Fine Books Part 8

In 1486 also came an edition of the _Libro de la divina lege_ of Marco del Monte S. Maria, with cuts of Mount Sinai and its desert, notable as having been copied by a much more skilful wood-cutter at Florence eight years later; 1487 produced the first of the Venetian ill.u.s.trated _Aesops_, the cuts having borders of white scroll-work on a black ground and being influenced by the Naples edition of 1485. With this must be mentioned a _Fior di virtu_, with a t.i.tle cut of a Friar plucking blossoms from a tree, which was thought good enough to be copied at Milan, but was replaced at Venice three years later by a delightful picture of a walled garden. It was in 1487 also that there appeared the edition of the _Devote Meditatione sopra la Pa.s.sione_, with cuts taken from the old block-book (see p. 123). In subsequent editions (of 1489, etc.) these were replaced by new woodcuts of varying merit. A later edition still (1500) has a fine picture of the Entry into Jerusalem which Prince d'Essling connects with the _Hypnerotomachia_ of 1499. In 1488 we come to the first ill.u.s.trated edition of the _Trionfi_ of Petrarch, printed by Bernardino de Novara. This has six large cuts, showing respectively the triumphs of Love, of Chast.i.ty, Death, Fame, Time, and the Divinity. All are well designed, but spoilt by weak cutting. In the same year appeared two other ill.u.s.trated books, a _Sphaera Mundi_, with a few cuts not in themselves of great importance, and the _De Essent et Essenta_ of S. Thomas Aquinas, with a striking little picture of a child lighting a fire by means of a burning-gla.s.s.

By studying these books in conjunction Prince d'Essling has shown that they were designed by one of their printers, Johann Santritter, and executed by the other, Hieronymus de Sanctis, and that to the latter may thus be attributed the ill.u.s.trations (one at least of them of unusual beauty) in an _Officium Beatae Virginis_ which issued from his press 26 April, 1494.

The information on the last two pages is all epitomized from the Prince d'Essling's great work _Les livres a figures Venitiens_ (1907, etc.), and is quoted here in some detail as showing that from the time of Erhard Ratdolt onwards book-ill.u.s.trations are found with some frequency at Venice, a fact for which, until the Prince published the results of his unwearying researches, there was very little evidence available.

The event of 1490 was the publication by Lucantonio Giunta of an edition of Niccolo Malermi's Italian version of the Bible, ill.u.s.trated with 384 cuts, many of them charming, measuring about three inches by two. The success of this set a fas.h.i.+on, and several important folio books in double columns similarly ill.u.s.trated appeared during the next few years, a _Vite di Sancti Padre_ in 1491, Boccaccio's _Decamerone_, Masuccio's _Novellino_, and a _Legendario_ translated from the Latin of Jacobus de Voragine in 1492, a rival Italian Bible and an Italian Livy in 1493, a _Morgante Maggiore_ in 1494, and an Italian _Terence_ in 1497, while in quarto we have a _Miracoli de la Madonna_ (1491), _Vita de la Vergine_ and _Trabisonda Istoriata_ (1492), _Guerrino Meschino_ (1493), and several others. In some of these books cuts are found signed with F, in others with N, in others with i or ia; in the Malermi Bible and some other books we sometimes find the signature b or .b. Such signatures, which at one time aroused keen controversy, are now believed to have belonged not to the designer, but to the workshop of the wood-cutters by whom the blocks were cut. In the case of the Malermi Bible of 1490 workmen of very varying skill were employed, some of the ill.u.s.trations to the Gospels being emptied of all delight by the rudeness of their cutting. Where the designer and the cutter are both at their best the result is nearly perfect of its kind, and it is curious to think that some of these dainty little blocks were imitated from the large, heavy woodcuts in the Cologne Bibles printed by Quentell some ten years earlier. In the rival Bible of 1493 the best cuts are not so good, nor the worst so bad as in the original edition of 1490. In the other books (I have not seen the Masuccio) the cutting is again more even, but the designs, though often charming and sometimes amusing, are seldom as good as the best in the Bible. Most of these books have one or more larger cuts used at the beginning of the text or of sections of it, and these are always good.

Two editions of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, both published in 1491, one by Bernardinus Benalius and Matheo Codeca in March, the other by Pietro Cremonese in November, must be grouped with the books just mentioned, as they are also ill.u.s.trated with small cuts (though those in the November edition are a good deal larger than the usual column-cuts), and these are signed in some cases with the letter .b. which appears in the Malermi Bible of 1490. Neither designer has triumphed over the monotonous effect produced by the continual reappearance of the figures of Dante and his guide, and the little cuts in the March edition are far from impressive. On the other hand it has a good frontispiece, in which, after the medieval habit, the successive incidents of the first canto of the _Inferno_ are all crowded into the same picture.

Popular as were the little vignettes, they were far from exhausting the energies of the Venetian ill.u.s.trators of this decade. At the opposite pole from them are the four full-page pictures in the 1493 and later editions of the _Fascicolo de Medicina_ of Joannes Ketham. These represent a physician lecturing, a consultation, a dissection, and a visit of a doctor to an infectious patient, whom he views by the light of two flambeaux held by pages, while he smells his pouncet-box. This picture (in the foreground of which sits a cat, afterwards cut out to reduce the size of the block) is perhaps the finest of the four, but that of the Dissection has the interest of being printed in several colours. Erhard Ratdolt had made some experiments in colour-printing in the astronomical books which he printed at Venice, and at Augsburg completed the crucifixion cut in some of his missals partly by printed colours, partly by hand. In 1490 a Venetian printer, Johann Herzog, had ill.u.s.trated the _De Heredibus_ of Johannes Crispus de Montibus with a genealogical tree growing out of a rec.u.mbent human figure, and had printed this in brown, green, and red. But the dissection in the _Fascicolo di Medicina_ was the most elaborate of the Venetian experiments in colour-printing and apparently also the last.

With the ill.u.s.trations to the Ketham may be mentioned for its large pictorial effect, though it comes in a quarto, the fine cut of the author in the _Doctrina della vita monastica_ of San Lorenzo Giustiniano, first patriarch of Venice. The figure of San Lorenzo as he walks with a book under his arm and a hand held up in benediction is imitated from that in a picture by Gentile Bellini, but he is here shown (Plate XV) preceded by a charming little crucifer, whose childish face enhances by contrast the austerer benignity of the saint.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XV. VENICE, ANONYMOUS PRESS, 1494

LORENZO GIUSTINIANO. DELLA VITA RELIGIOSA

PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR]

However good the large ill.u.s.trations in Venetian books, the merits of them are rather those of single prints than of really appropriate bookwork. The little column-cuts, on the other hand, are almost playful in their minuteness, and even when most successful produce the effect of a delightful border or tailpiece without quite attaining to the full possibilities of book-ill.u.s.tration. The feverish production of these column-cuts began to slacken, though it did not cease, in 1493, and about that date a few charming full-page pictures are found at the beginning and end of various small quartos. From the treatment of the man's hair and beard it is clear that the delightful frontispiece to the _Fioretti della Biblia_ of 1493 (Prince d'Essling, I, 161) was the work of the ill.u.s.trator of the second Malermi Bible from which the small cuts in the text are taken. The three cuts to the _Fioretti_ of S. Francis, completed 11 June in the same year, that of the _Chome l'angelo amaestra l'anima_ of Pietro Damiani, dated in the following November, of an undated _Monte de la Oratione,_ and again of the _De la confessione_ of S. Bernardino of Siena, all in the same style, form a group of singular beauty (see Prince d'Essling, I, 284 _sqq._; II, 191, 194, 195).

Those of S. Catherine's _Dialogo de la divina providentia_, 17 May, 1494 (D'Essling, II, 199 _sqq._), were probably no less happily designed, but have lost more in their cutting, and with these must be grouped the picture of a Venetian school in the _Regulae Sypontinae_ of Nicolaus Perottus, 29 March, 1492 (D'Essling, II, 86), used also in the _De Structura Compositionis_ of Nicolaus Ferettus, printed three years later at Forl. The style is continued in the _Specchio della fede_ of Robertus Caracciolus, 11 April, 1495 (D'Essling, II, 260), in the headpiece of the _Commentaria in libros Aristotelis_ of S. Thomas Aquinas, 28 Sept., 1496, and in the two admirable pictures of Terence lecturing to his commentators, and of a theatre as seen from the back of the stage, found in the _Terentius c.u.m tribus commentariis_ of July, 1497 (D'Essling, II, 295, and 277 _sqq._). Still in the same style, but carelessly designed and poorly cut, are the ill.u.s.trations to the well-known Ovid of April, 1497 (D'Essling, III, 220 _sqq._), and this leads us on to the still more famous _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ of Francesco Colonna, printed by Aldus for Leonardo Cra.s.sus, a jurisconsult, in December, 1499, and finally to the cut of Christ entering Jerusalem in the _Devote Meditatione_ of the following April (D'Essling, I, 372), where the hand of the artist of the _Hypnerotomachia_ is clearly visible, though he has surrounded his picture with a frame in the Florentine manner, which was then beginning to make its influence felt at Venice.

The primacy usually given to the _Hypnerotomachia_ among all these books is probably in part due to considerations which have little to do with its artistic merit. The story is a kind of archaeological romance which appealed greatly to the dilettante, for whose benefit Leonardo Cra.s.sus commissioned Aldus to print it, but which was far from exciting the popular interest which shows its appreciation for a book by thumbing it out of existence. The _Hypnerotomachia_ is probably almost as common a book as the _Nuremberg Chronicle_ or the First Folio Shakespeare, and thus its merits have become known to all lovers of old books. It is impressive, moreover, from its size and the profusion of its 168 ill.u.s.trations of various sizes, while the extraordinary variety of these and the excellence of their cutting are further points in its favour.

The initial letters of the successive chapters form the sentence POLIAM FRATER FRANCISCUS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT, and this with the colophon a.s.signing the completion of the book to May-Day, 1467, at Treviso, reveals the author as Francesco Colonna, a Dominican, who had taught rhetoric at Treviso and Padua, and in 1499, when his book was printed, was still alive and an inmate of the convent of SS. Giovanni and Paolo at Venice. The Polia whom he so greatly loved has been identified with Lucretia Lelio, daughter of a jurisconsult at Treviso.

The story of the _Hypnerotomachia_, or "Strife of Love in a Dream," as its English translator called it, is greatly influenced by the Renaissance interest in antique architecture and art which is evident in so many of its ill.u.s.trations. Polifilo's dreams are full, as the preface-writer says, of "molte cose antiquarie digne di memoria, & tutto quello lui dice hauere visto di puncto in puncto & per proprii uocabuli ello descriue c.u.m elegante stilo, pyramidi, obelisce, ruine maxime di edificii, la differentia di columne, la sua mensura, gli capitelli, base, epistyli," etc. etc. But he is brought also to the palace of Queen Eleuterylida, and while there witnesses the triumphs or festivals of Europa, Leda, Danae, Bacchus, Vertumnus, and Pomona, which provide several attractive subjects for the ill.u.s.trator. The second part of the book is somewhat less purely antiquarian. Lucrezia Lelio had entered a convent after being attacked by the plague which visited Treviso from 1464 to 1466, and so here also Polia is made to take refuge in the temple of Diana, whence, however, she is driven on account of the visits of Polifilo, with whom, by the aid of Venus, she is ultimately united.

One other point to be mentioned is that many of the full-page Venetian ill.u.s.trations, both in quartos and folios, have quasi-architectural borders to them, the footpiece being sometimes filled with children riding griffins or other grotesques, while school-books were often made more attractive to young readers by a border in which a master is flogging a boy duly horsed for the purpose on the back of a schoolfellow. In two of the most graceful of Venetian borders, those to the _Herodotus_ of 1494 (and also in the 1497 edition of S. Jerome's Epistles) and Johann Muller's epitome of Ptolemy's _Almagest_ (of 1496), the design is picked out in white on a black ground.

A few Florentine woodcut ill.u.s.trations have borders of the kind just mentioned in which the design stands out in white on a black ground. In one of these borders there are rather ugly candelabra at the sides, at the top two lovers facing each other in a circle supported by Cupids, at the foot a s.h.i.+eld supported by boys standing on the backs of couchant stags. Another has mermen at the top, a s.h.i.+eld within a wreath supported by eagles at the foot, and floral ornaments and armour at the sides. In a third on either side of the s.h.i.+eld in the footpiece boys are tilting at each other mounted on boars. In a fourth are shown saints and some of the emblems of the Pa.s.sion, supported by angels. But as a rule, while nearly all Florentine woodcuts have borders these are only from an eighth to three-sixteenths of an inch in depth, and the pattern on them is a leaf or flower or some conventional design of the simplest possible kind. A very few cuts have only a rule round them, one of the largest a triple rule. A rude cut of the Crucifixion is found in Francesco di Dino's 1490 edition of Cavalca's _Specchio di Croce_ surrounded by a rope-work border two-fifths of an inch deep, and this border, partly broken away, also surrounds a really beautiful Pieta (Christ standing in a tomb, His cross behind Him, His hands upheld by angels) in Miscomini's 1492 edition of Savonarola's _Trattato dell' Umilta_. When the same publisher used Dino's Crucifixion cut, also in 1492, for Savonarola's _Tractato dell' Amore di Gesu_, he left it without either border or rule round it, the only instance of a Florentine cut so treated in the fifteenth century. Dr. Paul Kristeller, whose richly ill.u.s.trated monograph on _Early Florentine Woodcuts_ (Kegan Paul, 1897) is the standard work on the subject, suggests with much plausibility that these two cuts, of the Crucifixion and the Pieta, were originally made for earlier books now lost, and belong to an older school of wood-cutting, more akin to that which produced the few extant Florentine single prints.

The earliest work of the new school of ill.u.s.tration is the magnificent cut of the Virgin in a mandorla appearing to S. Jacopone da Todi as he kneels in prayer. This, surrounded by the triple rule already mentioned, is prefixed to an edition of Jacopone's _Laude_ printed by Frances...o...b..onacorsi and dated 28 September, 1490. Apparently the earliest dated cut with a typical Florentine border is that to the _Lunare_ of Granollachs printed by Lor. Morgiani and Giovanni da Magonza in September, 1491. It measures more than 6 inches by 4, and is copied, and transfigured in the process, from the heavy cut in a Naples edition of 1485. Two months later the same firm issued the _Soliloqui_i of S.

Augustine with an extraordinarily fine t.i.tle-cut of the saint (the same picture did duty in 1493 for S. Antonino) writing at a desk in his cell.

This has a border, but with a white ground instead of a black. On 1 January, 1491-2, still from the same firm, we have surely the prettiest Arithmetic ever printed, that of Filippo Calandri, with delightful little pictures and border pieces, cut in simple outline, in the Venetian rather than the Florentine manner. On 20 March, Morgiani and his partner produced a new edition of Bettini's _Monte Santo di Dio_ with the three copperplates of 1481 (see Chapter XV) skilfully translated into duly bordered woodcuts, the first two filling a folio page, the third somewhat shorter. A _Mandeville_ with a single cut followed in June, and in December the _Trattati_ of Ugo Pantiera, also with a single cut, perhaps by the designer of the Calandri, since it employs the same trick of representing a master on a much larger scale than a disciple as is found in the picture of Pythagoras in the earlier book.[32] One of the earliest (and also most delightful) of the t.i.tle-cuts of another prolific publisher, the picture of a lecturer and his pupils in Antonio Miscomini's 1492 edition of Landini's _Formulario_,[33] measures about 6 inches by 4. But after this the period of experiment was at an end, and with very few exceptions the woodcuts in Florentine books for the rest of the century all measure either a little over or a little under 3 inches by 4, and are all surrounded by a narrow border with some simple design in white upon a black ground.

Some pains have been taken to make clear both the experiments as to style, size, and borders in the Florentine book-ill.u.s.trations of 1490-2, and the external uniformity in size and borders in the great bulk of the work of the next few years, because in the first number of the _Burlington Magazine_ and subsequently in his fine book on Florentine Drawings, Mr. Bernhard Berenson put forward with considerable confidence the theory that nine-tenths of the Florentine book-ill.u.s.trations of this period were made from designs supplied by a single artist whom he identifies with a certain Bartolommeo di Giovanni. This Bartolommeo contracted in July, 1488, with the Prior of the Innocents to paint before the end of October seven predelle (Innocenti Museum, Nos. 63-70) for an altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, the commission for which had been given to Domenico Ghirlandajo. Mr. Berenson believes that in addition to these predelle (the only works with which Bartolommeo is connected by any evidence other than that of style) he painted the Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents, as an episode in Ghirlandajo's altarpiece at the Innocenti, that he must have been one of the more famous painter's apprentices in the years 1481-5, and subsequently helped him with altarpieces at Lucca and at the Accademia at Florence, and painted a fresco for the church of S. Frediano at Lucca and numerous fronts to the ca.s.son or ornamental chests, which were at this period the most decorative articles of Florentine furniture. As a minor painter Bartolommeo di Giovanni[34] is p.r.o.nounced by Mr. Berenson to have been "incapable of producing on the scale of life a figure that can support inspection": in predelle and ca.s.sone-fronts he is "feeble, if vivacious, and scarcely more than pleasant," yet with no authenticated work to build on except the predelle in the Innocenti, Mr. Berenson does not hesitate to a.s.sert that "in Florence between 1490 and 1500 few apparently, if any, ill.u.s.trated books were published without woodcuts for which Alunno di Domenico[34] furnished the designs," and on the strength of this a.s.sumption bestows on him the praise, amply deserved by the Florentine school as a whole, that he was "a book-ill.u.s.trator, charming as few in vision and interpretation, with scarcely a rival for daintiness and refinement of arrangement, s.p.a.cing and distribution of black and white." Mr. Berenson's theories oblige him to credit Bartolommeo with having copied at least from Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Piero di Cosimo, as well as from Ghirlandajo, and push the licence accorded to "connoisseurs.h.i.+p" to its extreme limit. As I have already acknowledged elsewhere,[35] if any one man is to be credited with the whole, or nearly the whole of the Florentine book-ill.u.s.trations of this decade, a minor artist used to painting predelle and ca.s.sone-fronts would be the right kind of man for the task, but on the very scanty evidence at present available I am personally more inclined to attribute such unity as can be traced in these Florentine cuts to their having all come from one large wood-cutter's shop, without attempting to trace them back to a single designer.

In the year 1492, when the form of the Florentine woodcuts had become fairly fixed, Savonarola was called to the death-bed of Lorenzo the Magnificent, only to refuse him absolution. His _Amore di Gesu_ and _Trattato dell' Umilta_ were printed in June of that year by Miscomini, each decorated with a single cut. During the six years ending with his execution in May, 1498, some twenty-three different tracts from his pen, ill.u.s.trated with one or more woodcuts, were printed at Florence, most of them in several different editions. In the _De Simplicitate Christianae vitae_ (1496) a friar is shown writing in his cell; in other cuts we see a friar preaching, or visiting the convent of the "Murate" or Recluses of Florence, or talking with seven Florentines under a tree, but in no case has any attempt been made at portraiture. This is true also of the _Compendio di Revelatione_ (1495), in which there are some charming cuts showing Savonarola escorted by four holy women representing Simplicity, Prayer, Patience, and Faith, on an emba.s.sy to the Blessed Virgin. In the first of these they meet the devil attired as a hermit; in the second they arrive at the gate of the celestial city of which the wall is crowded with saints and angels; in the third they are ushered forth by S. Peter. A tract by Domenico Benivieni in defence of Savonarola, besides a cut of the usual size representing Benivieni arguing with his opponents, has a full-page one of the river of blood flowing from Christ's wounds and sinners cleansing themselves in it and marking their foreheads with the sign of the cross. One of the finest cuts in the Savonarola series represents a citizen of Florence in prayer before a crucifix. But almost all of them are good.

Besides the Savonarola tracts the miscellaneous religious treatises ill.u.s.trated with one or more woodcuts are very numerous. In some cases outside models were still sought. One of the most important of these books is the _Meditatione sopra la Pa.s.sione_ attributed to S.

Bonaventura, of which two undated editions were issued, one with eight cuts, the other with twelve, three of the additional cuts in the second edition--the Entry into Jerusalem, Christ before Pilate, and Procession to Calvary (see Plate XVI)--being exceptionally fine. The earlier designer probably had the Venetian edition of 1489 before him, but used it quite freely. Two of the three cuts in the 1494 Florentine edition of the _Libro delli commandamenti di Dio_ of Marco del Monte S. Maria are improved copies of those in the Venetian edition of 1486. The third cut, which appears also in the same author's _Tabula della Salute_ (also of 1494), representing the Monte della Pieta, is copied on a reduced scale from a large copper engraving attributed to Baccio Baldini, of which an example is in the Print Room of the British Museum. Of the thirty-four cuts in Cardinal Capranica's _Arte del benmorire_, eleven are imitated from the well-known series in the German block-books.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XVI. FLORENCE, MISCOMINI, C. 1495

BONAVENTURA. MEDITATIONE. THE PROCESSION TO CALVARY]

For the _Rappresentazioni_ or miracle-plays in honour of various saints originality was more imperative, and numerous cuts were designed, only a few of which have come down to us in editions of the fifteenth century, most being known as they survive in reprints of the second half of the sixteenth. Our example (Plate XVII) is from an undated edition of _La Festa di San Giovanni_, in which, as on many other t.i.tlepages, an angel is shown above the t.i.tle-cut as the speaker of the Prologue. Purely secular literature in the shape of _Novelle_ was no doubt plentiful, despite the influence of Savonarola, but most of it has perished, thumbed to pieces by too eager readers. A volume of _Novelle_ at the University Library, Erlangen, is ill.u.s.trated with delightful cuts, and others survive here and there in different libraries. Of more pretentious quartos Angelo Politiano's _La Giostra di Giuliano di Medici_ (first edition undated, second 1513) is very finely ill.u.s.trated, and Petrarch's _Trionfi_ (1499) has good versions of the usual six subjects.

Many of the best of the quartos and all the ill.u.s.trated folios were financed by a publisher, Ser Piero Pacini of Pescia, who was succeeded early in the sixteenth century by his son Bernardo. Pacini in 1495 began his career with a very ambitious venture, a folio edition of the _Epistole et Evangelii et Lectioni_ as they were read in the Ma.s.s throughout the year. This has a decorative frontispiece, in the centre of which stand SS. Peter and Paul, while small cuts of the four evangelists are placed in the corners. The text is ill.u.s.trated with 144 different woodcuts, besides numerous fancy portraits of evangelists, prophets, etc. A few of the cuts are taken from the _Meditationes_ of S.

Bonaventura, and one or two, perhaps, from other books already published; but the enormous majority are new, and from the consistency of the portrait-types of Christ, S. Peter, S. John, etc., appear all to have been designed by the same man. Some are less successful than others, but the average is exceptionally high, and the best cuts are full of movement and life. An _Aesop_ followed in 1496, Pulci's _Morgante Maggiore_ in 1500, and the _Quatriregio_, a dull poem in imitation of Dante by Bishop Frezzi, in 1508. It has been conjectured, however, that an earlier edition of the _Quatriregio_ may have been printed in the fifteenth century with the same ill.u.s.trations, and there is considerable reason to doubt whether any fresh cuts in the old style were made at Florence after the temporary cessation of publis.h.i.+ng brought about by the political troubles of 1501. On the other hand, the old cuts went on being used, sometimes in the originals, sometimes in copies, throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century, and it is only in these reprints that many of them are known to survive.

At no other Italian town was there any outburst of book-ill.u.s.tration at all comparable to those at Venice and Florence in the last decade of the fifteenth century. At Ferrara, after a fine cut of S. George and a much ruder one of S. Maurelius in a _Legenda_ of the latter saint printed in 1489,[36] no ill.u.s.tration appeared until 1493, when the _Compilatio_ of Alfraga.n.u.s was adorned with a picture of the astronomer instructing a diminutive hermit. After this, in 1496 we have a fine cut of the Virgin and Child in the _De ingenuis adolescentium moribus_, and in 1497 two important folio books, both from the press of Lorenzo Rossi, the _De claris mulieribus_ of Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis (29 April) and the Epistles of S. Jerome (12 October). The former of these is distinctly native work, with the exception of an architectural border, decorated chiefly with _putti_ and griffins, etc., which is thoroughly Venetian in style, and was used again in the S. Jerome. There are two large ill.u.s.trations, one showing the author presenting his book to the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, the other containing eight scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin. Fifty-six cuts in the text are made to serve as portraits of 172 different women, and under the strain of such repet.i.tion individuality perforce disappears. But at the end of the book are seven cuts of Italian ladies of the fifteenth century: Bona of Lombardy, Bianca Maria of Milan, Catherine Countess of Frejus and Imola, Leonora d.u.c.h.ess of Ferrara, Bianca Mirandula, Genebria Sforza, and Damisella Trivulzia, and these, some of them fair, some rather forbidding, appear all to be genuine portraits. The cutting is mostly rather stiff and heavy (Damisella Trivulzia is exceptionally tenderly treated), and much use is made of black grounds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XVII. FLORENCE, BART. DI LIBRI, C. 1495

LA FESTA DI SAN GIOVANNI. (t.i.tLE)]

In contrast to those in the _De claris mulieribus_, the cuts in the _Epistulae_ of S. Jerome are distinctly Venetian in style. As one of the two architectural borders is dated 1493, it is possible that the book was at first intended to be issued at Venice, but was transferred to Ferrara when Venetian interest in small column-cuts was found to be on the wane. It possesses in all over 160 of these, those ill.u.s.trating conventual life in the second part of the book being much the most interesting.

At Milan the _Theorica Musicae_ of Franchino Gafori, printed in 1492 by Philippus Mantegatius, has a t.i.tle-cut of a man playing the organ, and four coa.r.s.ely cut pictures, together occupying a page, showing primitive musical experiments. Four years later the same author's _Practica Musicae_ was issued by another printer, Guillaume Le Signerre, with a t.i.tle-cut ill.u.s.trating the different measures and the Muses and signs of the Zodiac to which they belong, and with two fine woodcut borders surrounding the opening pages of Books I and III, and II and IV. In 1498 Le Signerre produced two much more profusely ill.u.s.trated books, the _Specchio dell' Anima_ of Ludovicus Besalii and an _Aesop_, some of the cuts of the former being used again in 1499 in the _Tesoro Spirituale_ of Johannes Petrus de Ferrariis. After this he migrated to Saluzzo, and in 1503 produced there a fine edition of the _De Veritate Contritionis_ of Vivaldus, with a frontispiece of S. Jerome in the desert. At Modena in 1490 Dominicus Rocociola printed a _Legenda Sanctorum Trium Regum_, with a rather pleasing cut of their Adoration of the Holy Child; and two years later, at the same place, the _Prognosticatio_ of Johann Lichtenberger, printed by Pierre Maufer, was ill.u.s.trated with three full-page quarto cuts and forty-two half-page ones, careful directions for each picture being supplied in the text, but the cuts being modelled on those in the German editions at Ulm and Mainz. At Aquila in 1493 an _Aesop_ was produced, copied from the Naples edition of 1485. At Pavia in 1505 the _Sanctuarium_ of Jacobus Gualla was ill.u.s.trated with seventy woodcuts and some excellent initials. At Saluzzo in 1508 another work by Vivaldus, printed by Jacobus de Circis and Sixtus de Somachis, was decorated with three large woodcuts of very exceptional merit: a portrait of the Marquis Ludovico II (almost too striking for a book-ill.u.s.tration), a picture of S. Thomas Aquinas in his cell, and another of S. Louis of France. The treatise of Paulus de Middelburgo on the date of Easter, printed by Petruzzi at Fos...o...b..one in 1513, contains some very fine borders, and the _Decachordum Christianum_ of Marcus Vigerius, printed at Fano in 1507 by Hieronymus Soncinus, has ten cuts by Florio Vava.s.sore, surrounded with good arabesque borders. To multiply isolated examples such as these would turn our text into a catalogue.

Here and there special care was taken over the decoration of a book, and worthy results produced. But throughout Italy the best period of ill.u.s.tration had come to an end when the sixteenth century was only a few years old.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] In the masterly work of the Prince d'Essling on _Les livres a figures Venitiens_, the discovery of this interesting fact is inadvertently ascribed to Mr. Guppy, the present librarian of the John Rylands Library. It was made by his predecessor, Mr. Gordon Duff, a note by whom on the subject was quoted in my _Italian Book-Ill.u.s.trations_ (p. 18), published in 1894.

[32] The same trick is used in the _Rudimenta astronomica_ of Alfraga.n.u.s, printed at Ferrara by Andreas Bellfortis in 1493.

[33] Also used in an undated edition of the _Flores Poetarum_.

[34] Mr. Berenson prefers to call him "Alunno di Domenico,"

Ghirlandajo's pupil.

[35] Introduction to the Roxburghe Club edition (presented by Mr.

Dyson Perrins) of the _Epistole et Evangelii_ of 1495.

[36] There were two issues or editions of this book in 1489, one of which is said to have only the cut of S. Maurelius.

CHAPTER IX

EARLY FRENCH AND SPANISH ILl.u.s.tRATED BOOKS

Although interrupted by the death of its veteran author, Claudin's magnificent _Histoire de l'imprimerie en France_, in the three volumes which he lived to complete, made it for the first time possible for students to trace the early history of book-ill.u.s.tration at Paris and Lyon, the two great centres of printing in France. No ill.u.s.trated books were printed at the Sorbonne, nor by its German printers when they set up in the rue S. Jacques, nor by their rivals there, Keysere and Stoll, and the French printers at the sign of the Soufflet vert. In January, 1476-7, in the first French book printed at Paris, the _Chroniques de France_ or de _S. Denis_, Pasquier Bonhomme so far recognized the possibility of ill.u.s.tration as to leave a s.p.a.ce for a miniature on the first page of text,[37] but he used no woodcuts himself, and his son Jean suffered himself to be antic.i.p.ated in introducing them by Jean Du Pre. Although he worked on rather narrow lines, Du Pre was the finest of the early Parisian printers, and possessed far better taste than the prolific publisher, Antoine Verard, of whom so much more has been written. His first book, a Paris Missal issued in partners.h.i.+p with Didier Huym, 22 September, 1481, has a large picture of the Pere eternel and the Crucifixion. Although this is fairly well cut, it is baldly handled, and was far surpa.s.sed two months later (28 November) in a similar missal for the diocese of Verdun, by a really fine metal-cut of a priest and other wors.h.i.+ppers at prayer at an altar. From the priest's uplifted hands a little figure of a man is rising up to a vision of the Pere eternel, seen with His angels against the background of a sky full of stars. The little figure is the priest's soul, and the cut (often confused with pictures of the Ma.s.s of S. Gregory, in which the Host is seen as a figure of Christ) ill.u.s.trates the opening words of the introit: "Ad te levavi animam meam." In the same Missal are a number of smaller cuts which look as if they had been prepared for a Horae, and may indeed have been used for one now entirely lost. The "Ad te levavi"

cut reappears in many of the later Missals of Du Pre, and subsequently of Wolfgang Hopyl. Du Pre's first secular book to be ill.u.s.trated was an edition of Boccaccio's _De la ruine des n.o.bles hommes_, completed 26 February, 1483-4, and of peculiar interest to English bookmen because the woodcuts were acquired by Richard Pynson, and used in his edition of Lydgate's _Falles of Princes_, an English verse-rendering of the same work. They are well designed and clearly cut, if rather hard, and till their French origin was discovered were justly praised as "some of the very best" English woodcuts of the fifteenth century. Only a few weeks later Jean Bonhomme (12 May, 1484) issued Maistre Jacques Millet's _L'Histoire de la destruction de Troye la Grant_, ill.u.s.trated with a number of cuts rather neater and firmer, but of much the same kind, and possibly from the same workshop. They pa.s.sed almost at once into the possession of Verard, and cuts from the series ill.u.s.trating battles, landings, councils, audiences, and other romantic commonplaces are found in his _Vegece_ of 1488 and _Les Commentaires Iules Cesar_ of about the same date (see Macfarlane's _Antoine Verard_, cuts vi-ix). A new edition of Millet's book was printed by Jean Driard for Verard 8 May, 1498. Two of the best of the cuts are those of the lamentation over the dead body of Hector and the sacrifice of Polyxena on the tomb of Achilles. The only other ill.u.s.trated book published by Jean Bonhomme was his edition of the _Livre des ruraulx prouffitz du labeur des champs_, a French version of Crescentius, with a frontispiece of the translator presenting his book to Charles VII (15 October, 1486). Meanwhile, a new publisher of ill.u.s.trated books had arisen, Guyot Marchant, who in September, 1485, issued a _Danse macabre_ which went through several editions. Its grim fantastic pictures (executed with unusual skill and delicacy, see Plate XVIII) of Death as a grinning skeleton claiming his prey from every cla.s.s of society seem to have become quickly popular, and additional cuts were made for later editions, including one in Latin (15 October, 1490), in which the Dance is called _Ch.o.r.ea ab eximio macabro versibus alemanicis edita_. A _Danse macabre des femmes_ followed (2 May, 1491), but the figures in this are mostly less good, as are those of a third part (the Debate between Soul and Body, and other pieces), despite the vivacity with which they represent the tortures of the d.a.m.ned. Akin to the _Danse Macabre_ is the _Compost et Kalendrier des Bergers_ (also of 1491), a medley of weather-lore, rules for health, and moral and religious instruction, liberally ill.u.s.trated with cuts of shepherds, of Moses, Christ and the Apostles, and of the tortures of the d.a.m.ned. This in its turn was followed, in 1496, by a similar book for the Shepherdesses, of which a new edition appeared in 1499, with added pastoral cuts, some of which have unusual charm. Besides Guyot Marchant, Pierre Levet began book-ill.u.s.tration in 1485, but most of his work was done for Verard. His earliest venture, an _Exposition de la salutation angelique_, has a cut of the Annunciation, the shading in which suggests that he may have imported a cutter from Lyon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XVIII. PARIS, MARCHAND, 1491

DANSE MACABRE (5^a). DEATH AND THE ARCHBISHOP. (REDUCED)]

In 1486 Jean Du Pre was very busy. At Paris he completed in June a _Vie des anciens Saintz Peres_, with a large cut of S. Jerome writing in a stall and the holy fathers pa.s.sing before him, also numerous very neat column-cuts and capital letters. Meanwhile, at Abbeville Du Pre was helping Pierre Gerard to produce one of the finest French books of the fifteenth century, the magnificent edition of S. Augustine's _Cite de Dieu_. Early in 1486 Gerard had already printed there an edition of _La somme rurale_, but this had only a single woodcut, and it was probably mainly in connection with the ill.u.s.trations that he now enlisted the help of Du Pre. In the first volume of the _Cite de Dieu_ (finished 24 November, 1486) there are eleven woodcuts, in the second (finished 12 April, 1486-7) twelve, i.e. a woodcut at the beginning of each of the twenty-two books and a frontispiece of S. Augustine writing, and the translator, Raoul de Preules, presenting his book to the King of France.

The subjects and general design of the cuts correspond with greater or less closeness to those in Royal MS. 14 D. 1 at the British Museum (Books I-XI only), so that the same original was probably followed by both. One of the most effective pictures is that to Book XIV, which shows a man seated in a tree, offered a crown by an angel and a money-chest by a devil, while Death is sawing the tree asunder, and two dragons wait at its foot. Another shows S. Augustine writing, while five devils play with his books, and an angel protects his mitre. The cutting throughout is excellent, and the pictures, though sometimes fantastic, are very effectively drawn. There can be little doubt that they were the work of Paris craftsmen. As for Pierre Gerard, in 1487 he printed by himself, still at Abbeville, an edition of _Le Triomphe des Neuf Preux_, with rather childishly conventional cuts of the legendary heroes, but for Bertrand Du Guesclin a portrait which at least faithfully reproduces his bullet head. We find Du Pre forming a similar alliance two years later with Jean Le Bourgeois of Rouen, for whom he completed at Paris the second volume of a _Roman des Chevaliers de la Table ronde_, 16 September, 1488, while Le Bourgeois was still struggling at Rouen with Vol. I, which ultimately got finished 24 November. This has some large cuts of the Feast at the Round Table, etc. In 1489 Du Pre produced a _Legende doree_, a companion volume to his _Vie des Saintz Peres_ of 1486. But by this time he was already producing Horae, which will be spoken of later on, and Horae and Missals were his main occupations for the rest of his career, though he produced a fine edition of the allegorical romance _Le Chevalier Delibere_ by Olivier de la Marche, Bonnor's _Arbre des Batailles_ (in which he used some of the same cuts), 1493, _Les vigilles du roi Charles VII_ and some other secular books.

The great Paris publisher Antoine Verard started on his busy career in 1485, and the history of book-ill.u.s.tration at Paris is soon immensely complicated by his doings. Many of the printers at Paris printed for him; ill.u.s.trations originally made for other men gravitated into his possession and were used occasionally for new editions of the book for which they had been made, much more often as stock cuts in books with which they had nothing to do; while if another firm brought out a successful picture-book, Verard imitated the cuts in it with unscrupulous and unblus.h.i.+ng closeness. The monograph of my late friend and colleague John Macfarlane[38] describes some 280 books published by Verard between 1485 and 1512, and like most bibliographical work done at first hand by personal examination of the books themselves gets at the root of the matter, although the absence of information as to Verard's predecessors and contemporaries, such as has since been supplied by M.

Claudin, prevented the author from pressing home some of his points.

Thus in his estimate that sets of blocks had been "expressly cut to adorn some thirty editions," Macfarlane did not make sufficient allowance for the cases in which these apparent sets were themselves not original, having been acquired by Verard from earlier owners.