A History of Wood-Engraving Part 3

Other distinguished artists united with Durer and the designers of Maximilian's works in making this period of wood-engraving the most ill.u.s.trious in the German practice of the art. Lukas van Leyden (1494-1533), whose youthful works in copperplate were wonderful, left some woodcuts in Durer's bold, broad manner, which ill.u.s.trate the attempt of German art to acquire cla.s.sical taste, and show so much the more clearly the incapacity of the Germans in the perception of beauty.

The Cranachs, father (1472-1553) and son (1515-1586), who are interesting because of the share they had in the Reformation, produced some very striking works, such as the charming scene of the Repose in Egypt, and were the first to practise chiaro-scuro engraving in the North. Hans Baldung (1470-1552?), although his designs are sometimes characterized by exaggeration and too great violence of action, ranks with the best of the secondary artists of the time; and Hans Springinklee, who has been already mentioned, reached a high degree of excellence in his ill.u.s.trations to the Hortulus Animae, which are still valued.

The works of these men, however, were only the most important and the best of a vast number of woodcuts which, during the first half of the sixteenth century, appeared in Germany during this period of the greatest popularity of the art. Under the personal influence of Durer, or under the influence of the numerous and widely-spread prints by himself and his a.s.sociates, many other artists of merit acquired skill in engraving, both on metal and in wood, and employed it upon a great variety of subjects. The devotion of mediaeval art wholly to church decoration and to the representation of religious scenes had pa.s.sed away in all quarters of the world; in Italy the artists had come to treat the subjects of pagan imagination, the beings and scenes of cla.s.sical mythology; in Germany the people had homelier tasks, and religious art there yielded to the interest which men felt in the incidents and objects of common life; in both countries wealth took the place of religion as the patron of art; and, although art still dealt with the story of the Scriptures and the martyrs, because these filled so important a place in the imagination of the people, still it had become secularized. This change was naturally shown in the arts of engraving more than in painting, because engraving in copper and on wood had a far greater sphere of influence, and came into more intimate relations with the popular life, and because the ill.u.s.tration of books offered a greater variety of subject. In German engraving, from this time, the actual life of the town and the peasantry was represented almost as often as the history of the Saviour and the saints; the village festival, the procession of the wedding-guests, the fetes of the town, the employments and costumes of the citizens, recur with the same frequency as the pa.s.sion of the Lord and the Old Testament stories; the joy and sorrow of ordinary life, the objects of ordinary observation and thought, the humorous, the humble, and the satirical, sometimes strangely mingled with ill-understood mythology and badly-caricatured cla.s.sicism, are the constant theme of the engravers.

Chief among the successors of Durer who shared in this vast production were the group of artists known as the Little Masters, although the name is one of ill-defined and incomplete application; they were so called because they chiefly engraved small designs; but they also engraved large designs, and their number, which is usually limited to seven, excludes some whose works are on the same small scale. The first of them was Albrecht Altdorfer (1488-1538), said to have been the pupil of Durer and the inventor of engraving in this manner; in his day he was more celebrated as an architect and painter than as an engraver, but his fame now rests on his works on copper and in wood. The best known of his sixty-five woodcuts is the series of forty designs, scarcely three inches by two in size, ent.i.tled the Fall and Redemption of Man, in depicting which he had the Smaller Pa.s.sion of Durer to guide him. In these he attempted to obtain effects by the use of fine and close lines, such as were employed in copperplate-engraving; but, although his success was certainly remarkable, considering the rude mechanical processes of the time, yet his method clearly produced results of inferior artistic value in comparison with the works in the bold, broad manner of Durer. All of his woodcuts, excepting four, are representations of religious subjects; they are marked, like his other works, by an attention to landscape, that truly modern object of art, of which he probably learned the value from Durer, who was the first to treat landscape with real appreciation. In Hans Sebald Behaim (1500-1550?) the spirit of the age is revealed with great clearness and variety (Fig. 49); both his life and his art were inspired by it. In his early manhood he was banished from Nuremberg for denying the doctrines of transubstantiation and the efficacy of baptism, and for entertaining some vague socialistic and communistic opinions; but it is not clear to what extent he held them, if he held them at all. He seems to have been one of the most advanced of the religious Reformers, and he employed his art in their service, as, for example, in a book ent.i.tled The Papacy, which he ill.u.s.trated with a series of seventy-four figures of the different orders of monks in their peculiar costumes, beneath each of which satirical lines were written. He is best known by his eighty-one Bible-cuts, which were the most popular, perhaps, of the many series published in that century, not excepting the impressive Bible figures of Holbein; they pa.s.sed through many editions, and were widely copied. The first English Bible was ill.u.s.trated by them. Besides these two series, and one other in ill.u.s.tration of the Apocalypse, he designed many separate prints, both in the small manner of the Little Masters and in imitation of the large works of Maximilian, such as his Military Fete, in honor of Charles V., his Fountain of Youth, and the prints of the Marauding Soldiers, which measured four or five feet in length. His representations of peasant life are peculiarly attractive, because of the force of realism displayed in them, whether he depicted the marriage festival, or mere jollity or drunken brawl. In the breadth of his interests, in the variety of his subjects, and in his sympathy with the special movements of his age, he was as an engraver more characteristic of the civilization in which he lived than any other of the Little Masters who gave their attention to wood-engraving. Of the rest of this group none, excepting Hans Brosamer (1506-1552), left works in wood-engraving of any consequence; he designed in a free and bold manner, and his engravings are to be found in books of the third quarter of the century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 49.--Virgin and Child. From a print by Hans Sebald Behaim.]

Other artists of this period devoted their attention to wood-engraving; but as they did not mark any new progress in the art, or reflect any aspect of German civilization which has not already been ill.u.s.trated, they need not be treated in any detail. Virgil Solis (1514-1562), a very productive designer, who was employed by the Nuremberg printers to ill.u.s.trate the books by which they attempted to rival the productions of the Lyonese press; Jobst Amman (1539-1591), whose excellent engravings of costumes and trades are well known; Erhard Schon (d. 1550), Melchior Lorch (1527-1586), whose works were of little merit; and Tobias Stimmer (1539-1582), a popular designer for book ill.u.s.tration, are all who deserve mention. Their engravings are inferior to the productions of previous artists, and after their death the art in Germany fell into speedy and irretrievable decay.

The work of the wood-engravers who were imbued with the German spirit exhibits the same excellences and defects as other German work in art.

It is characterized by vigor princ.i.p.ally, and in its higher range it has great value, because of the imaginative and reflective spirit by which it was animated; in its lower range, as a portrayal of life and manners, it derives from its realism an extraordinary interest. Its great deficiency is its lack of beauty, and is due to the inborn feebleness of the sense of beauty in the German race; but, notwithstanding this deformity, German wood-engraving was invaluably useful in its day in the cities where it became so popular, because it was so widely and variously practised, and entered into the life of the people in so many ways with an effective influence of which it is difficult to form an adequate conception. It facilitated the spread of literature and helped on the progress of the Reformation to a degree which is little recognized; it disseminated ideas and standards of art, and made them common property; and, finally, it prepared the way for the great master who was to embody in wood-engraving the highest excellence of art and thought.

VI.

HANS HOLBEIN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: G FIG. 50.--From the "Epistole di San Hieronymo."

Ferrara, 1497.]

Germany produced one artist who freed himself from the limitations of taste and interest which the place of his birth imposed upon him, and took rank with the great masters who seem to belong rather to the race than to their native country. Hans Holbein was neither German nor Italian, neither cla.s.sical nor mediaeval. The ideal of his art was not determined by the culture of any single school, at home or abroad; far less was it a jarring compromise between the aims and methods of different schools; it grew out of a faithful study of all, and in it were rationally blended the elements which were right in each. In style, theme, and spirit he advanced so far beyond his contemporaries that he became the first modern artist--the first to clear his vision from the deceptions of religious enthusiasm, and to subdue in himself the lawlessness of the romantic spirit; the first to perceive that only the purely human interest gives lasting significance to any artistic work, and to depict humanity simply for its own sake; the first to express his meaning in a way which seems truthful and beautiful universally to all cultivated men. In this lies the peculiar and profound value of his works.

Holbein was born at Augsburg, in 1495 or 1496, into a family of artists.

In that city, then the centre of German culture, he grew up amid the stir of curiosity and thought which attended the discovery of the Western World and the first movements of the Reformation. He handled the pencil and the brush from boyhood, and produced works as wonderful for their precocious excellence as the early efforts of Mantegna; he was deeply impressed by the secular and picturesque genius of Burgkmaier, the great artist of Augsburg, who may have first opened to him the value of beauty of detail, and inculcated in him that carefulness in respect to it which afterward distinguished him; he seems, too, even at this early period, to have been touched by some Italian influence which may have reached Augsburg in consequence of the close commercial relations between that city and Venice. Holbein, however, did not arrive at any mature development until after he left Augsburg and removed to Basle, whither he went in 1515, in order to earn his bread by making designs for books--a trade which was then flourishing and lucrative in that city. Basle offered conditions of life more favorable, in some respects, to the development of energetic individuality than did Augsburg; it was already the seat of humanistic literature, at the head of which was Erasmus, and it soon became the safest refuge of the persecuted Reformers. In such a city there was necessarily a vigorous intellectual life and a free and liberal spirit, which must have exerted great influence upon the young artist, who by his profession was brought into intimate relations with the most learned and advanced thinkers about him. Holbein was at once profoundly affected by the literary and reform movements which he was called upon to aid by his designs, and he threw himself into their service with energy and sympathy. His art, too, under the influence of Italy, and under the rational direction of his own thought, grew steadily more refined in ideal and more finished in execution. He soon learned the value of formal beauty, and gave evidence that the work of the last great German painter was not to be marred by German tastelessness. Hitherto the masters of German art, led by a realistic spirit which did not discriminate regularly and with certainty between the different values of the lovely and the unlovely, had expressed their thought and feeling in familiar forms, and, consequently, often in forms which shared in the grotesqueness, bordering on caricature, and in the homeliness, bordering on ugliness, that characterized much of actual German life. Holbein, whose realism was governed by cultivated taste, expressed his thought and feeling in beautiful forms. His predecessors had used a dialect of art, as it were, which could never seem perfectly natural or be immediately intelligible to any but their own countrymen; Holbein acquired the true language of art, and was as directly and completely intelligible to the refined Englishman or Italian as to the citizen of Augsburg or Basle. Holbein came, also, to an understanding of the true law of art; as he freed himself from the Gothic dulness of sight in respect to beauty, he freed himself from the Gothic license of reverie, fancy, and thought. He limited himself to the clear and forcible expression of the idea he had in mind; he admitted no details which interfered with his main purpose, and which a.s.serted a claim to be there for their own sake; he made every accessary enforce or ill.u.s.trate his princ.i.p.al design, and subordinated each minor portion of his picture to the leading conception; he had one purpose in view, and he preserved its unity. How different this was from the practice of Durer, who introduced into his work whatever came into his mind, however remotely it might be a.s.sociated with his subject, who repeated almost wearisomely the same idea in varying symbolism, and dissipated the intensity of the thought by distracting suggestion crowded into any available s.p.a.ce, need not be pointed out; in just the proportion in which Durer lost by his practice directness, simplicity, and force, Holbein gained these by his own method, which was, indeed, the method of great art, of the art which obeys reason, in distinction from the art which yields to the wandering sentiment. Holbein differed from Durer in another respect: he thoroughly understood what he meant to express; he would have nothing to do with vague dreaming or mystical contemplation; he thought that whatever could not be definitely conceived in the brain, and clearly expressed by line and color, lay outside the domain of his art; he gave up the phantoms of the enthusiast and the puzzle of the theologian to those who cared for them, and fixed his attention on human life as he saw it and understood it. He often treated religious subjects, but in no different spirit from that in which he treated secular subjects; in all it is the human interest which attracts him--the life of man as it exists within the bounds of mortality. Thus he arrived not only at the true language and the true law of art, but also at its true object. This development of his genius did not take place suddenly and at once; it was a gradual growth, and reached full maturity only in his closing years; but, while he still worked at Basle, the essential lines of his development were clearly marked, and he had advanced so far along them as to be even then the most perfect artist whom the North had produced.

Holbein began to practise wood-engraving as soon as he settled in Basle, and designed many t.i.tlepages, initial letters, and cuts for the publishers of that city. The t.i.tlepages, which are numerous, were usually in the form of an architectural frame, in which groups of figures were introduced; they show how early his taste for the forms of Italian architecture became p.r.o.nounced, and how bold and free was his power of drawing, and how highly developed was his sense of style, even in his first efforts. He ill.u.s.trated the books of the humanists, especially the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, then a new and popular work; and he designed the cuts for the biblical translations of Luther, and for other publications of the Reformers. He served the Reformation, too, in a humorous as well as in a serious way, for he was as much a master of satire as of beauty. Two cuts in ridicule of the papal party are particularly noticeable, one in which he satirizes the sale of indulgences, contrasting it with true repentance; and one in which he represents Christ as the Light of the World, with a group of sinners approaching upon one side, and a group of papal dignitaries led by Aristotle turning away on the other side. The ill.u.s.trations in which he depicts ordinary humble life, particularly the life of peasants and children, make another great department of his lesser work in wood-engraving; these scenes are sometimes separate cuts, and sometimes introduced as backgrounds of initial letters, twenty alphabets of which are ascribed to him; they represent the pastimes and sports of the country, just as Holbein may have seen them at any time upon the way-side, and are full of heartiness, humor, and reality. The sketches from the life of boys and children are especially graceful and charming, and reveal an ease and power in delineation which has seldom been rivalled. This species of _genre_ art, which had first made its appearance in wood-engraving, because it was considered beneath the dignity of the higher arts, was very popular; by his work of this sort Holbein contributed to the pleasure of the people, just as by his co-operation with the Humanists and the Reformers he served them in more important ways. Finally he produced at Basle his two great works in wood-engraving, the Dance of Death and the Figures of the Bible, which are the highest achievements of the art at any time.

The Dance of Death was an old subject. It had possessed for centuries a powerful and sometimes morbid attraction for the artistic imagination and for popular reflection. It was peculiarly the product of mediaeval Christian life, and survives as a representative of the great mediaeval ideas. That age first surrounded death with terrors, fastened the attention of man continually upon his doom, and affrighted his spirit with the dread of that unknown hour of his dissolution which should put him in danger of the second death of immortal agony. In Greece death had been the breaking of the chrysalis by the winged b.u.t.terfly, or, at least, only the extinction of the torch; here it was the gaunt and grinning skeleton always jostling the flesh of the living, however beautiful or joyous they might be. In the churches of the thirteenth century there swung a banner emblazoned upon one side with the figures of a youth and maiden before a mirror of their loveliness, and, upon the reverse, with Death holding his spade beside the worm-pierced corpse; it was the type of mediaeval Christian teaching. The fear of death was the recurring burden of the pulpit; it made the heart of every bowed worshipper tremble, and was taught with fearful distinctness by the pestilence that again and again suddenly struck the populations of Europe. The chord of feeling was overstrained; the elastic force of life a.s.serted itself, and, by a strange transformation, men made a jest of their terror, and played with death as they have never since done; they acted the ravages of death in pantomime, made the tragedy comic, put the figure of Death into their carnivals, and changed the object of their alarm into the theme of their sport. In the spirit of that democracy which, in spite of the aristocratic structure of mediaeval society, was imbedded in the heart of the Christian system, where every soul was of equal value before G.o.d, the people turned the universal moral lesson of death into a satire against the great; Death was not only the common executioner, he arrested the prelates and the n.o.bles, stripped them of their robes and their possessions, and tried them whether they were of G.o.d or Mammon. In these many-varied forms of terror, sport, and irony Death filled the imagination and reflection of the age; the shrouded figure or the naked skeleton was seen on the stage of the theatre, amid the games of the people, on the walls of the churches and the monasteries, throughout the whole range of art and literature. Holbein had looked on many representations of this idea: where, as in Durer's work, Death attends knight and beggar; or where, as in the Nuremberg Chronicle, the skeletons dance by the open grave; or where, as in the famous series at Basle, Death humbles every rank of life in turn. But Holbein did not look on these scenes as his predecessors had done; he was free from their spirit. He took the mediaeval idea and re-moulded it, as Shakspeare re-moulded the tradition of Denmark and Italy, into a work for all times and generations. He represented Death, but with an artistic power, an imaginative fervor, a perception of the constant element in its interest for mankind, which lifted his work out of mediaevalism into universal truth; and in doing this he not only showed the high power of his art, but he unlocked the secrets of his character.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 51.--The Nun. From Holbein's "Images de la Mort."

Lyons, 1547.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 52.--The Preacher. From Holbein's "Images de la Mort." Lyons, 1547.]

This work is, in the first edition (1538), a series of forty-one small cuts, in each of which is depicted the triumph of Death over some person who is typical of a whole cla.s.s. Each design represents with intense dramatic power some scene from daily life; Death lays his summons upon all in the midst of their habitual occupations: the trader has escaped shipwreck, and "on the beach undoes his corded bales;" Death plucks him by the cloak; the weary, pack-laden peddler, plodding on in his unfinished journey, turns questioningly to the delaying hand upon his shoulder; the priest goes to the burial of the poor, Death carries the candle in a lantern before him, and rings the warning bell; the drunkard gulps his liquor, the judge takes his bribe, the miser counts his gold--Death interrupts them with a sneer. What poetic feeling, what dramatic force, there is in the picture of the Nun! (Fig. 51.) She kneels with head averted from the altar of her devotions toward the youth who sits upon the bed playing the lute to her sleeping soul, and at the moment Death stands there to put out the light of the taper which shall leave her in darkness forever. What sharp satire there is in the representation of the Preacher (Fig. 52), dilating, perhaps, in his accustomed, half-mechanical way, upon the terrors of that very Death already at his elbow! What justness of sight, what grimness of reality, there is in the representation of the Ploughman (Fig. 53); how directly does Holbein bring us face to face with the human curse--in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn death! George Sand, looking out on the spring fields of her remote province and seeing the French peasants ploughing up the soft and smoking soil, remembered this type of peasant life as Holbein saw it, and described this cut in words that vivify the concentrated meaning of the whole series. "The engraving," she says, "represents a farmer guiding the plough in the middle of a field. A vast plain extends into the distance, where there are some poor huts; the sun is setting behind a hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The peasant is old, thickset, and in tatters; the team which he drives before him is lean, worn out by fatigue and scanty food; the ploughshare is buried in a rugged and stubborn soil. In this scene of sweat and habitual toil there is only one being in good spirits and light of foot, a fantastic character, a skeleton with a whip, that runs in the furrow beside the startled horses and beats them--as it were, a farmer's boy.

It is Death." She takes up the story again, after a while. "Is there much consolation," she asks, "in this stoicism, and do devout souls find their account therein? The ambitious, the knave, the tyrant, the sensualist, all the proud sinners who abuse life, and whom Death drags away by the hair, are on their way to a reckoning, no doubt; but the blind, the beggar, the fool, the poor peasant, is there any amends for their long wretchedness in the single reflection that death is not an evil for them? No! an inexorable melancholy, a dismaying fatality, weighs upon the artist's work. It is like a bitter curse launched on the universal human lot."[40]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 53.--The Ploughman. From Holbein's "Images de la Mort." Lyons, 1547.]

Certainly the artist's work is a bold and naked statement of man's mortality, of the close of life contrasted with the worth of its career; but the melancholy of his work is not more inexorable, its fatality is not more dismaying, than the reality he saw. He did not choose for his pencil what was unusual, extraordinary, or abnormal in life; he depicted its accustomed course and its fixed conclusion in fear, folly, or dignity. He took almost every character among men, almost every pa.s.sion or vice of the race, almost every toil or pursuit in which his contemporaries engaged, and confronted them with their fate. The king is at his feast, Death pours the wine; the poor mother is cooking her humble meal at the hearth, Death steals her child; the bridal pair walk on absorbed, while Death beats their wedding-march with glee. Throughout the series there is the same dramatic insight, the same unadorned reality, the same humanity. Here and there the spirit of the Reformer reveals itself: the Pope in the exercise of his utmost worldly power crowns the emperor, but behind is Death; a devil lurks in the shadow, and over the heads of the cardinals are other devils; the monk, abbot, and prioress--how they resist and are panic-stricken! There can be no doubt at what Holbein reckoned these men and their trade. Holbein showed here, too, his sympathy with the humbler cla.s.ses in those days of peasant wars, of the German Bible, and of books in the vulgar tongue--the days when the people began to be a self-conscious body, with a knowledge of the opportunities of life and the power to make good their claim to share in them; as Holbein saw life, it was only the humble to whom Death was not full of scorn and jesting, they alone stood dignified in his presence. Beneath this sympathy with the Reformers and the people need we look farther, as Ruskin does, to find scepticism hidden in the shadows of Holbein's heart? Holbein saw the Church as Avarice, trading in the sins of its children; as Cruelty, rejoicing in the blood of its enemies; as Ignorance, putting out the light of the mind. There was no faltering in his resolute, indignant denial of that Church. Did he find any refuge elsewhere in such hope and faith as remain to man in the suggestions of his own spirit? He saw Death's triumph, and he made men see it with his eyes; if he saw more than that, he kept silence concerning it. He did not menace the guilty with any peril save the peril of Death's mockery; he spoke no word of consolation for the good; for the inevitable sorrow of the child's loss there is no cure, for the ploughman's faithful labor there is no reward except in final repose by the shadow of the distant spire. He did not open the heavens to let through one gleam of immortal life upon the human lot, unless it be in the Judgment, where only the saved have risen; nevertheless, the purport of that scene, even if it be interpreted with the most Christian realism, cannot destroy the spirit of all others.

"Inexorable melancholy, dismaying fatality"--these, truly, are the burden of his work.

The series holds high rank, too, merely as a product of artistic skill.

It shows throughout the designer's ease, simplicity, and economy in methods of work, his complete control of his resources, and his unerring correctness in choosing the means proper to fulfil his ends; few lines are employed, as in the Italian manner, and there is little cross-hatching; but, as in all great art, every line has its work to do, its meaning, which it expresses perfectly, with no waste of labor and no ineffectual effort. In sureness of stroke and accuracy of proportion the drawing is unsurpa.s.sed; you may magnify any of the designs twelve times, and even the fingers will show no disproportion in whole or in part. It is true that there is no anatomical accuracy; no single skeleton is correctly drawn in detail, but the shape of Death, guessed at as a thing unknown, is so expressed that in the earliest days of the work men said that in it "Death seemed to live, and the living to be truly dead." The correctness, vigor, and economy of line in the drawing of these cuts made them a lesson to later artists like Rubens, merely as an example of powerful and truthful effects perfectly obtained at the least expense of labor. In this respect they were in design a triumph of art, as much as they were in conception a triumph of imagination.

Holbein made the original drawings for the Dance of Death before he left Basle in 1526; but, although some copies were printed in that city, the work did not become known until it was published in 1538 by the Trechsels at Lyons, where it appeared without Holbein's name. This latter circ.u.mstance, in connection with a pa.s.sage in the preface of this edition, led some writers to question Holbein's t.i.tle to be considered the designer of the series, although his friend, Nicolas Bourbon de Vandoeuvre, the poet, calls him the author of it in a book published at Lyons in 1538, while Karl van Mander, of Holland, in 1548, and Conrad Gesner, of Zurich, in 1549, ascribe it to him, and their statements were unhesitatingly accepted until doubt was expressed in our own time. The pa.s.sage in the preface of the first Lyons edition, on which the sceptics rely, mentions the death "of him who has here imaged (_imagine_) for us such elegant designs as much in advance of all hitherto issued as the paintings of Apelles or Zeuxis surpa.s.s those of the moderns;" but this is generally considered to refer to the engraver, Hans Lutzelburger, who cut the designs in wood after Holbein's drawing, and deserves all the praise for their extraordinarily skilful technical execution. This is the most satisfactory explanation which can be framed; but, if it is not accepted, the balance of evidence in favor of Holbein is so great as to be conclusive. The original drawings, made with a pen and touched with bistre, are in the cabinet of the Czar, and show the excellence of the draughtsmanship more clearly than the woodcuts; the engraver omitted some striking details, but in general his fidelity and correctness of rendering were remarkable. The first edition at Lyons contained only forty-one of the original designs, of which there are forty-six at St.

Petersburg; the later editions, published by Frellon, increased the number to fifty-three in 1547, and fifty-eight in 1562, including some beautiful cuts of children at the end of the volume. The popularity of the work was very great; the text was printed in French, Latin, and Italian, and thirteen editions from the original blocks were issued before 1563. Since that time it has been published many times; but the engravings in the later editions, which were copied from the originals by workmen much inferior to Lutzelburger, have little comparative value.

Between forty and fifty editions have been printed from wood-blocks, and as many more from copperplate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 54.--Nathan Rebuking David. From Holbein's "Icones Historiarum Veteris Testamenti." Lyons, 1547.]

The Figures of the Bible, which made a series of ninety-two ill.u.s.trations of the Old Testament, showed the same qualities of Holbein's genius as did the Dance of Death, but generally in less perfection. In designing many of these cuts Holbein accepted the types of the previous artists, just as nearly all the great painters frequently took their conceptions of scriptural scenes from their predecessors; hence these Bible Figures show a marked resemblance in their general composition to the earlier woodcuts in ill.u.s.tration of the Scriptures. But while Holbein followed the earlier custom in representing two or three a.s.sociated actions in one scene, and kept the same relative arrangement of the parts, he essentially modified the total effect by omitting some elements, subordinating others, giving prominence to the princ.i.p.al group, and informing the whole picture with a far more vigorous, thoughtful, and expressive spirit. In artistic merit some of these designs are among the best of Holbein's work; but the technical skill of the wood-engraver who cut them is inferior to that shown in the Dance of Death. The scene in which Nathan is represented rebuking David (Fig. 54) is especially n.o.ble in conception: the prophet does not clothe himself in any superior human dignity as a divine messenger; but, mindful only of the supreme law which is over all men equally, kneels loyally and obediently before his king, and calls on him to humiliate himself, not before man, but in the solitary presence of G.o.d. The power of the universal law, independent alike of the majesty of the criminal or the lowliness of its servant, has never been pictured with greater subtlety and force than is here done. There are others among these designs of equal excellence, both in imagination and art, but in all the best of them there is some human interest in the scene which attracted Holbein's heart; in others, such as the ill.u.s.trations to the books of the Prophets, he falls into a feebleness of conception and baldness of allegorical statement which shows clearly how little he cared for what was merely supernatural. The series, nevertheless, is, as a whole, the best which was made in that century, and was reprinted several times to satisfy the popular demand for it; it first appeared, contemporaneously with the Dance of Death, in 1538, at Lyons; the text was afterward published in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English, but the work never obtained the extraordinary popularity of the Dance of Death. It is noteworthy that no edition of either work was printed in German--so far had Holbein outstripped his countrymen in the purity of art.

When these two works appeared at Lyons, Holbein had been for many years a resident at the English court, where he painted that series of portraits which remains unsurpa.s.sed as a gallery of typical English men and women represented by an artist capable of revealing character as well as of portraying looks. In these later years of his life he busied himself but little with designing for woodcuts, but he did not entirely neglect the art, and was, without doubt, of great service in spreading a taste for it in England, and in improving its practice there. The English printers imported their best woodcuts, and probably wood-engraving was hardly a recognized English art before Holbein's day.

The great t.i.tlepage which he designed for Coverdale's Bible in 1535 was apparently cut by some Swiss engraver, as were some other similar works; but a few designs, which Holbein seems to have drawn so as to require the least possible skill in the engraver to reproduce them, were apparently executed in England. They were produced when England was separating from Rome, in the time of Cromwell's power, and are marked by the same satirical spirit as Holbein's earlier work at Basle; the self-righteous Pharisee wears a cowl, the lawyers, who are offended when Christ casts out the devil from the possessed one, have bishops' mitres; the unfaithful shepherd who flees when the wolf comes is a monk. These cuts, in which Holbein last used his art as a weapon of civilization, mark the close of his practice of it.

In the course of that practice he had not merely found utterance for his genius, but he had shown the entire adequacy of wood-engraving for the purposes of the artist when the laws which spring out of its peculiar nature are most rigidly observed. He had employed it with complete success as a mode of obtaining beautiful architectural design, of depicting charming _genre_ scenes, of attacking abuses by the keenest and most effective irony, of making real for the popular comprehension the solemn and beautiful stories of the Scriptures, and of expressing pa.s.sionate feeling and profound thought; and he thus exercised upon his own time and upon the future an influence which was perhaps more powerful than that exercised by any contemporary artists. Within the limits of the Dance of Death he had embodied in wood-engraving tragedy and humor, satire and sermon, poetic sentiment, dramatic action, and wise reflection, and he thus gave to that work a special interest for his contemporaries as an expression of the sympathies, efforts, and problems of that time, and an enduring interest for all men as the truest picture of universal human life seen at its most tragic moment through the hollow sockets of Death. He did this without offering violence to the peculiar nature of the art, without wresting it from its appropriate methods or requiring of it any difficult effort; he perceived more clearly than Durer the essential conditions under which wood-engraving must be practised, and he conformed to them. If he had needed cross-hatching, fine and delicate lines, harmonies of tone, and soft transitions of light, he would have had recourse to copperplate; but not finding them necessary, he contented himself with the bold outlines, easily cut and easily printed, which were the peculiar province of wood-engraving, and by means of them created works which not only made wood-engraving ill.u.s.trious, but rank with the high achievements and valuable legacies of the other arts of design. Holbein was one of the great geniuses of the race, and he put into his works the fire and wisdom of genius; but, independently of what his works contain, and merely as ill.u.s.trations of artistic methods, they show for the first time an artist perceiving and choosing to obey the simple laws of the art, and exhibiting its compa.s.s and capacity, its wealth and utility, within the sphere of those laws. This thorough understanding and rational practice of the art, in connection with his intellectual and artistic powers, made Holbein the most perfect master who has ever left works in wood-engraving, and give his works the utmost value both as forms of art and as embodiments of imagination and thought.

VII.

THE DECLINE AND EXTINCTION OF THE ART.

[Ill.u.s.tration: T FIG. 55.--From "Opera Vergiliana," printed by Sacon.

Lyons, 1517.]

The wood-engravers of France produced no great works like those of Maximilian, and no single cuts of the artistic value of those by Durer and his contemporaries. They limited themselves almost exclusively to the ill.u.s.tration of books. The early printers, who had expended so much care in the adornment of their religious books, were succeeded by other printers who were hardly less animated by enthusiastic devotion to their art, as was shown by their efforts to make their works beautiful both in text and ill.u.s.tration. The Renaissance had now penetrated into France, and entered into the arts. Geoffrey Tory (c. 1480-1533), who had travelled in Italy, appears to have been the first to introduce a cla.s.sical spirit into wood-engraving; from his time two distinct schools may be distinguished in French wood-engraving--one Germanic and archaic, the other filled by the Italian spirit. The most distinguished engravers belonged to the latter school, and their work was characterized by the curiously modified Italian taste which marked the French Renaissance.

They understood design, and showed considerable power in it; they regarded the main lines and princ.i.p.al harmonies and contrasts of ma.s.ses which are necessary to it; but they transformed its simplicity into elegance, and overlaid it with ornamentation and trifling detail which marred its effect, and gave to their works an appearance of artificiality, of over-labored refinement and mistaken scrupulousness of taste. As a rule, indeed, taste was their characteristic rather than a developed sense of beauty, and skill rather than power. Finally, they pa.s.sed, by a natural progress, into a complexity and fineness of line which are unsuitable to wood-engraving; they lost the sense of unity in the abundance of detail, and were forced to give up engraving in wood and adopt engraving on copperplate, which was so much better fitted to the meaningless excess of delicacy and acc.u.mulation of ornament in which the French Renaissance ended.

The most talented of the French designers for wood-engraving was Jean Cousin (1501-1589), a member of the Reformed Church, little favored at court and much neglected by his contemporaries. He appears to have been of a robust and independent spirit, an admirer of Michael Angelo and the Italians, and an industrious and painstaking workman in many branches of art. A large number of designs are ascribed to him; but, as is the case with nearly all the French engravers, there is great difficulty in making out what really was his work. Among the characteristic products of French wood-engraving were representations of royal triumphal entries into the great cities of the kingdom. Two of these are ascribed to Cousin--the entry of Henry II. into Paris, published in 1549, and his entry into Rouen, published in the next year. In the latter the captains of Normandy lead the march; they are followed by ranks of foot-soldiers, trumpeters, men holding aloft laurel wreaths, other men with antique arms and banners, and a band which, with a reminiscence from Roman festivals, carry lambs in their arms for sacrifice to the G.o.ds; next succeed new ranks of soldiers, then elephants and captives, the fool and musicians leading on Flora and her nymphs, after whom comes the Car of Happy Fortune, on which the royal family are enthroned, and the triumphal Chariot of Fame; the procession closes with men-at-arms and two captains, with succeeding scenes of some places by which the pageant had pa.s.sed. In this work the French Renaissance shows itself in the prime of its career, when some simplicity and n.o.bility of design were still kept, and the tendency toward refinement of line and multiplication of ornament were still held in check by a regard for unity of effect. The Entry of Henry II. into Paris is, perhaps, even more excellent. The two works rank with the best French wood-engraving in the sixteenth century.

The characteristics by which the French Renaissance differed from the Renaissance in Italy are more clearly and easily seen in the reproduction of the Dream of Poliphilo, which was published in 1554, and is ascribed to Cousin. The French artist did not copy the beautiful designs of the Venetian; he kept the general character of each woodcut, it is true, but he varied the style. He made Poliphilo elegant in figure, taller and more modish in gesture and att.i.tude; he represented the landscape in greater detail and with more realism; he gave greater height and more careful proportion to the architecture, added ornaments to its bare facades and smooth lintels, and in the subordinate portions he varied the curvature of the lines and made them more complex; in the lesser figures, the statues and monumental devices, he allowed himself more liberty in changing the original designs, and sometimes practically transformed them; finally, he introduced a more vigorous dramatic action throughout, and attempted to obtain more difficult effects of contrast and to give relief to the figures. Nevertheless, the improvements which the taste of Cousin required are distinctly injurious. The French reproduction is inferior to the Italian original in feeling for design, in simple beauty, in the force and directness of its appeal to the artistic sense, in the power and sweetness of its charm; much that was lovely in the original has become simply pretty, much that was n.o.ble and striking has become only tasteful; especially that quality, by virtue of which the original possessed something suggestive of the calm beauty of sculpture, has vanished, and in the effort of the new designer to obtain pictorial effects one has an unpleasant sense of something like weakness. The comparative study of the two volumes is of extreme interest, so clearly do they ill.u.s.trate the different temper of the Renaissance in France and Italy. France received the word of inspiration from Italy, but could not become its oracle. Even at that early day French art was marked by the dispersion of interest, the regard for externals, and the inability to create the purest imaginative work, which have since characterized the French people, despite their facility in acquisition and the ease with which they reach the level of excellence in any pursuit.

Of the other works, known or supposed to be by Cousin, the Book of Perspective, published in 1560, is the most remarkable, because in its designs considerable difficulties are overcome, and greater power of relief is shown than in any previous French wood-engraving. This book was a treatise, similar to those by Durer and Leonardo da Vinci upon the laws of art, and its dedication is noticeable because of the light it throws on Cousin's spirit--"neither to kings nor princes, as is customary," he says, "but to the public." The Bible, usually called Le Clerc's, which contains two hundred and eighty-seven woodcuts, is said to be by Cousin, but of this there is no direct evidence; and to him is ascribed the Triumphal Entry of Charles IX., published in 1572, and supposed by some to have been designed by the engraver Olivier Codore; many other works are also added to his list, but they were inferior in value to those which have been described, and were unmarked by any special interest. In consequence of the fineness and number of his productions Cousin must be considered the princ.i.p.al French engraver of the century; and he undoubtedly deserves a high rank among the artists of talent, in distinction from the artists of genius, who have practised wood-engraving.

About Cousin there were a number of other designers who gave attention to the art and left works of value; but these works bear so much resemblance to one another that it is frequently impossible to recognize in them the hand of any individual of the school--a difficulty by which Cousin's reputation has profited, because of the eagerness of his admirers to ascribe to him any excellent work in his style which is not definitely known to belong to some one of his contemporaries. These lesser artists were Jean Goujon (c. 1550), who made some excellent cuts for a Vitruvius of 1547, and is believed by some authorities to have designed the reproduction of the Dream of Poliphilo; Pierre Woeiriot (b.

1532), whose biblical cuts inserted in a Josephus of 1566 have much merit; Jean Tortorel (b. 1540?) and Jacques Perissin (b. 1530?), who designed some interesting ill.u.s.trations of the Huguenot wars; and Philibert de Lorme (c. 1570) and Jean Le Clerc (1580-1620), whose productions are of comparatively little interest. The works of all these artists lacked that intimate relation with the life of the people which made the engravings of the lesser German designers valuable, and have importance only as ill.u.s.trations of the development of French art in the Renaissance.

The only artist who can contest Cousin's foremost place in French wood-engraving is Bernard Salomon (c. 1550), usually called the Little Bernard, from the small size of his cuts, who was the leading designer of Lyons. That city had retained its importance as a centre of popular literature ill.u.s.trated by woodcuts, and is said to have sent forth more books of this kind in the latter part of the sixteenth century than any other city in Europe. The works of Holbein were the pride of the Lyonese art, and exerted great influence upon the style of the designers who were constantly employed in the service of the Lyonese press. Bernard worked in the small manner which Holbein had made popular, and he learned from him how to compress much in a little s.p.a.ce; but he multiplied details, and carried the lines to an extreme of fineness which his engravers were unable to do justice to in cutting the block.

As is the case with Cousin, a vast number of designs are attributed to Bernard, simply because they are sufficiently excellent to have been his work; according to Didot, no less than twenty-three hundred cuts have been claimed for him, and it is believed by some writers that he not only designed but engraved this large number. A large proportion of these must have been produced by the unknown contemporaries of Bernard, because, although he gave his attention wholly to wood-engraving for thirty years, he could not have accomplished so great a work. His best-known designs are the ill.u.s.trations to an Ovid, published by Jean de Tournes, and two hundred and thirty cuts for the same printer's edition of the Bible: these rank next to Cousin's works as the most remarkable productions of French wood-engraving in the sixteenth century. Of the other Lyonese designers very little is known; indeed, no other important name has been preserved, excepting that of Jean Moni (c.

1570), who is remembered for a series of Bible cuts inferior to those by Bernard. In Lyons, as in the rest of France, wood-engraving lost its value toward the close of the century, in consequence of its attempts at a kind of delicacy and refinement beyond its reach and inappropriate to its cla.s.s; it did not appeal to the taste of the late Renaissance, and by degrees the engravers lost their technical skill, and the artists gave up its practice as a fine art. This result was also partly due to the contempt into which the popular romantic literature of the preceding century had fallen, and to the degradation of wood-engraving as a mode of coa.r.s.e caricature. Copperplate-engraving gradually supplanted the more simple art, and finally the practice of wood-engraving became extinct.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 56.--St. Christopher. From a Venetian print.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 57.--St. Sebastian and St. Francis. Portion of a print by Andreani after t.i.tian.]

In Italy the older style of woodcuts in simple outline continued to be followed long after it was abandoned in the North. The designs in Italian books up to the year 1530, when cross-hatching was introduced, do not differ essentially in character from those of which examples have already been given. The names of the artists who produced them are either obscure or unknown, excepting Leonardo da Vinci, to whom are ascribed the cuts in Luca Pacioli's volume, De Proportione Divina, published in 1509, and Marc Antonio Raimondi (1478-1534), to whom are ascribed the remarkably excellent cuts in a volume ent.i.tled Epistole et Evangelii Volgari Hystoriade, published in 1512 in Venice. From the first, Venice (Fig. 56) had been the chief seat of wood-engraving in Italy, and now became the rival of Lyons. The most distinguished of the group of artists who produced woodcuts in that city was Nicolo Boldrini (c. 1550), who designed several engravings (Fig. 59) after t.i.tian (1476?-1575) with such boldness and force that some writers have believed t.i.tian to have drawn the design on the block for Boldrini to engrave. The works of t.i.tian and other Venetian painters were reproduced in the same way by Francesco da Nanto (c. 1530); and by other artists, like Giovanni Battista del Porto (c. 1500), Domenico delle Greche (c.

1550), and Giuseppe Scolari (c. 1580), who also sometimes made woodcuts from their own designs. Besides these engravings, some very large cuts, similar to those which the German artists had attempted, were printed from several blocks; but they have little interest. The ill.u.s.trations in Vesalius's Anatomy, published at Basle in 1543, in which wood-engraving was first employed as an aid to scientific exposition, were designed in Venice by Jean Calcar, a pupil of t.i.tian, and are of extraordinary merit. Finally, in the cuts by Cesare Vecellio (1550-1606) for the volume ent.i.tled Habiti Antiche e Moderne, published in 1590, Venetian wood-engraving produced its last excellent work--so excellent, indeed, that the designs have been attributed to t.i.tian himself, who was the uncle of Vecellio.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 58.--The Annunciation. From a print by Francesco da Nanto.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 59.--Milo of Crotona. From a print by Boldrini after t.i.tian.]