Fine Books Part 11

Before pa.s.sing away from the Nuremberg and Augsburg book-ill.u.s.trators, it seems necessary to describe briefly, but in a more connected form, the literary and artistic enterprises of the Emperor Maximilian, to which so many incidental allusions have been made. The Emperor's first attempt to glorify himself and his lineage took the form of a Genealogy for which several antiquaries--Mennel, Sunthaim, Tritheim, and Stabius--made researches. Burgkmair made designs of some ninety ancestors and their heraldic coats in 1509-11, and the wood-blocks were cut. It was apparently intended to print them in 1512, but the whole project was abandoned, and the work is now only known from a few sets of proofs, no one of which is quite complete.

After this failure Maximilian planned a Triumphal Arch and Procession, the programme for the Arch being drawn up by Stabius, that of the Procession by Treitzsaurwein. The plan of the Arch was largely worked out by Durer, with help from Springinklee, Traut, and Altdorfer, whose designs were carried out in 192 woodblocks cut by Hieronymus Andrea and his a.s.sistants. When the impressions from these are put together they make a design measuring nearly twelve feet by ten. In the centre is the Gate of Honour, to the left and right the gates of Praise and n.o.bility.

Above the main gate rises a tower on which are displayed the Emperor's ancestors and their arms, above the other gates a series of incidents of Maximilian's life, surmounted by busts of his imperial predecessors and of contemporary princes. This was printed in 1517-18 at Nuremberg, and in 1526-8 and 1559 at Vienna. On the Procession or Triumph, Durer, Springinklee, Schaufelein, Burgkmair, and Beck were all engaged. The 138 blocks composing it were cut by Andrea and Jost de Negker in 1516-18, and it was printed by order of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1526. A Triumphal Car designed by Durer in 1518, in connection with the same project, was published in eight sheets in 1522.

A series of representations of Saints of the House of Hapsburg had been planned soon after the abandonment of the Genealogy, and a.s.sumed shape in 1514. From drawings now attributed to Leonhard Beck, 123 woodblocks were made, and an edition in book form was printed some time after 1522.

The romance of _Theuerdank_ was written by Melchior Pfintzing, under Maximilian's direction, to celebrate his wooing of Mary of Burgundy and other exploits. The bulk (seventy-seven) of the ill.u.s.trations in it are now ascribed to Beck, seventeen to Schaufelein, thirteen to Burgkmair, and three, two, and one respectively to Schon, Traut, and Breu. It was published as a sumptuous folio, several copies being struck on vellum by the elder Schoensperger at Nuremberg in 1517, and reprinted two years later.

The _Weisskunig_, or White King, an account of Maximilian's parentage, education, and exploits, was dictated by him in fragments to Treitzsaurwein, but never fully edited. Of the 249 ill.u.s.trations about half are by Burgkmair, most of the others by Beck. With the exception of thirteen the blocks were preserved at Vienna, and the book was printed there for the first time in 1775.

Lastly, the _Freydal_, which was to have given an account of Maximilian's tourneys and "Mummereien," is known to us by the preservation of the original miniatures from which the ill.u.s.trations were to have been made, but only five blocks out of 256 were actually cut.

The patronage of the Emperor Maximilian gives special importance to the work done during his lifetime at Nuremberg and Augsburg, but there was no lack of book-ill.u.s.trations elsewhere. At Tubingen some of the mathematical works of Johann Stoffler were curiously decorated, and the second edition of his _Ephemerides_ (1533) has a fine portrait of the author in his seventy-ninth year. At Ratisbon, Albrecht Altdorfer was the most important worker for the wood-cutters, and to him are now attributed thirty-eight cuts ill.u.s.trating the Fall and Redemption of Man, published at Hamburg in 1604, under the name of Durer, as "nunc primum e tenebris in lucem editae." Their minute and rather niggling style renders the bad printing which they have mostly received peculiarly destructive to them. Another Ratisbon artist, Michael Ostendorfer, ill.u.s.trated a few books published at Ratisbon itself, and others printed at Ingolstadt.

At Wittenberg, from a little before 1520, the influence of Martin Luther made itself as much felt as that of Maximilian at Augsburg and Nuremberg. Hither, in 1505, had come a Franconian artist, Lucas Cranach, who had already ill.u.s.trated some missals for Winterburger of Vienna.

Numerous pictures of saints, which he drew for the Wittenberg _Heiligthumsbuch_ of 1509, are subsequently found dispersed in other works, such as the _Hortulus Animae_. A few t.i.tle-cuts on tracts by Luther and others are a.s.signed to him, but a great ma.s.s of bookwork, including numerous fine borders, found in Wittenberg books of the Luther period, while showing abundant traces of the elder Cranach's influence, is yet clearly not by him. It has recently been a.s.signed, with some probability, to his eldest son, Hans. His younger son, Lucas Cranach II, also supplied a few borders and ill.u.s.trations to the Wittenberg booksellers. Georg Lemberger also produced borders for t.i.tlepages and some Bible cuts, and two other Wittenberg Bible-ill.u.s.trators of this school were Erhard Altdorfer, brother of Albrecht, whose best bookwork is found in a fine Danish Bible printed at Copenhagen in 1550, and Hans Brosamer, Bibles, or parts of the Bible, with whose cuts appeared both at Wittenberg and at Frankfort.

At Stra.s.sburg, Hans Baldung Grien, whose work shows the influence of Durer, ill.u.s.trated the _Granatapfel_ (1510) and other works by Geiler of Kaisersberg, the _Hortulus Animae_ printed by Flach (1510), etc. Johann Wachtlin, who had contributed a Resurrection to a set of Pa.s.sion cuts published by k.n.o.blauch in 1506, ill.u.s.trated a _Leben Christi_ for the same printer in 1508. We find his work again in the _Feldbuch der Wundarznei_ of Hans von Gersdorff, printed by Schott in 1517. The work of Hans Weiditz for Stra.s.sburg publishers has already been mentioned.

It was here also that Urs Graf worked for some little time for k.n.o.blauch, to whose Pa.s.sion set of 1507 he contributed, and other publishers. In 1509 he is found at Basel, where two years later he became a citizen, supplying ninety-five little woodcuts to an edition of the _Postilla_ of Guillermus, and also designing t.i.tle borders. As a centre of printing Basel was now rapidly increasing in importance, and when Erasmus allied himself with the foremost Basel printer, Johann Froben, for a time the city succeeded, in point of quality though not of quant.i.ty, to the typographical supremacy which Venice was fast losing.

Scholarly works such as approved themselves to Erasmus and Froben offered, of course, very little scope for book-ill.u.s.tration properly so called, but the desire for beauty found vent, not only with them, but with the other Basel printers of the day, Valentin Curio, Johann Bebel, Adam Petri, Andreas Cratander, etc., in elaborate borders to t.i.tlepages, headpieces and tailpieces, ornamental capitals and trade devices. The arrival of Hans Holbein (born at Augsburg in 1497) at Basel in 1516 on his Wanderjahre supplied a decorator of a skill altogether outshining that shown in the rather tasteless architectural work, varied with groups of children, produced by Urs Graf, though Holbein himself was content to begin in this style. In his most characteristic work the footpiece of the border ill.u.s.trates some cla.s.sical scene, Mutius Scaevola and Porsenna, the death of Cleopatra, or Quintus Curtius leaping into the abyss; less commonly a scriptural one, such as the death of John the Baptist. The most elaborate of his t.i.tlepages was that to the _Tabula_ of Cebes (1521), in which little children crowd through the gate of life to meet all the varied fortunes which life brings.

Delightful humour is shown in an often used headpiece and tailpiece, showing villagers chasing a fox and returning home dancing. During 1517 and the following year, when Hans Holbein was absent from Basel, his brother Ambrosius worked there on the same lines, and decorated, among other books, More's _Utopia_.

After his return to Basel in 1519, Hans Holbein remained at work there until 1526, and it was during this period that his book-ill.u.s.trations, properly so called, were executed, including those to the Apocalypse and his two most famous pieces of bookwork, his _Dance of Death_ and _Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones_, both of which were first published in 1538 at Lyon by Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel. These (with perhaps some exceptions) and many of his other designs[45] were cut in wood by Hans Lutzelburger who signed a Holbein t.i.tlepage to a German New Testament printed by Thomas Wolff in 1523, and who, if rightly identified with the Hans Formschneider with whose widow the Trechsels were in correspondence in 1526 and 1527, must have died about the time that Holbein left Basel. Pen copies, moreover, of some of the cuts of the _Dance of Death_ are preserved at the Berlin Museum, and one of these is dated 1527, so that there can be no question that the originals belong to this period of Holbein's life, and the British Museum possesses a set of proofs of forty out of the original series of forty-one, printed on four sheets, ten on a sheet. It has been conjectured that the occupations of some of the great personages whom Death is depicted as seizing may have been considered as coming under the offence of _scandalum magnatum_ and so have caused the long delay before the blocks were used, but as this explanation does not apply to the ill.u.s.trations to the Old Testament it seems inadequate. As published in 1538 by the Trechsels the cuts are accompanied by French quatrains from the pen of Gilles Corrozet and other appropriate matter, and have prefixed to them a t.i.tlepage reading: _Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort, autant elegamm[=e]t pourtraictes que artificiellement imaginees. A Lyon, soubz lescu de Coloigne, M.D.x.x.xVIII._ A second edition with Latin instead of French verses was published by Jean and Francois Frellon, and others followed, in one of which, that of 1545, one, and in another, that of 1547, eleven additional cuts were printed, while in 1562, when the book was still in Frellon's hands, five woodcuts of children make their appearance, though they have no connection with the original series.

That Holbein's Old Testament designs also belong to his Basel period is shown by copies of them appearing in a Bible printed by Froschouer in 1531, though the original cuts were not published till seven years later. As printed by the Trechsels they are eighty-six in number, and while the cutting of the best is worthy of Lutzelburger, their execution is too unequal for it to be certain that the whole series was executed by him. The cuts were also used by the Trechsels in a Bible of the same year, and both the Bible and the cuts under their own t.i.tle _Historiarum Veteris Testamenti Icones_ were republished by the Frellons.

Considerations of s.p.a.ce forbid more than a bare mention of the _Bambergische Halssgericht_ (1508), with its all too vivid representations of the cruel punishments then in use, and the ill.u.s.trated cla.s.sics published at later dates by Johann Schoeffer at Mainz, or of the work of Jakob Kobel at Oppenheim with its rather clumsy imitations of Ratdolt's Italian ornaments, or of the ill.u.s.trated books printed by Johann Weissenburger at Landshut, or of those from the press of Hieronymus Rodlich at Siemen, the _Thurnierbuch_ of 1530, _Kunst des Messens_ of the following year, and _Fierabras_ of 1533. After about 1535 little original book-ill.u.s.tration of any importance was produced in other German cities, but in Nuremberg and Frankfurt it continued plentiful, Virgil Solis and Jobst Amman working a.s.siduously for the booksellers in both places.

In no other country did the first thirty years of the sixteenth century produce so much interesting work as in Germany. Interesting, moreover, as this German work is in itself, it is made yet more so by the fact that a sufficient proportion of it is signed to enable connoisseurs to pursue their pleasant task of distributing the unsigned cuts among the available artists. Less intrinsically good, and with very few facilities for playing this fascinating game, the book-ill.u.s.trations of other countries have been comparatively little studied. In Italy the new century brought some evil days to the book trade. Printing itself ceased for a time at Brescia; at Florence publishers for many years relied chiefly on their old stock of cuts; at Milan, at Ferrara and Pavia a little new work was done. At Venice the thin delicate outline cuts of the last decade of the fifteenth century ceased to be produced any longer, though the old blocks sometimes reappear. More often the old designs were either simply copied or imitated in the more heavily shaded style which was now coming into vogue. The interest of some of this shaded work is increased by the occasional appearance on it of a signature. Thus in the _Missale Romanum_ of 30 July, 1506, published by Stagninus, some of the cuts in this shaded style bear the same signature, "ia," as appears on the outline work in the Ovid of 1497.

Work done by "ia" is also sometimes found copied by another cutter calling himself VGO, whose name is also found on some copies of French Horae cuts in a Venice Horae of 1513.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XXV. VENICE. GREG. DE GREGORIIS, 1518

MISSALE ROMANUM (246^b). THE ASCENSION]

Signatures which occur with some frequency between 1515 and 1529 are the z.a., z.A., and I.A. used by Zoan Andrea, i.e. Johannes Andreas Vava.s.sore. This Zoan Andrea was an a.s.siduous copyist. Early in his career (1515-16) we find him imitating Durers large ill.u.s.trations to the Apocalypse; in 1517 his t.i.tle-cut for the _De modo regendi_ of Antonio Cornazano imitates that of Burgkmair on the 1515 _De rebus Gothorum_ of Jornandes. In 1520 he prefixed to a Livy printed by Giunta an excellent portrait modelled, as the Prince d'Essling has shown, on a sculpture set up at Padua to the memory either of the historian himself or of one of his descendants; in 1521 he copied Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of Horatius Cocles, and in the same year another by Raimondi of Quintus Curtius. This was for an edition of Boiardo, and for a later edition of 1524 Zoan Andrea copied yet another engraving, that of Scipio Africa.n.u.s.

In 1525 he imitated Holbein's elaborate border to the _Tabula Cebetis_, applying it to a _Dictionarium Graec.u.m_. About this time also he produced the well-known block-book (at least three editions known) _Opera noua contemplatiua_, imitating Durer's Little Pa.s.sion in some of the cuts. Because of the rarity of signed woodcuts in Italian books Zoan Andrea has attracted more attention than the quality of his work deserves. It seems probable that he was the head of a workshop, and the craftsmanship of the cuts bearing his signature is very unequal.

Turning to the general course of book-ill.u.s.tration in Venice as it may be studied in the great work of the Prince d'Essling, unhappily left without the promised introduction at the time of his lamented death, we find several different influences at work. As has been already noted, the shaded work which had begun to make its appearance before 1500, as in the frontispiece to the _Epitome Almagesti_ of Regiomonta.n.u.s (1496), rapidly became the predominant style. We find it combined with some of the charm of the earlier outline vignettes in the small pictures of a Virgil of 1507, and in some of those of another edition in 1508, though the larger ones in this are heavy and coa.r.s.e. The extreme of coa.r.s.eness is found in an edition of the _Legendario di Sancti_ of 1518, the woodcuts being more suited to a broadside for a cottage wall than to Venetian bookwork. The style is seen at its best in the ill.u.s.trations of a well-known Horae printed by Bernardinus Stagninus in 1507, and, generally speaking, it is in the Missals, Breviaries, and Horae published by L. A. Giunta, Stagninus and the De Gregoriis (see Plate XXV) that the most satisfactory bookwork of this period is found.

Another style which may be traced in many books of the early years of the century is a rather coa.r.s.e development of the characteristic Florentine manner of the fifteenth century. The cuts are as a rule considerably larger than the Florentine ones, and the ornamental borders which surround them are much deeper. As in many of the Florentine cuts, more use is made of black s.p.a.ces than was usual at Venice, but the cutting as a rule is coa.r.s.e, and there is none of the charm of the best Florentine work. Woodcuts in this style are found most frequently on the t.i.tlepages of popular books in small quarto, published by the Sessas, who apparently did not see their way to commissioning more than a single ill.u.s.tration to each book. But the influence of the style affected the pictures in a few works of larger size--for instance, the 1503 edition of the _Chronica Chronicarum_ of Bergomensis, and the well-known picture of a choir in the _Practica Musices_ of Gafori (1512).

Despite his connection with the _Hypnerotomachia_, which, however, was printed on commission, Aldus concerned himself little with book-ill.u.s.trations, and if the miserable cuts which he put into his edition of _Hero and Leander_ of Musaeus are fair specimens of what he thought sufficiently good when left to himself, he was well advised in holding aloof from them. Nevertheless, the popularity which he gained for the small octavos which he introduced in 1501 was an important factor in the development of book-ill.u.s.tration in the sixteenth century.

Although Aldus did not ill.u.s.trate them himself, it was impossible that the lightly printed handy books which he introduced should remain permanently unill.u.s.trated, and when italic type was ousting roman and small books taking the place of large, the introduction of smaller ill.u.s.trations, depending for their effect on the delicacy of their cutting, became inevitable. If we take any popular book of the century, such as the _Sonetti_ of Petrarch, and note the ill.u.s.trations in successive editions, we shall find them getting smaller and smaller and more and more lightly cut and lightly printed, in order to match better with the thin italic types. The new style is seen at its best in the books of 1540-60, the Petrarch of 1544 printed by Gabriel Giolito, Boccaccio's _Decamerone_ printed by Valgrisi in 1552, Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ by Giolito in 1553. Finally, book-ill.u.s.tration peters out at Venice in pictorial capitals, which take as their subjects any heroes of Greek and Roman history and mythology whose names begin with the required letter, on the principle of the nursery alphabet in which "A was an Archer who shot at a frog, B was a Butcher who had a great dog." To an age which, not otherwise to its loss, neglects the study of Lempriere's Cla.s.sical Dictionary, many of these puzzle initials are bafflingly obscure, relieved only by a recurring Q, which in almost all alphabets depicts Quintus Curtius leaping into the chasm at Rome. Some similar sets of Old Testament subjects are much easier. Books decorated with capitals of this kind are found as late as the end of the seventeenth century. Isolated initials designed on this plan are found also in other countries, but outside Italy it is only seldom that we come across anything approaching a set.

As to French book-ill.u.s.trations of the sixteenth century, a competent historian should have much to say, but the present writer has made no detailed study of them, and in the absence of any monograph to steal from must be content with recording general impressions, only here and there made precise by references to books which he has examined. Far more than those of Germany or Venice, French publishers of the sixteenth century relied on the great stock of woodcuts which had come into existence during the decades 1481-1500. That they did so may be regarded as some compensation for the exceptional rarity of most of the more interesting French incunabula. We have spoken disrespectfully of the little devotional books printed about 1500 with an old Horae cut on the back of the t.i.tlepage or at the end, but in the popular books printed by the Lenoirs and other publishers as late as 1530, and even later, cuts will be found from Millet's _Destruction de Troie_ and other incunabula now quite un.o.btainable, and it is even possible at times from salvage of this kind to deduce the former existence of fifteenth century editions of which no copy can now be found.

After about 1503 the French Horae decline rapidly in beauty and interest, but many fine missals were issued by Wolfgang Hopyl and other firms, some with one or more striking pictures, almost all with admirable capitals.

Among non-liturgical books it is difficult to find any cla.s.s for which new ill.u.s.trations were made at all freely. Several books of Chronicles by Monstrelet, Robert Gaguin, and others have one or more cuts at the beginning which may have been made for them, e.g. a folio cut of S.

Denis and S. Remy, with shields of arms found in the _Compendium super Francorum gestis_ by Robert Gaguin (this, however, dates back to 1500), a double cut of S. Louis blessed by the Pope and confronting the Turks (found in Gaguin's _Sommaire Historial de France, c._ 1523, and elsewhere), another double cut of Clovis baptized and in battle (Gaguin's _Mer des Chronicques_, 1536, but much earlier), a spirited battle scene (_Victoire du Roy contre les Venitiens_, 1510), etc. But wherever we find ill.u.s.trations in the text, there we are sure to light on a medley of old cuts (e.g. in _Les grands chronicques de France_, 1514, Gaguin's _Chronicques_, 1516, and the _Rozier historial_, 1523), and it will be odds that Millet's _Destruction de Troie_ will be found contributing its woodcuts of the Trojan War as ill.u.s.trations of French history. When an original cut of this period can be found, it seldom has the charm of the best work of the last five years of the fifteenth century, but is usually quite good; there is, for instance, a quite successful metal-cut with crible background of Justinian in Council in an edition of his laws printed by Bocard for Pet.i.t in 1516, and some of the liturgical cuts are admirable. There is thus no reason to impute the falling off in new cuts to lack of artists. It seems clear that the demand for ill.u.s.trations had for the moment shifted to an uncritical audience who liked (small blame to them) the fifteenth century cuts which had delighted more educated people a generation earlier, and were not at all particular as to their appropriateness. Meanwhile the educated book-buyers were learning Greek and preparing themselves to appreciate the severe, unill.u.s.trated elegance of the books of the Estiennes, and new cuts were not needed.

The inception of a new style must certainly be connected with the name of Geoffroi Tory, whose best work is to be found in his Books of Hours, which have already been described in an earlier chapter. Its predominant note is a rather thin elegance of outline, in which the height of the figures is usually somewhat exaggerated. Tory is supposed to have brought home this style after his visit to Italy, but its application to bookwork appears to have been his own idea. There is, indeed, a striking resemblance between the little cuts of Tory's third Horae set, dated 8 February, 1529, and those in an Aldine Horae of October of the same year, but to the best of my belief Tory reckoned his year from 1 January, not in the old French style from Easter, and if so it was Tory who supplied the Aldine artist with a model, which indeed is a logical continuation of his editions of 1525 and 1527. It is greatly to be regretted that his own _Champfleury_ of 1527 is so slightly ill.u.s.trated.

The little picture of Hercules Gallicus which comes in it is quite delightful.

If any guide were in existence to the ill.u.s.trated French books of the thirties in the sixteenth century it would probably be possible to trace the spread of Tory's influence. In 1530 Simon Colines ill.u.s.trated Jean Ruel's _Veterinaria Medicina_ with a good enough cut in the old French style slightly modified. For the same author's _De Natura Stirpium_ of 1536 he provided a woodcut, of an alcove scene in a garden, the tone of which is quite new. It is evident that French publishers were waking up to new possibilities and sending their artists to foreign models, as a _Perceforest_ printed for Gilles Gourmont in 1531 and a _Meliadus de Leonnoys_ for Denis Janot in 1532, have both of them elaborate t.i.tle borders in the style which the Holbeins had made popular at Basel. The latter is signed .F., a signature found in several later books in the new style. In 1534 we find Wechel issuing a _Valturius_ with neat adaptations of the old Verona ill.u.s.trations. Doubtless there were many other interesting books, with cuts original or copied of this decade, but the only one of which I have a note is the _L'amant mal traicte de sa mye_ (translated from the Spanish of Diego de San Pedro), printed by Denis Janot for V. Sertenas in 1539, in which the t.i.tle is enclosed in a delicately cut border, the footpiece of which shows the lovers in a garden. Not long after this Janot printed (without putting his name or a date) _La touche Naifue pour esprouver Lamy and le Flateur_ of Antoine Du Saix, in which the rules enclosing the t.i.tle cut into a pretty oval design of flowers and ribbons. In 1540 we find the new style fully established in the _Hecatongraphie Cest a dire les descriptions de cent figures & hystoires_, a book of emblems, by Gilles Corrozet, printed by Denis Janot, which I only know in the third edition, that of 1543. Here we find little vignettes, much smaller than those in the Malermi Bible, with a headline over them and a quatrain in italics beneath, the whole enclosed in an ornamental frame. The little cuts have the faults inevitable in emblems, and some of them are poorly cut, but the best of them are not only wonderfully delicate, but show a sense of movement and a skill in the manipulation of drapery never reached in the fifteenth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XXVI. PARIS, J. LOYS FOR V. SERTENAS, 1545

HOMER. L'ILIADE EN VERS FRANCOIS. (t.i.tLE-CUT)]

In 1543 appeared, again from the press of Denis Janot, "imprimeur du Roy en langue francoise," another emblem book, _Le Tableau de Cebes de Thebes, ancien philosophe & disciple de Socrate: auquel est paincte de ses couleurs, la uraye image de la vie humaine, & quelle uoye l'homme doit elire, pour peruenir a vertu & perfaicte science. Premierem[=e]t escript en Grec & maintenant expose en Ryme Francoyse_. The French rhymester was again the author of the _Hecatongraphie_, and the imprint, "A Paris On les uend en la grand [_sic_] salle du Palais en la boutique de Gilles Corrozet," shows that he not only wrote the verses and perhaps inspired the ill.u.s.trations, but sold the books as well.

In 1545 we find this same style of design and cutting on a larger scale in _Les dix premiers livres de l'Iliade d'Homere, Prince des Poetes, traduictz en vers Francois, par M. Hugues Salel_, and printed by Iehan Loys for Vincent Sertenas. The cuts are in two sizes, the smaller being surrounded with Toryesque borders. It is difficult to pa.s.s any judgment other than one of praise on such delicate work. Nevertheless, just as the _fanfare_ style of binding used by Nicolas Eve, with its profuse repet.i.tion of small tools, is much more effective on a small book cover than on a large, so here we may well feel that some bolder and clearer design would be better suited to the ill.u.s.tration of a folio. In the t.i.tle-cut here shown (Plate XXVI) a rather larger style is attempted with good results.

The year after the Homer there appeared at Paris from the press of Jacques Kerver a French translation of the _Hypnerotomachia_ by Jean Martin. This is one of the most interesting cases of the rehandling of woodcuts, the arrangement of the original designs being closely followed, while the tone is completely changed by the subst.i.tution of the tall rather thin figures which had become fashionable in French woodcuts for the short and rather plump ones of the Venetian edition, and by similar changes in the treatment of landscape.

In the second half of the century at Paris excellent woodcut portraits, mostly in an oval frame, are sometimes found on t.i.tlepages, and in other cases decoration is supplied by a neatly cut device. Where ill.u.s.trations are needed for the explanation of works on hunting or any other subjects they are mostly well drawn and cut. But the use of woodcuts in books of imaginative literature became more and more rare.

At Lyon, as at Paris, at the beginning of the century the store of fifteenth century cuts was freely drawn on for popular editions.

Considerable influence, however, was exercised at first by Italian models, afterwards by Germany, so that while in the early sixteenth century Latin Bibles the cuts are mostly copied from Giunta's Malermi Bible, these were gradually superseded by German cuts, which Anton Koberger supplied to the Lyonnese printers who worked for him. While in Italy the small octavos popularized by Aldus continued to hold their own, in France, from about 1530, editions in 32 came rapidly into fashion, and about the middle of the century these were especially the vogue at Lyon, the publishers often casing them in very gay little trade bindings sometimes stamped in gold, but often with painted interlacements. The publication by the Trechsels in 1538 of the two Holbein books, the _Dance of Death_ and ill.u.s.trations to the Old Testament, must have given an impetus to picture-making at Lyon, but this was at first chiefly visible in ill.u.s.trated Bibles and New Testaments. Gilles Corrozet, who had written the verses for both the Holbein books, continued his career, as we have seen, at Paris. The most typical Lyonnese ill.u.s.trated books were the rival editions of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ in French, one printed by Mace Bonhomme in 1556, with borders to every page and little cuts measuring about 1 in. by 2, and a similar edition (reissued in Dutch and Italian) of the next year from the press of Jean de Tournes, the borders and little pictures in which are attributed to Bernard Salomon. In 1557 De Tournes issued also the _Devises Heroiques_ of Claude Paradin, and he was also the publisher of a _Calendrier Historial_, a memorandum book charmingly decorated with cuts of the seasons.

Partly owing to religious troubles the book trade at Lyon soon after this rapidly declined, but the French style was carried on for a while at Antwerp by Christopher Plantin, who printed Paradin's _Devises Heroiques_ in 1562 and in 1564, and the two following years three books of Emblems, those of Sambucus, Hadria.n.u.s Junius, and Alciatus himself.

His earlier Horae are also ill.u.s.trated with woodcuts, and in at least one edition we find the unusual combination of woodcut borders and copperplate pictures. But although Plantin never wholly gave up the use of woodcuts, for his more sumptuous editions he developed a marked preference for copperplates, and by his example helped to complete the downfall of the woodcut, which by the end of the sixteenth century had gone almost completely out of fashion.

FOOTNOTES:

[44] Mr. Dodgson also ascribes to Traut the ill.u.s.trations in the _Legend des heyligen vatters Francisci_ (Nuremberg, 1512), and some of the cuts in the _Theuerdank_ (1517).

[45] Including perhaps the four sets of decorative capitals attributed to Holbein, one ornamental, the others representing a Dance of Peasants, Children, and a Dance of Death.

CHAPTER XII

PRINTING IN ENGLAND (1476-1580)[46]

Something has already been written about the earliest English books on the scale to which they are ent.i.tled in a rapid survey of European incunabula. We may now consider them more in detail as befits a book written in English.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XXVII. WESTMINSTER, CAXTON, C. 1490

THE FIFTEEN OES.]

William Caxton, a Kentishman, born about 1420, had been brought up as a mercer in the city of London, and the relations between the English wooltraders and the clothmakers of Flanders being very intimate, he had, as he tells us himself, pa.s.sed thirty years of his life (in round numbers the years from twenty years of age to fifty) "for the most part in Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zealand." During the last few years of this time he had held the important position of Governor of the English merchants at Bruges, but about 1469 he surrendered this in order to become secretary to Edward IV's sister, Margaret, wife of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Some years before this, Raoul Lefevre, chaplain to the Duke's predecessor, had compiled an epitome of the histories of Troy, _Le Recueil des histoires de Troye_, and in March, 1469, Caxton amused himself by beginning to translate this into English. Dissatisfied with the result he laid it on one side, but was bidden by his patroness, the d.u.c.h.ess, to continue his work. This he finished on 19 September, 1471, while staying at Cologne. According to a distinct statement by Wynkyn de Worde, whom (at least as early as 1480) he employed as his foreman, Caxton printed at Cologne "himself to avaunce" the first Latin edition of the _De Proprietatibus Rerum_, a kind of encyclopaedia "on the properties of things," by an English friar of the thirteenth century named Bartholomew. Now the first edition of this work is undoubtedly one printed at Cologne about 1471 or 1472 at an anonymous press which Bradshaw called that of the printer of the 1473 edition of the _Dialogi decem Auctorum_, and Mr. Proctor, less happily, that of the printer of the _Flores Sancti Augustini_, an undated book in the same type. The _De Proprietatibus Rerum_ is certainly slightly earlier than either of these, and there are some typographical differences which suggest that between the completion of the one book and the beginning of the other two the press may have changed masters. The _De Proprietatibus_ is by far the largest book of the whole group, and being by, or credited to, an English author, it is highly probable that the well-to-do ex-Governor of the English merchants became temporarily a member of the firm for its production and shared in the venture. This is the natural meaning of Wynkyn de Worde's statement that Caxton was the "first prynter of this boke," and is quite as likely to be true as the supposition that he took part in printing it as a kind of amateur journeyman to advance himself in the art. It may be noted, moreover, that the books of this anonymous press belong to the less advanced school of printing at Cologne, a school technically several years behind that of Ulrich Zell, and this takes the force out of the objection raised by William Blades, that if Caxton had learnt printing at Cologne, he must have printed better when he made his start.