.-'&*. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES SCHOOL OF LIBRARY SERVICE "" \ 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