A History of Wood-Engraving Part 1

A History of Wood-Engraving.

by George Edward Woodberry.

PREFACE.

In this book I have attempted to gather and arrange such facts as should be known to men of cultivation interested in the art of engraving in wood. I have, therefore, disregarded such matter as seems to belong rather to descriptive bibliography, and have treated wood-engraving, in its princ.i.p.al works, as a reflection of the life of men and an ill.u.s.tration of successive phases of civilization. Where there is much disputed ground, particularly in the early history of the art, the writers on whom I have relied are referred to, and those who adopt a different view are named; but where the facts seemed plain, and are easily verifiable, reference did not appear necessary.

In conclusion, I have the honor to acknowledge my obligations to the officers of the Boston Public Library, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harvard College Library, for permission to reproduce several cuts in their possession; and to Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public Library, for the list of authorities at the end of the volume.

Especially it is my pleasant duty to thank Professor Charles Eliot Norton, of Harvard University, from whose curious and valuable collection more than half of these ill.u.s.trations are derived, both for them and for suggestion, advice, and criticism, without which, indeed, the work could not have been written.

GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY.

I.

_THE ORIGIN OF THE ART._

[Ill.u.s.tration: T FIG. 1.--From "Epistole di San Hieronymo Volgare."

Ferra 1497.]

The beginning of the art of wood-engraving in Europe, the time when paper was first laid down upon an engraved wood block and the first rude print was taken off, is unknown; the name of the inventor and his country are involved in a double obscurity of ignorance and fable, darkened still more by national jealousies and vanities; even the mechanical appliances and processes which led up to and at last resulted in the new art, can only be conjectured. The art had long lain but just beyond the border-line of discovery. The principle of making impressions by means of lines cut in relief upon wood was known to the ancients, who used engraved wooden stamps to indent figures and letters in soft substances like wax and clay, and, possibly, to print colors on surfaces, as had been done from early times in India in the manufacture of cloth; similar stamps were used in the Middle Ages by notaries and other public officers to print signatures on doc.u.ments, by Italian cloth-makers to impress colors on silk and other fabrics, and by the illuminators of ma.n.u.scripts to strike the outlines of initial letters.

This practice may have suggested the new process.

It is more probable that the art began in the workshops of the goldsmiths, who were so skilled in engraving upon metal that impressions of much artistic value have been taken from work executed by them in the twelfth century, showing that they really were engravers obliged to remain goldsmiths, because the art of printing from metal plates was unknown.[1] By their knowledge of design and their artistic execution, at least, if not by their mechanical inventiveness, the goldsmiths were the lineal ancestors of the great engravers of the Renaissance. Their art had been continued from Roman times, with fewer interruptions and hinderances than any other of the fine arts. It was early employed in the adornment of the altar, the pax, and other articles of the Church service; already, in St. Bernard's time, so much attention was given to workmanship of this kind, and so much wealth lavished upon it, that he denounced it, with true ascetic spirit, as a decoration of what was soon to become vile, a waste of what might have been given to the poor, and a distraction of the spirit from holiness to the admiration of beauty.

"The Church," he said, "shines with the splendor of her walls, and among her poor is dest.i.tution; she clothes her stones with gold, and leaves her children naked. * * * Finally, so many things are to be seen, everywhere such a marvellous variety of different forms, that one may read more upon the sculptured walls than in the written Scriptures, and spend the whole day in going about in wonder from one such thing to another, rather than in meditating upon G.o.d's law."[2] The art might have suffered seriously from such uncompromising opposition as St.

Bernard made, had not Suger, the great abbot of St. Denys, taken up its defence and supported it by his patronage and by his eloquence. "Let each one have his own opinion," he writes, "but I confess it is my conviction that whatever is most precious ought to be devoted above all to that holiest rite of the Eucharist; if golden lavers, if golden cups, and if golden bowls were used, by the command of G.o.d or of the prophet, to catch the blood of rams or bullocks or heifers, how much more ought vases of gold, precious stones, and whatever is dearest among all creatures, ever to be set forth with full devotion to receive the blood of Jesus Christ!"[3] By such arguments Suger defended the rightfulness and value of the goldsmith's art in the service of the Church. After his time the employment of the goldsmiths upon church decoration became so great that they were really the artists of Europe during the two hundred years previous to the invention of wood-engraving.[4] In the pursuit of their craft they practised the arts of modelling, casting, sculpture, engraving, enamelling, and the setting of precious stones; and in the thirteenth century they made use of all these resources in the execution of their beautiful works of art made of gold and silver, richly engraved, and adorned with ba.s.s-reliefs and statuettes, and brilliant with many-colored enamel and with jewels--the reliquaries in which were kept the innumerable holy relics that then filled Europe, the famous shrines for the bodies of the saints, about which pilgrims from every quarter were ever at prayer, and the tombs of the Crusaders, and of dignitaries of Church or State. They employed their skill, too, for the lesser glory of the churches, upon the vessels of the Holy Communion, the crosses, candelabra, and censers, and the ornaments that incrusted the vestments of the priests. With the increase of luxury and wealth they found a new field for their invention in contributing to the magnificence of secular life; in fashioning into strange forms the ewers, goblets, flagons, and every vessel which adorned the banquet; and in ornamenting them with fantastic figures, or with scenes from the chase, or from the history of Charlemagne and Saladin, as well as in executing those finely wrought decorations with which the silks and velvets of the n.o.bles were so heavily charged that the old poet, Martial d'Auvergne, says the lords and knights were "caparisoned in gold-work and jewels." Under Charles V. of France (1364) and the great Dukes of the Low Countries, the jewel-chamber of the prince was his pride in peace and his treasury in war: it furnished gifts for the bride, the favorite, and the heir, and for foreign amba.s.sadors and princes; it afforded pay for retainers before the battle and ransom after it, and in the days of the great fetes its treasures gave to the courts of France, Burgundy, and Flanders a magnificence that has seldom been seen in Europe.[5]

Under such fortunate encouragement the goldsmiths of the fourteenth century reached a knowledge of design and a finish in execution that justified the claim of their art to the first place among the fine arts, and made their workshops the apprentice-home of many great masters of art in Italy as well as in the North. They best understood the value of art, and were best skilled in artistic processes; they were the only persons[6] who had by them all the means for taking an impression--the engraved metal plate, iron tools, burnishers for rubbing off a proof, blackened oil, and paper which they used for tracing their designs; they would, too, have been aided in their art, merely as goldsmiths, could they have tested their engraving from time to time by taking an impression from it in its various stages. It is not unlikely, therefore, that the art of taking impressions from engraved work was found out, or at least was first extensively applied, in their workshops, where it could hardly have failed to be discovered ultimately, as paper came into use more generally and for more various purposes. If this were the case, metal-engraving preceded wood-engraving, but only by a brief s.p.a.ce of time, because, as soon as the idea of the new art was fully grasped, wood must have been almost immediately employed in preference to metal, on account of the greater ease and speed of working in wood, and of the less injury done to the paper in printing from it.

Some support for this view, that the art of printing from engraved metal plates was discovered by the goldsmiths, and preceded and suggested wood-engraving, is derived from the peculiar prints in the _maniere criblee_, or the dotted style, of which over three hundred are known.

They were produced by a mixed process of engraving in relief and in intaglio, usually upon a metal plate, but sometimes upon wood. The effects are given by dots and lines relieved in white upon a black ground, a.s.sisted by dots and lines relieved in black upon a white ground. These prints have afforded much material for dispute and controversy, both as to their process and their date; the mode in which the metal plates from which they were printed were engraved, particularly the punching out small holes in the metal, which appear usually as white dots, and give the name to the prints, is the same as a mode of ornamental work[7] in metal that had been practised for centuries in the workshops of the goldsmiths, and on this account they have been ascribed to the goldsmiths of the great Northern cities.[8]

They appeared certainly as early as 1450, and probably much earlier.[9]

Some of these prints are evidently taken from metal plates not originally meant to be printed from, for the inscriptions on the prints as well as the actions of the figures appear reversed, the words reading backward, and the figures performing actions with the left hand almost always performed by the right hand.[10] These may be the work of the first years of the fifteenth century, or they may have been taken long afterward, in a spirit of curiosity or experiment. The existence of these early prints, however, undoubtedly from the workshops of the goldsmiths, and after a mode long practised by them, strengthens the hypothesis--suggested by their wide acquaintance with artistic processes and their exclusive possession of all the proper instruments--that they originated the art of taking impressions on paper from engraved work; at all events, this seems the least wild, the most consistent, and best supported conjecture which has been put forth.

There is, however, no lack of more specific accounts of the origin of wood-engraving. Pliny's[11] reference to the portraits with which Varro ill.u.s.trated his works indicates, in the opinion of some writers, a momentary, isolated, and premature appearance of the art in his day.

Ottley[12] maintains that the art was introduced into Europe by the Venetians, who learned it "at a very early period of their intercourse with the people of Tartary, Thibet, and China;" but of this there is no satisfactory evidence. Papillon,[13] a French engraver of the last century, relates that in his youth he saw in the library of a retired Swiss officer nine woodcuts, ill.u.s.trative of the deeds of Alexander the Great, executed with a small knife by "two young and amiable twins,"

Isabella and Alexander Alberico Cunio, Knt., of Ravenna, in their seventeenth year, and dedicated by them to Pope Honorius IV., in 1284-85; but, as no one else ever saw or heard of them, and there is no contemporary reference to them, as no single unquestionable fact has been adduced in direct support of the story, and as Papillon is an untrustworthy writer, his tale, although accepted by some authorities,[14] is generally discredited,[15] and was regarded by Chatto[16] as the hallucination of a distempered mind. Meerman,[17] the stout defender of the claim of Lawrence Coster to the invention of printing with movable types, relying on the authority of Junius,[18] who wrote from tradition more than a century after the facts, makes Coster the first printer of woodcuts. Some writers accept this story; but in spite of them, and of the well-developed genealogical tree with which Meerman provided his hero, and even of Mr. Sotheby's[19] supposed discovery of Coster's portrait, his very existence is doubted. The charming scene in which the idea of the new art first occurred to Coster, as he was walking after dinner in his garden, and cutting letters from beech-tree bark with which to print moral sentences for his grandchildren--the old man surrounded by the childish group in the well-ordered Haarlem garden--is probably, after all, little more than a play of antiquarian fancy. These stories have slight historic weight; they are, to use M. Renouvier's simile, "a group of legends about the cradle of modern art, like those recounted of ancient art, the history of Craton, of Saurias, or of the daughter of Dibutades, who invented design by tracing on a wall the silhouette of her lover."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG 2.--St. Christopher, 1423. From Ottley's "Inquiry into the Origin and Early History of Engraving upon Copper and in Wood."]

The first fact known with certainty in the history of wood-engraving is, that in the first quarter of the fifteenth century there were scattered abroad in Northern Europe rude prints, representing scenes from the Scriptures and the lives of the saints. These pictures were on single leaves of paper; the outlines were printed from engraved wood-blocks, but occasionally, it is believed, from metal plates cut in relief; they were taken off in a pale, brownish ink by rubbing on the back of the paper with a burnisher, and sometimes in black ink and with a press; they were then colored, either by hand or by means of a stencil plate, in order to make them more attractive to the people. The earliest of these prints which bears an unquestionable date is the famous St.

Christopher (Fig. 2) of 1423, found by Heinecken,[20] in the middle of the last century, pasted inside the cover of a ma.n.u.script in the library of the convent of Buxheim, in Suabia. It represents St. Christopher, according to a favorite legend of the Middle Ages, fording a river with the infant Christ upon his shoulders; opposite, on the right bank, a hermit holds a lantern before his cell; on the left a peasant, with a bag on his back, climbs the steep ascent from his mill to the cottage high up on the cliff, where no swelling of the stream will reach it. The att.i.tude of the two heads is expressive, and the folds of the saint's robes are well cast about the shoulders; in other respects the cut has little artistic merit, but the attempt to mark shadows by a greater or less width of line is noticeable, and the lines in general are much more varied than is usual in early work. It was printed in black ink, and with a press. There are two other early prints, the dates of which are uncertain, but still sufficiently probable to deserve mention--the warmly controverted Brussels print[21] of 1418, which represents the Virgin and Child, surrounded by four saints, in an enclosed garden, in the style of the Van Eycks, and with more artistic merit than the St.

Christopher in design, drawing, and execution; and, secondly, the St.

Sebastian of 1437, at Vienna. The former was discovered in 1844, in a bad condition, and the latter in 1779; both are taken off in pale ink, and with a rubber. There are numerous other prints of this kind, which have been described in detail and have had conjectural dates a.s.signed to them, fruitful of much antiquarian dispute. One of these (Fig. 3) is here reproduced for the first time; it was found st.i.tched into a ma.n.u.script of 1445, and is unquestionably as old as the ma.n.u.script; it represents a Crucifixion, with the Virgin and Longinus at the left, and St. John and, perhaps, the Centurion at the right; in the upper left-hand corner is an angel with the Veronica, or handkerchief, which bears the miraculous portrait of the Saviour, and above are a scourge and a knife; in the original the body of Christ is covered with dots and scratches in vermillion, to represent blood. It was taken off in black ink with a press, and is one of the rudest engravings known.[22]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 3.--The Crucifixion. From the Ma.n.u.script "Book of Devotion." 1445.]

Valueless as these prints[23] are, for the most part, as works of art, they are of great interest. They were the first pictures the common people ever had, and doubtless they were highly prized. Rude as they were, the poor German peasant or humble artisan of the great industrial cities cared for them; they had been given to him by the monks, like the rudely-carved wooden images of earlier times, at the end of some pilgrimage that he had made for penance or devotion, and were treasured by him as a precious memento; or some preaching friar, to whom he had devoutly given a small alms for the building of a church or the decoration of a shrine, had rewarded his piety with a picture of the saint whom, so far as he could, he had honored; or he had received them on some day of festival, when in the streets of the Flemish cities the Lazarists or other orders of monks had marched in grand procession, scattering these brilliantly colored prints among the populace. Stuck up on the low walls of his dwelling, they not only recalled his pious deeds, they brought home before his eyes in daily sight the reality of that holy living and holy dying of the Saviour and his martyrs in whose intercession and prayer his hope of salvation lay. Throughout the fifteenth and a part of the sixteenth centuries, although the intellectual life of the higher cla.s.ses began to be secularized, among the common people these mediaeval sentiments and customs, which gave rise to the holy prints, continued without change until the Reformation; and so the workshops of the monks and of the guilds of Augsburg, Nuremberg, Ulm, Cologne, and the Flemish cities, kept on issuing these saints'

images, as they were called, long after the art had produced refined and n.o.ble works. They remained, in accordance with the true mediaeval spirit, not only without the name of the craftsman, _nomen vero auctoris humilitate siletur_, but unmarked by any individuality, impersonal as well as anonymous; there is little to show even the difference in the time and place of their production, except that their lines in the first half of the century were more round and flowing, while in the latter half they were angular, after the manner of the Van Eycks, and that they vary in the choice and brilliancy of their colors.[24]

At the very beginning, too, wood-engraving was applied to a new industry, which had sprung up rapidly, to furnish amus.e.m.e.nt for the camp and the town--the manufacture of playing-cards. Some writers have maintained that the art was thus applied before it was employed to make the holy prints; but there are no playing-cards known to have been printed before 1423, and it is probable that they were painted by hand and adorned by the stencil for some time after the first unquestioned mention of them in 1392.[25] The manufacture of both cards and holy prints soon became a thriving trade; it is mentioned in Augsburg in 1418, and soon afterward in Nuremberg; and in 1441 the exportation of these articles into Italy had become so large that the Venetian Senate pa.s.sed a decree,[26] which is the earliest doc.u.ment relative to wood-engraving in Italy, forbidding their importation into Venice, because the guild engaged in this manufacture in the city was suffering from the foreign compet.i.tion. Wood-engraving, being only one process in the craft of the card-maker and the print-maker, seems to have remained without a distinct name for a long while after its invention.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, therefore, wood-engraving, the youngest of the arts of design, after fifty years of obscure and unnoticed history, held an established position, and was recognized as a new craft. In art its discovery was the parallel of the invention of printing in literature; it was a means of multiplying and spreading the ideas which are expressed by art, of creating a popular appreciation and knowledge of art, and of bringing beautiful design within the reach of a larger body of men. It is difficult for a modern mind to realize the place which pictures filled in mediaeval life, before the invention of printing had brought about that great change which has resulted in making books almost the sole means of education. It was not merely that the paintings upon the walls of the churches conveyed more n.o.ble conceptions to the peasant and the artisan than their slow imagination could build up out of the words of the preacher; like children, they apprehended through pictures, they thought upon all higher themes in pictures rather than in words; their ideas were pictorial rather than verbal; painting was in spiritual matters more truly a language to them than their own _patois_. They could not reason, they could not easily understand intellectual statement, they could not imagine vividly, they could only see. This accounts for the rapid spread of the new art, and for the popularity and utility of the holy prints which were so widely employed to convey religious ideas and quicken religious sentiment; in the production of these wood-engraving appears from the first in its true vocation as a democratic art in the service of the people; its influence was one, and by no means the most insignificant, of the great forces which were to transform mediaeval into modern life, to make the civilization of the heart and the brain no longer the exclusive possession of a few among the fortunately born, but a common blessing.

Wood-engraving was at once the product of the desire for this change and of the effort toward it, a mirror of the movement the more valuable because the art was more intimately connected with the popular life than any other art of the Renaissance, and a power feeding the impulse from which it derived its own vitality. In this fact lies the historic interest of the art to the student of civilization. At first it served mediaeval religion; afterward it took a wider range, and by both its serious and satirical works afforded valuable aid in the progress of the Reformation, while it rendered the earliest printed books more attractive, in which its n.o.bler designs educated the eye in the perception of beauty. Finally, in the hands of the great engravers--of Durer, who, still mastered by the mediaeval spirit, employed it to embody the German Renaissance; of Maximilian's artists, who recorded in it the dying picturesqueness and chivalric spirit of the Middle Ages; of Holbein, who first heralded, by means of it, the intelligence and sentiment of modern times--it produced its chief monuments, which, for the most part, will here be dealt with, in order to ill.u.s.trate its value as a fine art practised for its own sake, as a trustworthy contemporary record of popular customs, ideas, and taste, and as an element of considerable power in the advancement of modern civilization.

II.

_THE BLOCK-BOOKS._

[Ill.u.s.tration: D FIG. 4.--From the "Epistole di San Hieronymo." 1497.]

During the first half of the fifteenth century, in more than one quarter of Europe, ingenious minds were at work seeking by various experiments and repeated trials, with more and more success, the great invention of printing with movable types; even now, after the most searching inquiry, the time and place of the invention are uncertain. Printing with movable types, however, was preceded and suggested by printing from engraved wood-blocks. The holy prints sometimes bore the name of the saint, or a brief _Ora pro n.o.bis_ or other legend impressed upon the paper; the wood-engravers who first cut these few letters upon the block, although ignorant of the vast consequences of their humble work, began that great movement which was to change the face of civilization. After letters had once been printed, to multiply the words and lengthen the sentences, to remove them from the field of the cut to the s.p.a.ce below it, to engrave whole columns of text, and, finally, to reproduce entire ma.n.u.scripts, and thus make printed books, were merely questions of manual skill and patience. Where or when or by whom these block-books, as they are called, were first engraved and printed is unknown; these questions have been bones of contention among antiquarians for three hundred years, and in the dispute much patient research has been expended, and much dusty knowledge heaped together, only to perplex doubt still farther, and to multiply baseless conjectures. It is probable that they were produced in the first half of the fifteenth century, when the men of the Renaissance, whose aroused curiosity made them alert to seize any new suggestion, were everywhere seeking for means to overthrow the great barrier to popular civilization, the rarity of the instruments for intellectual instruction; they soon saw of what service the new art might be in this task, through the cheapness and rapidity of its processes, and they applied it to the printing of words as well as of pictures.

The most common ma.n.u.scripts of the time, which had hitherto been the cheapest mode of intellectual communication, were especially fitted to be reproduced by the new art; they were those ill.u.s.trated abridgments of Scriptural history or doctrine, called _Biblia Pauperum_, or books of the poor preachers, which had long been used in popular religious instruction, in accordance with the mediaeval custom of conveying religious ideas to the illiterate more quickly and vividly through pictures than was possible by the use of language alone. In the sixth century Gregory the Great had defended wall-paintings in the churches as a means of religious instruction for the ignorant population which then filled the Roman provinces. In a letter to the Bishop of Ma.r.s.eilles, who had shown indiscreet zeal in destroying the pictures of the saints, he wrote: "What writing is to those who read, that a picture is to those who have only eyes; because, however ignorant they are, they see their duty in a picture, and there, although they have not learned their letters, they read; wherefore, for the people especially, painting stands in the place of literature."[27] In conformity with this opinion these ma.n.u.scripts were composed at an early period; they were written rapidly by the scribes, and ill.u.s.trated with designs made with the pen, and rudely colored by the rubricators. They served equally to take the place of the Bible among the poor clergy--for a complete ma.n.u.script of the Scriptures was far too valuable a treasure to be within their reach--and to aid the people in understanding what was told them; for, doubtless, in teaching both young and old the monks showed these pictures to explain their words, and to make a more lasting impression upon the memory of their hearers. These designs, it is worth while to point out, exhibit the immobility of mind in the mediaeval communities, guided, as they were, almost wholly by custom and tradition; the designs were not original, but were copied from the artistic representations in the princ.i.p.al churches, where the common people may have seen them, when upon a pilgrimage or at other times, carved among the ba.s.s-reliefs or glowing in the bright colors of the painted windows. They were copied without change, the scenes were conceived in the same manner, the characters were represented after the same conventional type, even in the details there was slight variation; and as the decorative arts in the churches were subordinated to architecture, these designs not infrequently bear the stamp of their original purpose, and are marked by the characteristics of mural art. They were copied, too, not only by the scribes from early representations, but they were reproduced by the great masters of the Renaissance from the ma.n.u.scripts and block-books themselves; Durer, Quentin Matzys, Lukas van Leyden, Martin Schon, and, in earlier times, Taddeo Gaddi and Orcagna, took their conceptions from these sources.

Of the block-books which reproduced these and similar ma.n.u.scripts several have been preserved, and some of them have been reproduced in fac-simile, and minutely described. Among the most important of these, the _Biblia Pauperum_,[28] or Poor Preachers' Bible, of which copies of several editions exist, deserves to be first mentioned. It is a small folio, containing forty pages, printed upon one side only, with the pale brownish ink used in most early prints, and by means of a rubber. The pages are arranged so that they can be pasted back to back; each page is divided into five compartments, separated by the pillars and mouldings of an architectural design, which immediately recall the divisions of a church window; in the centre is depicted some scene (Fig. 5) from the Gospels, and on either side are placed scenes from the Old Testament history ill.u.s.trative or typical of that commemorated in the central design; both above and below are two half-length representations of holy men. Various texts are interspersed in the field, and Latin verses are written below the central compartments. It will be seen that the designs not only served to ill.u.s.trate the preacher's lesson, but suggested his subject, and indicated and directed the course of his sermon: they taught him before they taught the people.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ELIJAH RAISETH THE WIDOW'S SON (1 K, xvii.). THE RAISING OF LAZARUS (Jno, xi.). ELISHA RAISETH THE WIDOW'S SON (2 K. iv.).

FIG. 5.--From the original in the possession of Professor Norton, of Cambridge.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 6.--The Creation of Eve. From the fac-simile of Berjeau.]

But, before commenting on this volume, it will be useful to describe first the much more interesting and more famous _Speculum Humanae Salvationis_,[29] or Mirror of Human Salvation, an examination of which will throw light on the history of the art. It is a small folio, and contains sixty-three pages, printed upon one side, of which fifty-eight are surmounted by two designs enclosed in an architectural border, which are ill.u.s.trative or symbolical of the life of Christ or of the Virgin; the designs (Fig. 6) are printed in pale ink by means of a rubber. The text is not engraved on the block or placed in the field of the cut, but is printed from movable metallic type in black ink with a press, and occupies the lower two-thirds of the page, in double columns. The book is, therefore, a product of the two arts of wood-engraving and typography in combination. There are four early editions known, two in Latin, and two in Dutch, all without the name of the printer, or the date or place of publication. They are printed on paper of the same manufacture, with woodcuts from the same blocks, and in the same typographical manner, excepting that one of the Latin editions contains twenty pages in which the text is printed from engraved wood-blocks in pale brownish ink, and with a rubber, like the designs. These four editions, therefore, were issued in the same country.

This curious book has been the subject of more dispute than any other of the block-books, because it offers more tangible facts to the investigator. The type is of a peculiar kind, distinctly different from that used by the early German printers, and the same in character with that used in other early books undoubtedly issued in the Low Countries.

The language of the Dutch editions is the pure dialect of North Holland in the first part of the fifteenth century; the costumes, the short jackets, the high, broad-brimmed hats, sometimes with flowing ribbons, the close-fitting hose and low shoes of the men, the head-dresses and skirts of the women, are of the same period in the Netherlands, and even in the physiognomy of the faces Flemish features have been seen. The designs, too, are in the manner of the great Flemish school, renowned as the best in Europe outside Italy, which was founded by Van Eyck, the discoverer of the art of painting in oil, and which was marked by a realism altogether new and easily distinguished; the backgrounds are filled with architecture of the same time and country. The _Speculum_, therefore, was produced in the Low Countries; it must have been printed there before 1483, and probably was printed some time before 1454. The _Biblia Pauperum_ has so much in common with the _Speculum_ in the style of its art, its costumes, and its general character, that, although of earlier date, it may be unhesitatingly ascribed to the same country.

The internal evidence, however, only enforces the probabilities springing from the social condition of the Netherlands, then the most highly civilized country north of the Alps. Its industries, in the hands of the great guilds of Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Louvain, Antwerp, and Liege, were the busiest in Europe. Its commerce was fast upon the lagging sails of Venice. The "Lancashire of the Middle Ages," as it has been fitly called, sent its manufactures abroad wherever the paths of the sea had been made open, and received the world's wealth in return.

The magnificence of its Court was the wonder of foreigners, and the prosperity of its people their admiration. The confusion of mediaeval life, it is true, was still there--fierce temper in the artisans, blood-thirstiness in the soldiery, everywhere the pitilessness of military force, wielded by a proud and selfish caste, as Froissart and Philippe de Comyns plainly recount; but there, nevertheless--although the brutal sack of Liege was yet to take place--modern life was beginning; merchant-life, supported by trade, citizen-life, made possible by the high organization of the great guilds, had begun, although the merchant and the citizen must still wear the sword; art, under the guidance of the Van Eycks, was pa.s.sing out of mediaeval conventionalism, out of the monastery and the monkish tradition, to deal no longer with lank, meagre, martyr-like bodies, to care no more for the moral lesson in contempt of artistic beauty, to come face to face with nature and humanity as they really were before men's eyes; and modern intellectual life, too--faint and feeble, no doubt--was nevertheless beginning to show signs of its presence there, where in after-times great thinkers were to find a harbor of refuge, and the most heroic struggle of freedom was to be fought out against Spain and Rome. This comparatively high state of civilization, the activity of men's minds, the variety of mechanical pursuits, the excellence of the goldsmiths'

art, the number and character of the early prints undoubtedly issued there, the mention of incorporated guilds of printers at Antwerp as early as 1417, and again in 1440, and at Bruges in 1454, make it probable that the invention of wood-engraving was due to the Netherlands, and perhaps the invention of typography also. Whether this were the case or not, it is certain that the artists of the Netherlands carried the art of engraving in wood to its highest point of excellence during its first period.

Antiquarians have not been contented to show that the best of the block-books came from the Netherlands; they have attempted to discover the names of the composer of the _Speculum_, the engraver of its designs, and its printer. But their conjectures[30] are so doubtful that it is unnecessary to examine them, with the exception of the ascription of the printing of the _Speculum_ to the Brothers of the Common Lot.[31] This brotherhood was one of the many orders which arose at that time in the Netherlands, given to mysticism and enthusiasm, that resulted in real licentiousness; or to piety and reform, that prepared the way for the Reformation. Its members were devoted to the spread of knowledge, and were engaged in copying ma.n.u.scripts and founding public schools in the cities. After the invention of printing, they set up the first presses in Brussels and Louvain, and published many books, always, however, without their name as publishers. They practised the art of wood-engraving, and doubtless some of the early holy prints were from their workshops; sometimes they inserted woodcuts in their ma.n.u.scripts, as in the _Spirituale Pomerium_, or Spiritual Garden, of Henri van den Bogaerde, the head of the retreat at Groenendael, where the painter Diedrick Bouts occasionally sought retirement, and where he may have aided the Brothers with his knowledge of design. It is quite possible that this brotherhood, so favorably placed, produced the _Speculum_ and others of the block-books, and that they were aided by the painters of the time whose style of design they followed; but, as Renouvier remarks in rejecting this account, the monks were not the only persons too little desirous of notoriety to print their names, and although they took part in early engraving and printing, a far more important part was taken by the great civil corporations. In either case, whether the monks or the secular engravers designed these woodcuts, they were probably aided at times by the painters, who at that period did not restrict themselves to the higher branches of art, but frequently put their skill to very humble tasks.

The character of the design is very easily seen; the lines are simple, often graceful and well-arranged; there is but little attempt at marking shadows; there is less stiffness in the forms, and the draperies follow the lines of the forms better than in either earlier or later work of a similar kind, and there is also much less unconscious caricature and grimace. A whole series needs to be looked at before one can appreciate the interest which these designs have in indicating the subjects on which imagination and thought were then exercised, and the modes in which they were exercised. Symbolism and mysticism pervade the whole.

All nature and history seem to have existed only to prefigure the life of the Saviour: imagination and thought hover about him, and take color, shape, and light only from that central form; the stories of the Old Testament, the histories of David, Samson, and Jonah, the ma.s.sacres, victories, and miracles there recorded, foreshadow, as it were in parables, the narrative of the Gospels; the temple, the altar, and the ark of the covenant, all the furnishings and observances of the Jewish ritual, reveal occult meanings; the garden of Solomon's Song, and the sentiment of the Bridegroom and the Bride who wander in it, are interpreted, sometimes in graceful or even poetic feeling, under the inspiration of mystical devotion; old kings of pagan Athens are transformed into witnesses of Christ, and, with the Sibyl of Rome, attest spiritual truth. This book and others like it are mirrors of the ecclesiastical mind; they picture the princ.i.p.al intellectual life of the Middle Ages; they show the sources of that deep feeling in the earlier Dutch artists which gave dignity and sweetness to their works. Even in the rudeness of these books, in the texts as well as in the designs, there is a _navete_, an openness and freshness of nature, a confidence in limited experience and contracted vision, which make the sight of these cuts as charming as conversation with one who had never heard of America or dreamed of Luther, and who would have found modern life a puzzle and an offence. The author of the _Speculum_ laments the evils which fell upon man in consequence of Adam's sin, and recounts them: blindness, deafness, lameness, floods, fire, pestilence, wild beasts, and lawsuits (in such order he arranges them); and he ends the long list with this last and heaviest evil, that men should presume to ask "why G.o.d willed to create man, whose fall he foresaw; why he willed to create the angels, whose ruin he foreknew; wherefore he hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and softened the heart of Mary Magdalene unto repentance; wherefore he made Peter contrite, who had denied him thrice, but allowed Judas to despair in his sin; wherefore he gave grace to one thief, and cared not to give grace to his companion." What modern man can fully realize the mental condition of this poet, who thus weeps over the temptation to ask these questions, as the supreme and direst curse which Divine vengeance allows to overtake the perverse children of this world?

A better ill.u.s.tration of the sentiment and grace sometimes to be found in the block-books is the _Historia Virginis Mariae ex Cantico Canticorum_, or History of the Virgin, as it is prefigured in the Song of Solomon. This volume is the finest in design of all the block-books.

In it the Bride, the Bridegroom, three attendant maidens, and an angel are grouped in successive scenes, ill.u.s.trating the mystical meaning of some verse of the Song. The artistic feeling displayed in the arrangement of the figures is such that the designs have been attributed directly to Roger Van der Weyden, the greatest of Van Eyck's pupils.

This book, like the _Biblia Pauperum_ and the _Speculum_, came from the engravers and the printers of the Netherlands; but it shows progress in art beyond those works, more elegance and vivacity of line, more ability to render feeling expressively, and especially more delight in nature and carefulness in delineating natural objects.