
tells its wonderful stories are drawn so as to be easily
recognisable, and we have no reason to suppose that
the humour which pervades them was otherwise than
intentional.
We come now to the best period of Dutch illustra-
tion, which centres round the presses of Leeu at
Gouda and Antwerp, and of Jacob Bellaert at Haar-
lem, whose business was probably only a branch of
Leeu's. During his stay at Gouda, Leeu commis-
sioned an important set of sixty-eight blocks, thirty-
two of which were used in the Lijden ons Heeren of
1482, and the whole set in a Devote Ghetiden, which
Mr. Conway conjectures to have been published just
after the printer's removal to Antwerp in the summer
of 1484. Fifty-two of them were used again, in con-
junction with other cuts, in the Boeck vanden leven
Holland 203
Christi of Ludolphus in 1487, and the history of many
of them can be traced in other books to as late as
1510. Thus they were evidently popular, though
neither their design nor their cutting calls for much
praise. Another set of seven cuts, to each of which
is joined a sidepiece showing a teacher and a scholar,
appears in Leeu's last Gouda book, the Van den Seven
Sacramenten of June 19, 1484, and evinces a much
greater mastery over his tools on the part of the
engraver. The little sidepiece, which was added to
bring the breadth of the cuts up to that of Leeu's
folio page (5| in.), is particularly good.
After Leeu's removal to Antwerp his activity as a
printer of illustrated books suffered a temporary
check, and our interest is transferred to the office of
Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem, who, after borrowing
some of Leeu's cuts for a Lijden ons Heeren, issued
in December 1483, in the following February had
printed under the name of Der Sonderen troest a
Dutch version of the Belial of Jacobus de Theramo.
This has altogether thirty-two cuts, the first of which
occupies a full page, and represents in its different
parts the fall of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve, the
Flood, the Passage of the Red Sea, and the Baptism
of Christ. Six half-page cuts represent incidents of the
Harrowing of Hell, the Ascension, and the Day of
Pentecost. The other illustrations at a hasty glance
seem to be of the same size (5 in. by 3f), but are
soon discovered to be separable into different blocks,
usually three in number. Eight blocks of 2| in. each,
204 Early Illustrated Books
and seventeen of half this width are thus arranged in
a series of dramatic combinations. Thus we are first
shown the different persons who answer the citation
of Solomon, whose judgment hall is the central block
in thirteen illustrations ; then the controversy in
heaven before Christ as the judge ; then scenes in a
Royal Council Chamber, etc. Our illustration is
taken from the opening of Solomon's Court, with
Belial appearing to plead on one side, and Christ
answering the summons of the messenger, Azahel, on
the other.
In October of the same year, 1484, Bellaert printed
an edition of the Boeck des gulden throens, in which
four cuts, representing the soul, depicted as a woman
with flowing hair, being instructed by an elder, serve
as illustrations to all the twenty-four discourses. In
1485 we have first of all two romances, the Historic
vanden vromen ridder Jason and the Vergaderinge der
Historien van Troyen, both translated from Raoul le
Fevre, and illustrated with half- folio cuts, which I
have not seen. At the end of the year came a trans-
lation of Glanville's De Proprietatibus Rerum, with
eleven folio cuts, of which the most interesting are
the first, which shows the Almighty seated in glory
within a circle thrown up by a black background, and
the sixth, which contains twelve little medallions,
representing the pleasures and occupations of the
different months. During 1486 Bellaert printed three
illustrated books, an Epistelen ende Euangelien, Pierre
Michault's Doctrinael des tyts, an allegory, in which
. nwteirccbta:
raoet alte Oinc ootcfil vt jgcjr.q. w.iutn^f 2 in c.cu iobartes De f itJefnCrtt*
bdpaliBoeuim
From De r Sonderen Troest, Haarlem, 1483. (Reduced.)
206 Early Illustrated Books
Virtue exhibits to the author the schools of Vice,
and a Dutch version of Deguileville's Ptttrinage de
la vie humaine. The ten cuts in the second of these
three books are described by Mr. Conway as care-
fully drawn, the more numerous illustrations in the
others showing hasty work, probably produced by
an inferior artist.
After 1486 Bellaert disappears, and most of his
cuts and types are found in the possession of Gerard
Leeu, who, since his removal to Antwerp, had lacked
the help of a good engraver. He apparently secured
the services of Bellaert's artist, and now printed French
and Dutch editions of the romance of Paris and
Vienne (May 1487), an edition of Reynard the Fox,
of which only a fragment remains, the already-men-
tioned edition of Ludolphus, for which he used cuts
both new and old, a Kintscheyt Jhesu (1488), Dutch
and Latin versions of the story of the Seven Wise
Men of Rome, who saved the young prince from the
wiles of his step-mother, and numerous religious
works. At the time of his death, in 1493, he was
engaged on an edition of the Crony cles of England,
which has on its title-page a fine quarto cut showing
the shield of England supported by angels.
In 1485 Leeu had borrowed blocks from Anton
Sorg, of Augsburg, for an edition of ALsop, and in
1491, in his Duytsche Ghetiden, he employed a set of
woodcuts imitated from those in use in the French
Horae. Mr. Conway assigns these directly to a
French wood-cutter, but the work, both in the cuts
Holland 207
and the borders, appears to me sufficiently distinctive
to be set down rather as an imitation than as pro-
duced by a foreign artist. Its success was immediate,
and the designs appear in half a dozen books printed
by Leeu during the next two years, and in nine
others issued by Lieseveldt, their purchaser, between
1493 and the end of the century.
We must now look very briefly at some of the
illustrated books printed in other Dutch towns. At
Zwolle, from 1484 onwards, Peter van Os issued a
large number of devotional works, the cuts in many of
which were copied from sets made for Leeu. This,
however, is not the case with a folio cut of the Virgin
manifesting herself to S. Bernard, which is given as
a frontispiece to three editions of the Saints Sermons
(1484, etc.), and is of great beauty. At Delft, Jacob
van der Meer also copied Leeu's books ; in 1483 he
produced an original set of illustrations to the ever-
popular Scaeckspul of Jacobus de Cessolis, and three
years later, a Passtonael t with upwards of ninety cuts,
which were used again and again in more than a
score of similar works or editions. He was succeeded
by Christian Snellaert, who, in 1491, endeavoured to
imitate Leeu's French cuts in an edition of the
Kerstenen Spieghel. John de Westphalia continued
to work at Louvain until 1496, but his illustrated
books were few and unimportant. At Gouda, Gotfrid
van Os, after borrowing blocks from Leeu, when the
latter had departed for Antwerp, issued a few books
with woodcuts, notably the romance of Godfrey of
2o8 Early Illustrated Books
Boulogne (Historic hertoghe Godeuaerts van Boloeri),
and Le C/tevalier Delibfrt by Olivier de Lamarche,
to the cut in which last Mr. Conway gives high
praise.
At Deventer, Jacobus de Breda and Richard
Paffroet, from 1486 onwards, printed a large number
of books with single cuts, none of any great im-
portance. In the last decade of the century, Hugo
Janszoen commissioned several sets of religious cuts
which excite Mr. Conway's wrath by their crudeness,
while the illustrated books issued at Antwerp by
Godfrey Bach, who had married the widow of an
earlier printer, Mathias van der Goes, do not seem to
have been much better. This decline of good work
Mr. Conway attributes chiefly to the influence of
the French woodcuts introduced by Leeu. 'The
characteristic quality,' he says, ' of the French cuts is
the large mass of delicately cut shade lines which
they contain. The workmen of the low countries
finding these foreign cuts rapidly becoming popular,
endeavoured to imitate them, but without bestowing
upon their work that care by which alone any
semblance of French delicacy could be attained.
From the year 1490 onwards, Dutch and Flemish
cuts always contain large masses of clumsily cut
shade. The outlines are rude ; the old childishness
is gone ; thus the last decade of the fifteenth century
is a decade of decline.'
When we pass from the illustrations to the other
decorations in early Dutch books, we find that large
Holland 209
borders of foliage, boldly but rather coarsely treated,
were used by Veldener in his Fasciculus Temporum
of 1480, and in Gerard Leeu's edition of the Dyalogus
Creaturarum the following year. Veldener's is ac-
companied by a fine initial O, in which the design of
the border is carried on. Leeu's page contains a
rather heavy S, and the woodcut of the faces of
the sun and moon.
In 1491, as we have seen, Leeu printed a Psalter
of the Blessed Virgin, by S. Bernard, in imitation of
the French Horae. This has very graceful little floral
borders, in small patterns, on grounds alternately
black and white. After Leeu's death, they passed
into the possession of Adrian van Lieseveldt, who
used them for a Duytsche Ghetyden in 1495.
The most noteworthy initial letters are the five
alphabets, printed in red, used by John of West-
phalia. In the smallest the letters are a third of
an inch square, in the largest about an inch and a
quarter. This and the next size are picked out
with white scroll-work, somewhat in the same way
as Schoeffer's. Peter van Os at Zwolle used a large
N, four inches square, with intertwining foliage. He
had also a fount of rustic capitals, almost unde-
cipherable. Leeu, besides his large S, had several
good alphabets of initials. A very beautiful D, re-
produced by Holtrop from the Vier Uterste (Quatuor
novissima) of 1488, is much the most graceful letter
in any Dutch book. No other initials of the same
style have been found. Eckert van Hombergh also
O
Mark of Jacob Bellaert.
Holland 211
had some good initials, in which the ground is com-
pletely covered with a light floral design. Gotfried
van Os at Gouda, M. Van Goes at Antwerp, Jacob
Jacobsoen at Delft, and Lud. de Ravescoet at Louvain,
were the chief other possessors of initials, the use of
which continued for a long time to be very partial.
Several of the devices of the Dutch printers are
very splendid. The borders which surrounded the
unicorn of H. Eckert van Hombergh and the eagle of
Jacob Bellaert give them special magnificence. The
Castle at Antwerp was used as a device by Gerard
Leeu, and subsequently by Thierry Martens, and a
printer at Gouda placed a similar erection on an
elephant, perhaps as a pun between howdah and
Gouda. Peter van Os at Zwolle had a large device
of an angel holding a shield ; M. van Goes at Ant-
werp a still larger one of a ragged man flourishing
a club, while his shield displays a white lion on a
black ground. Another Antwerp printer, G. Back,
used several varieties of bird-cages as his marks, in
one of which the Antwerp castle is introduced on
a shield hanging from the cage. Several printers
e.g. Colard Mansion at Bruges, Jacob Jacobsoen at
Delft, and Gerard Leeu at Gouda, contented them-
selves with small devices of a pair of shields braced
together. Leeu, however, while at Gouda, used also
a large device of a helmeted shield supported by
two lions.
foonctt laljoz
glo:taoenoi
refcnroj oeu
gcfu rljzift e
oelaglo:ioraraccatifri
mauerge/{9aciama
refuafenpozanofcra,
comcncalaletra od
pjcfentlibzcappellat
5:irantloblancl2:Di
cigtoa pcc moffcn 30
anotmartorellcaual
leralfcrcniffono
cepoontEcrcanoo
nfozttat tit tt8 tirtuts : t
marojmentatabebogut
tx aquellea per uftra
votn me comim'cat eti fucitat I
c(la t ittuofif f:itw trie fal
b:do6ffottledf,((i!:o tfttto
fosx en fanw molt glorfcfoe ca
luliere Oelaqualf lospeeicut^
noaald ban m to dues cotv.en
tat petpeiiwt lure teoztaf.ciw
evfctuolbs act es.JE flngubtmct
los molt Mignts ettee ce caual
lerioteaqutUii taMMMhl
i)ucccmlofolctrplanetit cnue
los alt rcc pknete: a> 1 1 1 ipUu-i^:
aquift tn iingulorftat tie caiulU
tlaentrdsolnea :raiuiUere eel
won apeltaJCtam lo blatlj:qu(
pfa Wrtut ccnquina molts ie
{jtito pwutates ccrat Ice a ol
ite cauaUtro novelet ne fn-.o U
fola bonoi ttcauellrtu. lir,es
fiuat tonquma tot limpcrt cb
cobtant lo t*te turckc qui cqucll
hauftfubiucatflUirtcmmiteir
eaftJogittbB.E cem U6i(cl;y
ftoua t acteatid o(t JCww Dm
mknguaaglrfe:ca voftra lllu
t volet mt
cuesmflloj Dber acuells Iccua
ejalttf iesquateffarirefon fla
otefltmmoltactfptabte mam
mtfeJCojfayo fuptrmon oztx
obligat miffrftar loe act te vinu
ofostetetaualUtf paffafe maioi
mft toj en to Wt ttactat fia molt
ftefemrt lo mto tof lo tttt e
woe t* utinte e ce cauallaia JE
tatffacortioeraCflira (ftrffeltda
eltccutfolo cfumlltors ooupaci
cno qul ctfle t Iro c t ue jfiuto Ct
la ncyblefoJturj qui.no cone re
From the romance of Tirattt lo Blanch, Valentia, 1490. (Much reduced.)
CHAPTER X.
SPAIN.
IN the present state of our knowledge of Spanish
books all that is possible to do here is to remark on
a few peculiarities of decoration which distinguish
them from the early books of other countries, and
then to describe, with some detail, the little handful
of illustrated books which have come under the
writer's own notice.
The book-hand in use in Spain's manuscripts during
the fifteenth century was unusually massive and hand-
some, and the same characteristics naturally reappear
in the majority of the types used by the early printers
in Spain. A considerable proportion of these were
Germans, whose tradition of good press-work was
very fairly maintained by their immediate successors,
so that throughout a great part of the sixteenth
century Spanish books retain much of the primitive
dignity which we are wont to associate only with
' incunabula.' From a very early period, also, they
are distinguished by the excellence of their initial
letters, which are almost as plentiful as they are good ;
the great majority of books printed after 1485, which
I have seen, being fully provided with them. The
213
214 Early Illustrated Books
prevailing form of initial exhibits very delicate white
tracery on a black ground. In a few instances, as in
a Seneca printed by Meinardo Ungut and Stanislao
Polono, at Seville, in 1491, some of the initials are in
red, and have a very decorative effect. A fine capital
L and A appear in a work of Jean de Mena, issued by
these printers in 1499, an d a good M in their Claros
Varones of Pulgar in the following year. A Consolat,
printed, it is .said, by Pedro Posa at Barcelona in
1494, is very remarkable for its profusion of fine
initials. Engraved borders are not of common occur-
rence in Spanish books, though I shall have to notice
two striking instances of their use in books printed at
Zamora and Valencia. Borders are found, also, on
the title-pages of various laws printed at Barcelona
during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, but these
are of no great beauty, and some of the pieces of which
they are composed are poor copies from the French
Home.
As a rule, Spanish title-pages are handsome and
imposing. During the last few years of the fifteenth
century and the beginning of its successors, the titles
of books were often printed in large woodcut letters.
A Spanish Livy, printed at Salamanca in 1497, a
Vocabulary of Antonio Lebrixa, printed by Krom-
berger at Seville in 1506, and a Mar de Istorias
printed at Valladolid in 1512, supply examples of
this practice. In an Obra a llaors del benauenturat
lo senyor sant Cristofol, printed at Valencia in 1498,
the woodcut title is in white on a black ground,
Spain 2 1 5
which is also relieved by a medallion of the saint
fording the stream. Pictures were also used in con-
nection with the more ordinary woodcut titles in
black e.g. in Juan de Lucena's Tratadode la vita beata,
printed by Juan de Burgos in 1502, we have a cut of
a king, bearing his sword of justice and surrounded
by his counsellors ; and in a Libro de Consolat tractant
dels fets maritims of the same year, printed by Johan
Luschner at Barcelona, beneath the woodcut title
there is a large figure of a ship, up whose masts sailors
are climbing, apparently in quest of a very prominent
moon.
Woodcut pictures of the hero decorate the title-
pages of the romances of Spain as of other countries,
and these pictorial title-pages are found also, though
less frequently, in works of devotion and in plays.
Such pictures are less common in Spain than else-
where, because of the great popularity there of the
heraldic title-page, in which the arms of the country,
or of the hero or patron of the work, form a singularly
successful method of ornament. These heraldic title-
pages are found in a few books, printed before 1500,
and were in common use throughout the sixteenth
century.
The earliest Spanish illustrated book with which I
am acquainted is the Libro delos Trabajos de Hercules
of the Marquis Enrique de Villena, printed by
Antonio de Centenera at Zamora, on January I5th,
1483 [1484]. This has eleven woodcuts, illustrating
the hero's exploits, and so rudely executed that they
2 1 6 Early Illustrated Books
are plainly the work of a native artist. Far more
interesting than these 'prentice cuts are the illustra-
tive initials, apparently engraved on soft metal, in a
Copilacion de leyes, promulgated in 1485, and supposed
to have been printed by Centenera in the same year.
These initials are nine in number, and must have
been designed and executed by clever artists, whose
work is so fine that the printer in most instances has
failed to do justice to it. On the first page of text
an initial P contains within it figures of a king and
queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. This page has at its
foot a border containing a hunting scene, with a
blank shield in its centre. The rest of the page is
surrounded by a text, printed decoratively, so as to
form an open-work border. The first section of the
laws, treating of 'la Santa Fe,' has an initial E,
showing God the Father upholding the crucified
Christ. The second section sets forth the duty of
the king to hear causes two days a week, and begins
with an L, here reproduced, in which the king is
unpleasantly close pressed by the litigants.
Two knights spurring from the different sides
of an S head the laws of chivalry ; a Canonist and
his scholars in an A preside over Matrimony ;
money-changers in a D over Commerce, while a
luckless wretch being hanged in the midst of a T
warns evil-doers of what they may expect under the
criminal law. The pages containing these initials are
enriched also by a border in two pieces, the lower
part of which shows a shield, with a device of trees,
Spain
217
supported by kneeling youths. The perpendicular
piece running up the outer margin, bears a floral
design. All the letters, while directly illustrating the
subjects of the chapters which they begin, are at the
same time essentially decorative, and they are cer-
tainly ^the best pictorial initials I have ever seen,
though it must be reckoned against them that they
were unduly difficult to print with the text.
Initial L from a Copilacion de Leyes, Zamora, c. 1485.
The page which heads this chapter, unfortunately
only one-third of its original size, from the famous
romance of Tirant lo Blanch, gives us another
example of this peculiar style of engraving. It is
taken from the edition printed at Valentia in 1490,
and may fairly be reckoned as one of the most
decorative pages in any fifteenth-century book. The
2 1 8 Early Illustrated Books
rest of the volume has no other ornament than some
good initials.
The first Spanish book with woodcuts of any
artistic merit with which I am acquainted is an
edition of Diego de San Pedro's Career d'Amor,
printed at Barcelona in 1493. This has sixteen
different cuts, some of which are several times
repeated. The title-cut, showing love's prison, is
here reproduced, and gives a very good idea of a
characteristic Spanish woodcut. The other illustra-
tions show the lover in various attitudes before his
lady, a meeting in a street, the author at work on his
book, etc. Another edition of the Career a" Amor,
with the same woodcuts, was printed at Burgos in
1496 by Fadrique Aleman.
Most of the other Spanish incunabula with wood-
cuts, which I have seen, were printed at Seville by
Meinardo Ungut and Stanislao Polono. The first
of these, Gorricio's Contemplaciones sobre el Rosario
de nuestra senora, issued in 1495, has some good
initials, two large cuts nearly the full size of the quarto
page, and fifteen smaller ones, with graceful borders
mostly on a black ground. The small cuts illustrate
the life of Christ and of the B. Virgin, and are, to
some extent, modelled on the pictures in the French
Horae. In the same year, the same printers published
Ayala's Chronica del Rey don Pedro, with a title-cut
of a young king, seated on his throne, and also the
Lilio de Medicina of B. de Gordonio with a title-cut
of lilies. In 1496, a firm of four printers, ' Paulo de
Title-page of Diego de San Pedro's Career d 'Amor, Barcelona, 1493.
22O Early Illustrated Books
Colonia, Juan Pegnicer de Nuremberg, Magno y
Thomas/ published an edition of Juan de Mena's
Labirinto or Las CCC (so called from the number of
stanzas in which it is written) with a title-cut of the
author (?) kneeling before a king. Three years later,
still at Seville, Pedro Brun printed in quarto the
romance of the Emperor Vespasian, with fourteen
full-page cuts of sea voyages, sieges, the death of
Pilate, etc. Against these books printed at Seville,
during the last decade of the century, I have only
notes of one or two books issued at Salamanca,
Valencia, and Barcelona, with unimportant title-cuts,
and a reprint at Burgos of the Trabajos de Hercules
(1499) with poor illustrations fitted into the columns
of a folio page. But it is quite possible that my
knowledge is as one-sided as it is limited, and I must,
therefore, refrain from building up any theory that
Seville, rather than any other town, was the chief
home of illustrated books in Spain. After 1500 the
Spanish books which I have met have no important
illustrations beyond the cuts which appear on some
of their title-pages. But here, also, I should be sorry
to make my small experience the basis of a general
statement.
The devices of the Spanish printers were greatly
influenced by those of their compeers of Italy and
France. The simple circle and cross, in white on a
black ground, with the printer's initials in the semi-
circles, is fairly common, while Diego de Gumiel and
Arnaldo Guillermo Brocar varied it, according to the
Spain 221
best Italian fashion, with very beautiful floral tracery.
The tree of knowledge and pendant shields, beloved
of the French printers, appear in the marks of Meinardo
Ungut and Stanislao Polono, and of Juan de Rosem-
bach. Arnaldo Guillermo had another and very
elaborate mark, showing a man kneeling before the
emblems of the Passion, and two angels supporting a
shield with a device of a porcupine. One of the
quaintest of all printers' marks was used by a later
printer of the name Juan Brocar, whose motto
' legitime certanti' is illustrated by a mail-clad soldier
grasping a lady's hair while he himself is being seized
by the devil !
? god; iboof fo Qauc mo t^an
Hfrei M ) tbae ibonf & b
>f cfot^ptige and; of ot^ct gooo?
Tlolb mag 3 tbetc an ^ofa 9p on mpi) Qt^f
Tlno ibfcw mg cofcut tbae fc^ ft7fT9 2 *&
lloib ;t ie tban and? of a Crogn fctbe
\too fo U ?|tt^ few fftsC 6e trtb
Tlno of mgftbpng p 6dnU ie mpfl rc
io fitcfc auaunfcge if ie fo muffrp^o*
$9at fCgOgng facnot fo$ tnaQi me fo fete
Sftrt 3 few no 15000? tbfrw t^a< wet 3 frer
Ttno gc* 3 am cnWfio? fb fo
Of goto? t^at 3 fljwtbeo? icc
From the Canterbury Tabs, and edition. (Reduced.)
CHAPTER XI.
ENGLAND.
(By E. GORDON DUFF.)
THE art of the wood-engraver may almost be said
to have had no existence in England before the intro-
duction of printing, for there are not probably more
than half-a-dozen cuts now known, if indeed so many,
that are of an earlier date. The few that exist are
devotional prints of the type known as the ' Image of
Pity,' in which a half-length figure of Christ on the
cross stands surrounded with the emblems of the
Passion.
It may be taken, I think, for granted that at the
time Caxton set up his press at Westminster, that is, in
the year 1477, there was no wood-engraver competent
to undertake the work of illustrating his books. We
see, for instance, that in the first edition of the Canter-
bury Tales there are no woodcuts, while they appear
in the second edition ; and it is not likely that Caxton
would have left a book so eminently suited for illus-
tration without some such adornment had the neces-
sary craftsmen been available. As it was, it was not
till 1480 that woodcuts first appeared in an English
223
224 Early Illustrated Books
printed book, the Mirror of the World. In this
there are two series of cuts. One, consisting of
diagrams, is found in most of the MSS. of the book ;
the other, which represents masters teaching their
scholars or at work alone, was a new departure of
Caxton's. It is quite probable that they were in-
tended for general use in books, indeed we find some
used in the Cato, but they do not appear to have been
employed elsewhere. The diagrams are meagre and
difficult to understand, so much so that the printer
has printed several in their wrong places. The neces-
sary letterpress occurring within them is not printed
(Caxton had not then a small enough type), but is
written in by hand, and it is worth noticing that this
is done in all copies in the same hand, and so must
have been done in Caxton's office, some are fond
enough to suppose by Caxton himself.
In the next year appeared the second edition of
the Game of Chesse> with a number of woodcuts. The
first edition printed at Bruges by Caxton and Mansion
had no illustrations. The cuts are coarsely designed
and roughly cut, but serve their purpose ; indeed they
are evidently intended as illustrations rather than
ornaments. Some controversy has at different times
arisen as to whether these cuts were executed in Eng-
land or abroad, but Mr. Linton has very justly decided
in favour of England. The work, he says, is so poor
that any one who could hold a knife could cut them,
therefore there was no necessity to send abroad.
About 1484 we have two important illustrated
England 225
books, the Canterbury Tales and the ALsop ; the
former with 28 illustrations, the latter with 186.
The cuts of the Canterbury Tales depict for the
most part the various individuals of the Pilgrimage,
and there is also a bird's-eye view of all the pilgrims
seated at an immense round table at supper, which
was used afterwards by Wynkyn de Worde for the
' Assembly of Gods.' The cuts in the ^Esop, with the
exception of the full-page frontispiece (known only in
the copy in the Windsor Library), are smaller and are
the work of two, if not three, engravers. One cut seems
to have been hurriedly executed in a different manner
from the rest, perhaps to take the place of one injured
at the last moment. It is not worked in the usual
manner \vith the outlines in black i.e, raised lines on
the wood-block, but a certain amount of the effect
has been produced by a white line on a black ground
i.e. by the cut-away lines of the wood-block.
The Golden Legend^ which was the next illustrated
book to appear, contains the most ambitious wood-
cuts which Caxton used. Those in the earlier part
are the full width of a large folio page, and show,
especially in their backgrounds, a certain amount of
technical skill. The later part of the book contains
a number of small cuts of saints very coarsely exe-
cuted, and the same cut is used over and over again
for different saints.
In 1487 Caxton first used his large woodcut device,
which is probably, though the contrary is often
asserted, of English workmanship. It is entirely
P
226 Early Illustrated Books
un-French in style and execution, and was probably
cut to print on the Missal printed by Maynyal for
Caxton, in order that the publisher might be brought
prominently into notice.
About this time (1487-88) two more illustrated
books were issued, the Royal Book and the Speculum
Vite Christi. The series cut for the Speculum are of
very good workmanship, though the designs are poor,
but all of them were not used in the book. One or
two appear later in books printed by W. de Worde,
manifestly from the same series. The Royal Book
contains only seven cuts, six of which are from the
Speculum. Some of the cuts occur also in the Doc-
trinal of Sapience and the Book of Divers Ghostly
Matters.
It is impossible not to think when examining
Caxton's books that the use of woodcuts was rather
forced upon him by the necessities of his business,
than deliberately preferred by himself. He seems to
have wished to popularise the more generally known
books, and only to have used woodcuts when the book
absolutely needed them. He did not, as some later
printers did, simply use woodcuts to attract the
unwary purchaser.
What cuts Caxton possessed at the end of his
career it is hard to determine. The set of large
Home cuts which W. de Worde used must have been
Caxton's, for we find one of them, the Crucifixion,
used in the Fifteen O'es, which was itself intended as
a supplement to a Horae, now unknown. In the same
England 227
way there must have been a number of cuts for use
in the 8vo Horae, but as that is known only from
a small fragment, we cannot identify them. From
similarity of style and identity of measurement we
can pick out a few from Wynkyn de Worde's later
editions, but many must be passed over.
On turning to examine the presses at work at the
same time as Caxton's, one cannot but be struck by
the scarcity of illustrations. Lettou and Machlinia,
though they produced over thirty books, had no
ornaments that we know of beyond a border which
was used in their edition of the Horae ad usum
Sarum, and passed into the hands of Pynson. They
seem to have been without everything except type,
not having even initial letters.
The St. Alban's press was a step in advance. A
few cuts were used in the Chronicles, and the Book
of St. Alban's contains coats of arms, produced by a
combination of wood-cutting and printing in colour.
The Oxford press was the most ambitious, and was
in possession of two sets of cuts, in neither case in-
tended for the books in which they were used. One
set was prepared for a Golden Legend, but no such
book is known to have been issued at the Oxford
press. One of these cuts appears as a frontispiece to
Lyndewode's Constitutions. It represents Jacobus de
Voragine writing the Golden Legend, so that it did
equally well for Lyndewode writing his law-book.
Others of the series are used in the Liber Festialis of
1486, but as that was a small folio and the cuts were
228 Early Illustrated Books
large, the ends were cut off, and they are all printed
in a mutilated condition. The other cuts used in the
Festial are small, and form part of a set for a Home,
but no Home is known to have been printed at the
Oxford press. It would be natural to suppose in this
case that these cuts had been procured from some
other printer who had used them in the production
of the books for which they were intended ; but the
most careful search has failed to find them in any
other book. Besides these cuts the Oxford press
owned a very beautiful border, which was used in
the commentary on the De Animd of Aristotle by
Alexander de Hales and the commentary on the
Lamentations of Jeremiah by John Lattebury, printed
in 1481 and 1482. The printers owned nothing else
for the adornment of their books but a rudely cut
capital G, which we find used many times in the
Festial.
The poverty of ornamental letters and borders is
very noticeable in all the English presses of the
fifteenth century. Caxton possessed one ambitious
letter, a capital A, which was used first in the Order
of Chivalry, and a series of eight borders, each made
up of four pieces, and found for the first time in the
Fifteen Cfes. They are of little merit, and compare
very unfavourably with French work of the period.
The best set of borders used in England belonged to
Notary and his partners when they started in London
about 1496. They are in the usual style, with dotted
backgrounds, and may very likely have been brought
England 229
from France. Pynson's borders, which he used in a
Home about 1495, are much more English in style,
but are not good enough to make the page really
attractive ; in fact almost the only fine specimens of
English printing with borders are to be found in the
Morton Missal, which he printed in 1500. In this
book also there are fine initial letters, often printed
in red. It is hard to understand why, as a rule, Eng-
lish initial letters were so very bad ; it certainly was
not from the want of excellent models, for those in the
Sarum missals, printed at Venice by Hertzog in 1494,
and sold in England by Frederic Egmont, contain
most beautifully designed initials, as good as can be
found in any early printed book.
Wynkyn de Worde, when he succeeded in 1491 to
Caxton's business, found himself in possession of a
large number of cuts, a considerably larger number
than ever appeared in the books of Caxton's that
now remain to us. The first illustrated book he
issued was a new edition of the Golden Legend, in
which the old cuts were utilised. This was printed
in 1493. In 1494 a new edition of the Speculum Vite
Christi was issued, of which only one copy is known,
that in the library at Holkham. It probably contains
only the series of cuts used by Caxton in his edition,
for the few leaves to be found in other libraries have
no new illustrations. About the same time (1494)
De Worde issued several editions of the Home ad
iisum Sarum, one in octavo (known from a few leaves
discovered in the binding of a book in the library of
230 Early Illustrated Books
Corpus Christi College, Oxford) and the rest in quarto.
In the quarto editions we find the large series of
pictures, among which are the three rioters and three
skeletons, the tree of Jesse, and the Crucifixion, which
occurs in Caxton's Fifteen O'es. It is extremely pro-
bable that all the cuts in these editions had belonged
to Caxton. The two cuts in the fragment of the
octavo edition, however, are of quite a different class,
evidently newly cut, and much superior in style and
simplicity to Caxton's. It is much to be regretted
that no complete copy of the book exists, for the neat
small cuts and bold red and black printing form a
very tasteful page.
A curious specimen of engraving is to be found in
the Scala Perfectionis, by Walter Hylton, also printed
in 1494. It represents the Virgin and child seated
under an architectural canopy, and below this are the
words of the antiphon beginning, ' Sit duke nomen
dni.' These words are not printed from type, but
cut on the block, and the engraver seems to have
treated them simply as part of the decoration, for
many of the words are by themselves quite unread-
able and bear only a superficial resemblance to the
inscription from which they were copied.
An edition of Glanville's De proprietatibus rerum
issued about this time has a number of cuts, not of
very great interest ; and the Book of St. Albans of
1496 has an extra chapter on fishing, illustrated with
a picture of an angler at work, with a tub, in the
German fashion, to put his fish into. It has also a
England
231
curiously modern diagram of the sizes of hooks.
In 1498 De Worde issued an illustrated edition of
Malory's Morte d? Arthur. The cuts are very am-
bitious, but badly executed, and the hand of the
engraver who cut them may be traced in several
books. In 1499 an edition of Mandeville was issued,
From the Falle of Princis, Pyr.son, 1494.
ornamented with a number of small cuts, and about
this time several small books were issued having cuts
on the title-page.
Richard Pynson's first illustrated book was an
edition of the Canterbury Tales, printed some time
232 Early Illustrated Books
before 1493. At the head of each tale is a rudely
executed cut of the pilgrim who narrates it These
cuts were made for this edition, and were in some
cases altered while the book was going through the
press to serve for different characters : the Squire
and the Manciple, the Sergeant and Doctor of Physic,
are from the same blocks with slight alterations.
Lydgate's Falle of P rinds t issued in 1494, contains
some of the very best woodcuts of the period : the
one here shown, that at the head of Book V., depicting
Marcus Manlius thrown into the Tiber, could hardly
be surpassed. About 1497 an edition of the Speculum
Vite Christi was issued, with a number of neatly
executed small cuts, and in 1500 Pynson printed the
beautiful Sarum Missal, known as the Morton Missal.
Special borders and ornaments, introducing a rebus
on the name of Morton, were engraved for this, and
a full-page cut of the prelate's coat of arms appears
at the commencement of the book.
After the year 1500 almost every book issued by
W. de Worde, who was pre-eminently the popular
publisher, had an illustration on the title-page. This
was not always cut for the book, nor indeed always very
applicable to the letterpress, and the cuts can almost
all be arranged into series made for more important
books. There were, however, a few stock cuts : a
schoolmaster with a gigantic birch for grammars, a
learned man seated at a desk for works of more ad-
vanced scholarship, and lively pictures of hell for
theological treatises. The title-page was formed on
England 233
a fixed plan. At the top, printed inside a wood-
cut ribbon, was placed the title, below this the cut.
Pynson, who was the Royal printer, and a publisher
of learned works, disdained such attempts to catch the
more vulgar buyers. His title-pages rarely have cuts,
and these are only used on such few popular books
as he issued. Both he and De Worde had a set of
narrow upright cuts of men and women with blank
labels over their heads, who could be used for any
purpose, and have their names printed in type in the
label above.
Foreign competition was also at this time making
its influence felt on English book-illustration. W. de
Worde had led the way by purchasing from Godfried
van Os, about 1492, some type initial letters, and at
least one woodcut. Pynson, early in the sixteenth
century, obtained some cuts from Ve"rard, which he
used in his edition of the Kalendar of Shepherdes,
1506, and Julian Notary, who began printing about
1496, seems to have made use of a miscellaneous
collection of cuts obtained from various quarters.
He had, amongst other curious things, part of a set
of metal cuts executed in the manure criblee, which
have not been traced to any other book, but appear
to have passed at a considerably later date into the
hands of Wyer, who only commenced to print in
1528. When W. de Worde left Westminster in 1500
to settle in Fleet Street, he parted with some of his
old woodcuts to Notary, woodcuts which had been
used in the Horae of 1494, and had originally belonged
234 Early Illustrated Books
to Caxton. All these miscellaneous cuts appear in
his Golden Legend of 1 503, and the large cut of the
' Assembly of Saints ' on the title-page seems also to
have been borrowed. It was used by Hopyl at Paris
in 1505 for his edition of the Golden Legend in Dutch,
and passed afterwards with Hopyl's business to his
son-in-law Prevost, who used it in a theological work
of John Major's.
Some time before 1510 an extremely curious book,
entitled probably the Passion of our Lorde Jesu, was
printed, probably by W. de Worde. The book is
now known only from stray leaves in bindings, but
from references to it in older bibliographies it is
probable that a perfect copy exists, though its where-
abouts is unknown. It contains a number of large
cuts of a very German appearance and quite unlike
any others of the period. Some are used also in the
York Manual printed by De Worde in 1 509.
About this time too a number of popular books in
English, some adorned with rude woodcuts, were
issued by John of Doesborch, a printer in Antwerp.
Among them may be mentioned The wonderful shape
and nature of man, beasts, serpents, etc., the Fifteen
Tokens, the Story of the Parson of Kalenbrowe, and
the Life of Virgilius. A still earlier Antwerp cut,
which had been used by Gerard Leeu for the title-page
of his English Solomon and Marcolphus, found its way
to England and was used by Copland.
In the last years of Henry VIl.'s reign, from 1501 to
1 509, a few books may be mentioned as particularly in-
England 235
teresting from their illustrations. In 1502 De Worde
printed the Ordinary of Chrysten Men, a large book
with a block-printed title. It was reprinted in 1 506.
In 1503 appeared the Recuyles of y* Hy story es of
Troye, a typical example of an illustrated book of the
period. There are about seventy cuts of all kinds, of
which twelve were specially cut for the book : many
others were used in the Morte d 1 Arthur, and the rest
are miscellaneous. In 1505 we have the Craft to
live and die well, of which there is another edition in
the following year. In 1506 appears the Castle of
Labour, one of the few books entirely illustrated with
cuts specially made for it ; in 1508 the Kalendar of
Shepherdes. An edition of the Seven wise Masters of
Rome, of which the only known copy is imperfect,
appeared about 1506, though the cuts which illustrate
it were made before 1500. The fragment contains
seven cuts, but the set must have consisted of eleven.
They are very careful copies of those used by Gerard
Leeu in his edition of 1490, and have lost none of the
feeling of the originals.
Three books only of Pynson's production during
this period call for special notice. About 1505 he
issued an edition of the Castle of Labour, with very
well-cut illustrations closely copied from the French
edition. In 1506 appeared his edition of the Kalendar
of Shepherdes, which is illustrated for the most part
with cuts obtained from Ve"rard, and in 1507 an edi-
tion of the Golden Legend. Of each of these books
but one copy is known.
236 Early Illustrated Books
For some unknown reason, the accession of Henry
VII. acted in the most extraordinary way upon the
English presses, which in that year issued a very large
number of books. Perhaps the influx of visitors to
London on that occasion made an unusual demand ;
but at any rate a number of popular books were then
issued. Amongst them are Rychard Cuer de Lyon, the
Fiftene Joyes of Mary age, the Convercyon of Swerers,
the Parliament of Devils, and many others. Besides
these there were, of course, a number of funeral
sermons on Henry VII., many of which have curious
frontispieces. In one the coffin of the late King forms
a prominent object in the foreground, but it has been
inserted into a cut with which it had originally nothing
to do. This method of inserting new pieces into old
blocks, technically termed plugging, was not much
used at this period when wood-engraving was so
cheap. An excellent example will be found in the
books printed for William Bretton, which contain a
large cut of his coat of arms. A mistake was made
in the cutting of the arms, and a new shield was in-
serted, the mantling and supporters being untouched.
Another notable book of that period is Barclay's Ship
of Fools, issued by Pynson in 1509. It contains one
hundred and eighteen cuts, the first being a full-page
illustration of the printer's coat of arms. The rest
are copies, roughly executed, of those in the original
edition. Another version of this book, translated by
Henry Watson, was issued the same year by Wynkyn
de Worde. It is illustrated with a special series of
England 237
cuts, which are used again in the later editions. Of
the original edition of 1 509 only one copy is known,
printed on vellum and preserved in the Bibliotheque
Nationale. Stray cuts from this series are found in
several of De Worde's other books, but may be at
once recognised from the occurrence of the ' fool ' in
his typical cap and bells.
About this time and a little earlier the title was
very often cut entire on a block. The De Proprie-
tatibus of c. 1496 contains the first and the most
elaborate specimen, in which the words 'Bartholomeus
de proprietatibus rerum ' are cut in enormous letters
on a wooden board ; indeed the whole block was so
large that hardly any copy contains the whole.
Faques, Pynson, and others used similar blocks, in
which the letters were white and the ground coloured
(one of Pynson's printed in red is to be found in the
Ortus Vocabulorum of 1509), but their uncouthness
soon led to their disuse. Numbers of service-books
were issued by Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde, pro-
fusely illustrated with small cuts, most of which appear
to have been of home manufacture, though unoriginal
in design. It is worth noticing one difference in the
cuts of the two printers. Pynson's small cuts have
generally an open or white background, De Worde's
are, as a rule, dotted in the French style. Since in
some of their service-books these two printers used
exactly similar founts of type the identification of
their cuts is of particular value. But these service
books almost from the first began to deteriorate.
238 Early Illustrated Books
The use of borders was abandoned, and little care
was given to keeping sets of cuts together, or using
those of similar styles in one book. We find the
archaic cuts of Caxton, the delicate pictures copied
from French models, and roughly designed and
executed English blocks all used together, sometimes
even on the same page. The same thing is notice-
able in all the illustrated books of the period. De
Worde used Caxton's cuts up to the very end of his
career, though in many cases the blocks were worm-
eaten or broken. The peculiar mixture of cuts is
very striking in some books. Take as an example
the edition of Robert the Devil, published about
1514. No cut used in it is original: one is from a
book on good living and dying, another from the
Ship of Fools, 1 a third is from a devotional book of
the previous century, and so on. In the Oliver of
Castile of 1518, though there are over sixty illus-
trations, not more than three or four are specially cut
for it, but come from the Morte d 1 Arthur, the Gesta
Romanorum, Helias Knight of the Swan, the Body of
Policy, Richard Cuer de Lion, the Book of Carving,
and so on, and perhaps many had been used more
than once. Indeed, W. de Worde minded as little
about using the same illustrations over and over
again as some of our modern publishers.
1 This particular cut, which represents the Fool looking out of a
window while his house is on fire, meant to illustrate the chapter ' Of
bostynge or hauynge confydence in fortune,' is not used in the edition
of 1517. It may, perhaps, occur in the edition of 1509, of which the
unique copy is at Paris.
England 239
For all books issued in the early years of the six-
teenth century it was thought necessary to have at
least an illustration on the title-page, so that practically
an examination of the illustrated books of the period
means almost an examination of the entire produce
of the printing press. In time, when the subject has
been thoroughly studied, it will be possible to separate
all the cuts into series cut for some special purpose.
At present the study of early woodcuts in England
is like making bricks without straw. We have no
bibliography of the books in any way adequate.
Herbert's Typographical Antiquities, published in
1785, is the latest working book of any value, and
until there is a fairly good list of books, it is im-
possible to study their illustrations.
A rather important influence was introduced into
the history of English book illustration about 1518,
when Pynson obtained from Froben some borders and
other material designed by Holbein. 1 They are the
first important examples of ' renaissance ' design used
in English books, and their effect was rapid and
marked. Wynkyn de Worde, who in his devices had
hitherto been content to use Caxton's trade-mark
with some few extra ornaments, introduced a hideous
parody of one of Froben's devices, poor in design,
and wretched in execution. The series of borders
used by Pynson were good in execution, and their
style harmonised with the Roman type used by him
1 Sir Thomas More, the mutual friend and employer of Pynson and
Froben, had probably a good deal to do with this purchase of material.
240 Early Illustrated Books
at that time, but with other books it was different.
The heavy English black letter required something
bolder, and unless these borders were heavily cut,
they looked particularly meagre. A very beautiful
title-page of this type (here somewhat reduced) is
that in Sir Thomas Elyot's Image of Governance,
printed by Thomas Berthelet at London in 1 540.
The illustrated books of this period offer a curious
mixture of styles, for nothing could be more opposed
in feeling than the early school of English cuts and
the newly introduced renaissance designs. The out-
sides of the books underwent exactly the same change,
for in place of the old pictorial blocks with which the
stationers had heretofore stamped their bindings, they
used hideous combinations of medallions and pillars.
The device of Berthelet is an excellent specimen of
the new style. Despising good old English names
and signs, he carried on business at the sign of
Lucretia Romana in Fleet Street, and his device de-
picts that person in the act of thrusting a sword into
her bosom. In the background is a classical land-,
scape, and on either side pillars. Above are festoons,
and on ribbons at the head and feet of the figure the
name of the printer and of his sign. Though the cut
is uninteresting it is a beautiful piece of work.
Another result of the new movement was the
banishment of woodcuts from the title-page. Those
to Pynson's books have already been noticed, but
lesser printers like Scot, Godfrey, Rastell, and Treveris
also made use of borders of classical design, and gave
"HE IMAGE
blcCmpctoui; ailejc
<5CIjoni8fi c^Uot Itnigljt
242 Early Illustrated Books
up the use of woodcuts. It is extremely curious to
notice what excellent effects on a title-page the
printers at this time produced from the poorest
materials. They seem to have understood much
better than those of a later date how to use different-
sized type with effect, and to make the whole page
pleasing, without attracting too much attention to
one particular part.
Before leaving this early period it will be as well to
return a little, and briefly notice some of the more
marked illustrated books produced by printers other
than Pynson and De Worde. The two printers of
the name of Faques, Guillam, and Richard, produced
a few most interesting books, and the device of the
last named, founded on that of the Paris printer,
Thielman Kerver, is a fine piece of engraving. The
name was originally cut upon the block as Faques,
and was so used in his two first books ; but in order
to make the name appear more English in form, the
' ques ' was cut out and 'kes' inserted in type. The
last dated book which he printed, the Mirrour of our
Lady of 1530, contains several fine illustrations ; that
on the reverse of the title-page depicting a woman
of some religious order writing a book, has at the
bottom the letters E. G. joined by a knot, which may
be the initials of the engraver.
The Cambridge press of 1521-1522, from the scho-
lastic nature of its books, required no illustrations, but
it used for the title-page of the Galen a border en-
graved on metal, rather in the manner of Holbein,
England 243
but evidently of native production. The Oxford
press of the early sixteenth century borrowed some
of its cuts from De Worde, but a few, such as the
ambitious frontispiece and the four diagrams in the
Compotus of 1519, were original.
John Rastell in his Pastyme of People used a number
of full-page illustrations of the kings of England,
coarse in design and execution, and very remarkable
in appearance. Peter Treveris issued a number of
books with illustrations, some of which are well worthy
of notice. The Crete Herbal, first published in 1516,
contained a large number of cuts. Jerome of Bruyns-
wyke's Worke of Surgeri has some curious plates of
surgical operations, and though the subjects are rather
repulsive, they are excellent specimens of the wood-
cutting of the period. Treveris' best-known book is
the Policronicon of 1527, printed for John Reynes,
whose mark in red generally occurs on the title-page.
This title-page is a fine piece of work, and has been
facsimiled by Dibdin in his Typographical Antiquities.
Some of the cuts and ornaments used by Treveris
passed after his death into the hands of the Edin-
burgh printer, Thomas Davidson.
Lawrence Andrewe of Calais, who printed shortly
before 1530, also issued some curious illustrated books.
Before coming to England he had translated the ex-
traordinary book, The wonderful shape and nature of
man, beasts, serpentes, etc., printed by John of Does-
borch, whom we have spoken of above. On his own
account he issued the Boke of distyllacyon of waters
244 Early Illustrated Books
by Jerome of Brunswick, illustrated with pictures of
apparatus, and The Mirror of the World. This is
founded on Caxton's edition, but is much more fully
illustrated, the cuts to the Natural History portion
being particularly curious. It is worth noticing that
Andrewe, like some other printers at this time, intro-
duced his device into many of the initial letters and
borders which were cut for him, so that they can be
readily identified when they occur, after his death, in
books by other printers.
After the death of Wynkyn de Worde in 1535,
ideas as regards book-illustration underwent a great
change. Theology had become popular, and theo-
logical books were not adapted for illustration,. The
ordinary book, with pictures put in haphazard, abso-
lutely died out ; and cuts were only used in chap-books,
or in large illustrated volumes, descriptions of hor-
rible creatures, and the likenesses of comets or por-
tents on the one hand, chronicles, books of travel, and
scientific works on the other. The difference which
we noticed between W. de Worde and Pynson, the
one being a popular printer and the other a printer of
standard works, is distinctly marked in the succeed-
ing generation. While Wyer, Byddell, and Copland
published the popular books, Grafton and Whyt-
church, Wolfe and Day, issued more solid literature.
The old woodcuts passed into the hands of the
poorer printers, and were used till they were worn
out, and it is curious to notice how long in many
cases this took. On the other hand, the illustrations
England 245
made for new books are, as a rule, of excellent design
and execution, owing a good deal, in all probability,
to the influence of Holbein, who, for the latter portion
of his life, was living in England. As examples of
his work, we may take two books published in 1548,
Cranmer's Catechism, published by Walter Lynne,
and Halle's Chronicles, published by Grafton. The
first contains a number of small cuts, one of which
is signed in full, Hans Holbein, and two others only
with his initials, H. H. Some writers insist that
these three cuts alone are to be ascribed to him, and
that the rest are from an unknown hand. Besides
these small cuts, there is one full-page cut on the
back of the title, of very fine work. It represents
Edward VI. seated on his throne with the bishops
kneeling on his right, the peers on his left. From the
hands of the king the bishops are receiving a bible.
The cut at the end of Halle's Chronicles, very similarly
executed, and also ascribed to Holbein, represents
Henry VIII. sitting in Parliament. Almost all the
volumes of chronicles, of which a number were issued
in the sixteenth century, contain woodcuts, and two
are especially well illustrated, Grafton's Chronicles,
published in 1569, and Holinshed's Chronicles in
1577. The illustrations in the latter book, which
Mr. Linton considers to have been cut on metal, do
not appear in the later edition of 1586. Among the
illustrations in the first edition, so Dibdin says, is to
be found a picture of a guillotine.
Of all the English printers of the latter half of the
m
petition,'
toe fue to
tule,gouetne anD
, bp
ftan&c al tt^e pete! Jous tetitattons
of tl?e Gcflje, tljg too^iDc anD
DEUpII^nDto ouercome rtci
ftatiuetnape become
ano ljoipe*|5obje folotoetft djefe*
it emft lafte pettrton,
From Cranmer's Catechism, London, 1548.
England 247
sixteenth century, none produced finer books than
John Day, who seems to have been not only a printer,
but also a wood-engraver and type-cutter. The
best known, perhaps, of his books is the Book of
Christian Prayers, commonly called Queen Elizabeth's
Prayer Book, which he published in 1569. In a way,
this book is undoubtedly a fine specimen of book-
ornamentation, but as it was executed in a style then
out of date, having borders like the earlier service
books, it suffers by comparison with the 'Books of
Hours ' of fifty years earlier. Another book of Day's
which obtained great popularity was the History of
Martyrs, compiled by John Fox. We read on Day's
epitaph in the church of Bradley-Parva
He set a Fox to wright how martyrs runne,
By death to lyfe. Fox ventured paynes and health,
To give them light ; Daye spent in print his wealth.
Considering the popularity of the book, and the
number of editions that were issued, we can hardly
imagine that Day lost money upon it. The illustra-
tions are of varied excellence, but the book contains
also some very fine initial letters. One, the C at the
commencement of the dedication, contains a portrait
of Queen Elizabeth on her throne, with three men
standing beside her, two of whom are supposed to be
Day and Fox. Below the throne, forming part of
the letter, is the Pope holding two broken keys.
Initial letters about this time arrived at their best.
They were often very large, and contained scenes,
mythological subjects, or coats-of-arms. A fine
248 Early Illustrated Books
specimen of this last class is to be found in the
Cosmographical Glasse, by William Cuningham, 1559.
It is a large D containing the arms of Robert, Lord
Dudley, to whom the book is dedicated. Very soon
after this some ingenious printer invented the system
of printing an ornamental border for the letter with
a blank space for the insertion of an ordinary capital
letter, a system which soon succeeded in destroying
any beauty or originality which letters had up to this
time possessed.
In conclusion, it will be well to notice the growth
of engraving on metal in England. The earliest
specimen that I know of is the device first used by
Pynson about 1496. It is certainly metal, and has
every appearance of having been cut in this country.
Some writers have put forward the theory that the
majority of early illustrations, though to all appear-
ance woodcuts, were really cut on metal. But
wherever it is possible to trace an individual cut for
any length of time, we can see from the breakages,
and in some cases from small holes bored by insects,
that the material used was certainly wood. Julian
Notary had some curious metal cuts, but they were
certainly of foreign design and workmanship, and the
same may be said of the metal cuts found amongst
the early English service-books. The Cambridge
Galen of 1521 has an engraved title-page. It is not
till 1 540 that we find a book illustrated with engrav-
ings produced in this country. This was Thomas
Raynald's Byrth of Mankynde, which contains four
England 249
plates of surgical diagrams. In some of the later
editions these plates have been re-engraved on wood.
In 1545 another medical book appeared, Compendiosa
totius delineatio aere exarata per Thomam Geminum.
It has a frontispiece with the arms of Henry VIII.,
and forty plates of anatomical subjects. Other
editions appeared in 1553 and 1559, and the title-page
of the last is altered by the insertion of a portrait of
Elizabeth in place of the royal arms. The Stirpium
Adversaria, nova authoribus Petro Pena et Mathia de
Lobel of 1570 has a beautifully engraved title-page,
and the 1572 edition of Parker's Bible contains a map
of the Holy Land with the following inscription in
an ornamental tablet : ' Graven bi Humfray Cole,
goldsmith, an English man born in y e north, and
pertayning to y e mint in the Tower, 1572.' Humfray
Cole is supposed by some authorities to have
engraved the beautiful portraits of Elizabeth, the
Earl of Leicester, and Lord Burleigh, which appear
in the earlier edition of 1568. Saxton's maps, which
appeared in 1579, are partly the work of native
engravers, for at least eight were engraved by
Augustine Ryther and Nicholas Reynolds. In 1591
there are two books, Broughton's Concert of Scrip-
ture, and Sir John Harrington's Ariosto. The latter
contains almost fifty plates, and was the most ambi-
tious book illustrated with metal plates published in
the century. There are a few other books published
before 1600 which contains specimens of engraving,
but none worthy of particular mention.
INDEX
ABBEVILLE, 149, 150 note.
/Esop, Steinhowel's, 50 ; Italian,
Verona 1479, 88 ; Naples 1485,
86 ; Venice 1487, 94 ; Florence,
for Piero Pacini, 125 ; Brescia
1487, 134; Milan 1498, 136;
Dutch, Leeu's, 206 j English,
Cax ton's, 225.
Albi, 146.
Aldus, 102, 107.
Antwerp, 176.
Appell, Dr., 102.
Arms on title-pages, 20, 215.
Arndes, S., 70.
Augsburg, 39-49, 75-77.
Avisio, G., 88.
Aymon, Les Quatre Filz, 146.
b (engraver's or artist's signature),
99-
Back, G., 208, 211.
Bacon, Sir N., book plate, 22.
Baldassaris, H., 142.
Baldini, B., 90.
Baleni, G., 129.
Bazaleriis, de, 138.
Bamler, J., 44-46.
Barberiis, P. de, 84.
Basle, 79.
Batines, Colomb de, 126, 129-30.
Beauvais, V. de, Miroir Historial,
154.
Belcari, M., 128.
Belial of Jacobus de Theramo, 41,
48 ; Dutch version called Der
Sender en freest, 203-5.
Bellaert, J., 202-5, 2II>
Bellescullee, P., 147.
Bellini, Monte Santo di Dio, 90.
Benaliis, B. de, 94, 99.
Benivieni, D., 119.
Benvenuto, F., 129.
Bergomensis, P. , De Claris mulieri-
bus, 135-
Berthelet, T. , 240.
Bettini, Monte Santo di Dio, I IO.
Bevilaqua, S., 141.
Bibles (i) Latin 42-line, 3, 6, 9,
24 ; 36-line, 8 ; 1462, IO, 26 :
(ii) German, 1472, 55 ; 1473
and 1477, 40, 41 ; 1480, 56, 99 ;
Koburger's, 56; Lubeck, 1494,
70 : (iii) Italian, Venice, 1490,
98.
Biblia Panperum, Pfister's, 27-30.
Bineant, G., 162.
Blast os, N., 139.
Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus,
49, 53 ; Decamerone, ICO.
Bonaventura, S., Deuote Medita-
tione, 96.
Bodner, Edehtein, 27-30.
Bonhomme, J., 162.
M., 173.
Bourgeois, J. le, 150.
Brandis, L., 53, 55.
252
Early Illustrated Books
Brant, S., Narrenschiff, 67-70.
Breda, J. de, 208.
Brescia, 132.
Breydenbach, B. von, 59-63, 166.
Brocar, A. G., 221.
Brocar, J., 221.
Bruges, 3, 201-2.
Buc A der JVatur, 45.
Buck der vier Historien, 27, 28.
Buck der Weisheit, 53.
Buck von den Sieben Todsilnden,
44.
Buonaccorsi, F., 119.
Burgkmair, 75, 77.
CALANDRO, P., Arithmetic, no.
Calendar of 1476, 33.
Caliergi, Z., 106.
Cambridge, 242.
Camus, 27.
Capranica, D. , Arte di bene Morire,
125.
Caxton, 13, 223 sqq.
Celtes, C., 71.
Centenera, A., 215.
Cessolis, J. de, Chess-book, German,
41 ; Italian, 120 ; Dutch, 207 ;
English, 224.
Chambe'ry, 147.
Champfleury, 170.
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Cax-
ton's edd. 223, 225 ; Pynson's,
231.
Chroniques de France, 165.
Codecha (or Capcasa) M. di, 96, 99.
Cologne, 55.
Colonna, F., 103.
Colophons, 24-26.
Columna, A,, De regimine princi-
pum of 1493, 36.
Contrasti, 130-132.
Conway, W. M., quoted, Chap. IX.
passim.
Copilacion de leyes, 1485, 2 1 6.
Cousteau, G., 158.
Cranach, L., 77.
Cremer, H., 6, 7
Cremonese, P., 99.
Dance of Death or Danse Macabre,
163, 172.
Dante, Divina Commedia, Flor-
ence, 1481, 90 ; Brescia, 1487,
99 ; Venice, 1491, 99.
Dati, A., 128.
G., 128.
DayJ., 247.
Delaborde, Vicomte, 10.
Delft, 207.
Deventer, 208.
Dialogus Creaturarum, 2OI-2.
Dienecker, J., 73.
Dinkmuth, 53.
Dino, F. di, 86, 109.
Directors, 26.
Doesborch, J. of, 234, 243.
Dolea, C., 10.
Dorothea, .,Rappresentatione, 130
Du Pre, G., 169.
J., 144, 148, 149, 150, 162,
181, 184-86.
Durandus, Rationale, 1459, 5, 6.
Durer, A., 71-73-
EGMONT, F., 139, 229.
Epistole ed Evangelii, 119.
Eustace, G., 196.
FAQUES, G. and R., 242.
Fasciculus Temporum, German,
56 ; Ratdolt's 93 ; Louvain,
1475, HSo, 201.
Ferdinand II., King of Naples, 18.
Ferrara, 134.
Fichet, G., 15.
Fifteen O'es, 228, 230.
Index
253
Fior di Virtu, Venice, 98 ; Flor-
ence, 122 ; Brescia, 134.
Florence, ill sqq.
Fogel, J., 6, 7.
Foresti of Bergamo, G. P., Supple-
mentum Chronicarum, 66 note,
93-
Forfengo, B. da, 1491, 134.
Fox, John, Book of Martyrs, 247.
Freydal, 73-75.
Frezzi, F., Quatriregio, 125.
Furter, Michael, 67, 79.
GAFORI, 135, 136.
Game of Chess. See Cessolis, J. de.
Gart der Gesundheyt, 59.
Gerard, P., 149.
Giunta, L. A., 98, 102, 108.
Godard, G., 196.
Golden Legend. See Voragine,
J. de.
Gouda, 20 1, 207.
Gorgonzola, N., 140.
Gorricio, Contemplaciones sobre el
rosario, 218.
Graf, Urs, 79.
Granjon, 175.
Gregoriis, G. de, 100-101.
Griin, Hans Baldung, 79.
Gruninger, 70, 79.
Gruyer, G., ill, 113.
Gryphius, F., 173.
Guillireti, S., 138.
HAARLEM, 202-5.
Hahn, U., 83.
Harrington, Sir J., Ariosto, 1591,
249.
Head-lines, 36.
Head-pieces, 36.
Historiarum Veteris Testamenti
Icones, 173.
Hoernen, Arnold ther, 31, 36.
Hohenwang, L., 40 note.
Holbein, A., 80.
Holbein, H., 56, 79-80, 172, 173,
239, 245-
Holl, L., 53.
Hours, Books of, 17. Chap. viii.
Hroswitha, 71.
Husz, M., 146.
Hyginus, Poeticon Astronomicon, 93.
Hypnerotomach ia, 1 02 - 1 07.
INGOLD, Das guldin Spiel, 41.
JENSON, N., 10, n.
Johann Petri, 119.
Jornandes De Rebus Gothorttm, 75
note.
Josephus, De la bataille judaique,
KERVER, J., 106.
- T. 195-
Ketham, J., Fascicule de Medicina,
IOI.
Knoblochzer, 57.
Knoblouch, J., 79.
Koburger, A., 56, 63.
Koelhoff, J., 36.
Konigshoven, 45.
Kristeller, Dr., 10, II, 96, 137.
Kropfenstein, 39.
L, FRENCH initial, 155-7.
Landino, C., 18, 120.
L'art de bien vivreet de bien mourir,
158-60.
Lavagnia, P. 90.
Leeu, G., 202, 206-211.
Le Rouge, P. 151, 155, 162.
Le Signerre, G. 135, 136.
Lettou, 227.
Lieseveldt, A. van, 209.
Lignamine, J. P. de, 84-86.
254
Early Illustrated Books
Lippmann, Dr., 12 note ; 66 note.
Lorenz, N., 90.
Louis II., Marquis of Saluzzo, 137.
Louvain, 201.
Lubeck, 53, 70.
Lucidario, 1494, 122.
Lutzelburger, 172.
Lydgate, Falle of Princes, 231.
Lyndewode, Constitutions, 227.
Lyons, 145-146, 165-166, 172.
MACHLINIA, 34, 227.
Maillet, J., 155.
Mansion, C, 201, 202, 21 1.
Marchant, G., 160, 162.
Martorel, T.,Tirant lo Blanch, 2 1 8.
Maximilian, Emperor, 72-75.
Mazalis, F. de, 139.
Medici, L. de, 128, 130.
Meer, J. van der, 207.
Meidenbach, J., Hortus Sanitatis,
59-
Menard, J., 158.
Mer des Hystoires, 162.
Middleton, Prof., 6, 7.
Milan, 90, 135.
Mir r our of our Lady , 1530.
Mirror of the World, 1480.
Mischomini, A., 96, 115, 116, 120,
122, 124, 132.
More, Sir T., 239 note.
Moravus, M., 87.
Morgiani, Lorenzo di, 109, 119.
Morin, Martin, 166.
Morton Missal, 20, 232.
Muther, Dr. 40 note ; 47 note.
Mystery Plays, 195.
NAPLES, 86.
Neyret, A., 147.
Nider, Expositio Decalogi, 36.
Novara, B., 93, 94.
Novclle, 132.
Numeister, 89, 146.
Nuremberg, 55, 79.
Nuremberg Chronicle. See Sche-
del, H.
OLPE, B. de, 67-70.
Os, G. van, 207, 233.
P. van, 207.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Lyons, 1556,
175 ; Mansion's, 1484, 20 1 ;
Venice, 1497, 102 ; Ve"rard's,
1493. IS2.
Oxford, 227-8, 243.
PACHEL, L., 90.
Pacini, B., 119, 124.
P. di, 141.
Pagination, 36.
Paris ft Vienne, 165.
Passion of our Lorde /esu, 234.
Pasti, M. de, 88.
Petrarch, De Remediis utriusque
Fortunae, 1532, 76 ; Trionfi,
96, 135-
Petri, Johann, 109.
Pfister, A., 27-30.
Pflanzmann, J., 40.
Pigouchet, 190-95.
Plantin, J., 176.
Politiano, A., Favola d'Orfeo,
130.
Polono, Stanislao, 14, 218.
Pont Notre Dame, 155.
Presentation Copies, 14.
Printers' workshop, cuts of, 163,
164.
Priiss, J., 57.
Ptolemy, Cosmographia, 53.
Pulci, L., Morgante Maggiore,
"5.
Pynson, 231 sqq.
QUENTEL, H., 56.
Index
255
Rappresentationi) 126.
Rastell, J., 240, 243.
Ratdolt, E., 33, 47, 91-93.
Rechtstreit des Menschen mil dem
Tode, 27.
Regnault, F., 196.
Reichenthal, ' Council of Con-
stance,' 1 46.
Rennes, 147.
Riessinger, S., 85.
Rivoli, Due de, IO, II.
Robert the Devil, c., 1514, 238.
Rome, 83-86.
Rouen, 150, 166.
Rudimenta Noviciorum, 53> 162.
Rupertus de Sancto Remigio, 45.
SALUZZO, 136.
San Pedro, D. di, Career d'Amor,
1493 and 1496, 218.
Santis, I. de, 96.
Savonarola Tracts, 111-113.
Schaufelein, H., 74, 75.
Schedel, H., Liber Chronicarum,
63-67.
Schenck, P., 147.
Schobsser, J., 47.
Schoeffer, P., 4, 5, 7, 8, 26, 59,
60.
Schonsperger, H., 47, 73.
Schott, M., 57.
Scinzenceller, U., 90.
Scotus, O., 93.
Seville, 218-20.
Seven Wise Masters of Rome, 206,
235-
Sforza family, 18.
Shields in printed borders, 19.
Simoneta, G., 18.
Snellaert, C., 207.
Speculum vite Christi, Caxton's,
226 ; De Worde's, 229 ; Pyn-
son's, 232.
Sorg, A., 46.
St. Alban's, Book of, 227.
Steiner, J. A., 27.
Stephan, Schatzbehalter, 63, 66.
Strasburg, 57.
Strozzi family, 18.
Supplementum Chronicarum. See
Foresti.
TAIL-PIECES, 36.
Terence, Works, 166 ; Eunuchus y
S3, 54-
Theuerdank, 73-75.
Theramo, J. de, 41. See Belial.
Thodesco, G., 109.
Title-pages, first use of, 31-35.
Tirant lo Blanch, 218.
Tory, Geoffrey, 170-71, 197.
Tournes, J. de, 17, 175.
Trechsel, J., 166.
-M., 172, 173-
Trepperel, J., 165.
Trabajos de Hercules, 215, 2 1 6, 220.
Turrecremata, Cardinal, Medita-
tiones, 83, 89, 146.
ULM, 49-53.
Ungut, M., 214, 218.
Utrecht, 201.
VARNHAGEN, Dr., 132.
Valturius, De Re Militari, 40 note,
8 7 .
Vegetius, early German, 40 note.
Vellum used, 9.
Venetian books, stamped borders
in, 10-12.
Venice, 91-107.
Verard, A., 15-17, 148-60, 186-90,
202.
Verona, 87.
Vespasian, Romance of, 220.
Vienne, 147.
256
Early Illustrated Books
Villena, E. de, Trabajos de Hercules,
215, 216, 220.
Vivaldus, 136.
Voragine, J. de, Caxton's, 20, 225 ;
cuts for an Oxford (?) edition of,
227 ; De Worde's, 229 ; Notary's,
234; in German, 40; French, 154.
Vostre, Simon, 190.
Weissltunig, 73-75.
Westphalia, J. de, 201, 207, 209.
Wittenberg, 77.
Wohlgemuth, Michael, 63, 71.
Worde, Wynkyn de, 226, 229 sqq.
ZAINER, G., 36, 40-44.
J-, 49-53-
Zamora, 215.
Zaroto, A., 135.
Zell, U., 55-
Zwolle, 207.
Zoppino, N., 141.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.
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