Early Illustrated Books / A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries

We come now to the most celebrated of all the series of Horae, those printed by Pigouchet, chiefly for Simon Vostre. Brunet in his list rightly discredits the existence of an edition by this printer dated as early as January 5, 1486. He accepts, however, and briefly describes as if he had himself seen, one of September 16, 1488, and mentions also an edition printed April 8, 1488-9. No copy of either of these editions has come to light during the twenty years in which the present writer has been interested in Horae, and it seems fairly certain that Pigouchet's first illustrated work is to be found in an edition Ad usum Parisiensem, dated December 1, 1491. The large cuts in this are fairly good, but a little stiff; the small border-cuts include a long set of incidents in the life of Christ with Old Testament types after the manner of the Biblia Pauperum. A Horae of May 8, 1492, substitutes floral borders for these little pictures. In another set of editions in which Pigouchet was concerned, apparently between 1493 and 1495, the borders are made up of vignettes of very varying size, which may be recognised by many of them being marked with Gothic letters, mostly large minuscules. Sometimes one, sometimes two, vignettes thus lettered occur on a page, and we may presume that the lettering, which is certainly a disfigurement, was intended to facilitate the arrangement of the borders. In these Horae, also, the designs are comparatively coarse and poor. Some of the large illustrations are divided into an upper compartment, containing the main subject, and two lower compartments, containing its 'types.'

Certainly by 1496, and possibly in earlier editions which I have not seen, Pigouchet had arrived at his typical style, of which a good specimen-page is given in our illustration from the edition of August 22, 1498. His original idea appears to have been for editions with a page of text measuring 5½ in. by 3½, such as he issued on April 17, 1496, and January 18, 1496-97. But at least as early as November 4, 1497, he added another inch both to the height and breadth of his page by the insertion of the little figures, which will be noticed at the left of the lower corner and on the right at the top. The extra inch was valuable, for it enabled him to surround his large illustrations with vignettes, but the borders themselves are not improved by them, for they mar the rich effect of the best work in which the backgrounds are of black with pricks of white.

These same dotted backgrounds, which we have already noticed as present in some of the finest of the printers' marks, appear also in three plates, which are found in the 1498 editions, and thenceforward, but, as far as I can ascertain, not earlier. These three plates illustrate (i.) the Tree of Jesse; (ii.) the Church Militant and Triumphant; (iii.) the Adoration of the Shepherds. All three plates are of great beauty, and the last is noticeable for the names—'Mahault,' 'Aloris,' 'Alison,' 'Gobin le Gay,' and 'le beau Roger'—which are assigned to the shepherds and their wives, and which are the same as those by which they are known in the French mystery-plays. The artists who used these dotted backgrounds evidently viewed the Horae rather from the mystery-play standpoint. They cared little for the 'types' which Vérard and Du Pré so carefully explained in their early editions, but delighted in the Dance of Death and in scenes of hunting and rural life, or failing these in grotesques. They placed their talents at the disposal of religion, but they bargained to be allowed to introduce a good deal of humour as well.

The best French Horae were all published within about ten years. During this decade, which just overlaps the fifteenth century, the only serious rival of Pigouchet was Thielman Kerver, who began printing in 1497, and by dint of close imitation approached very near indeed to Pigouchet's success. With the lessening of Pigouchet's activity about 1505, there came an after-flood of bad taste, which swept everything before it. The old French designs were displaced by reproductions of German work utterly unsuited to the French types and ornaments, and along with these there came an equally disastrous substitution of florid Renaissance borders of pillars and cherubs for Pigouchet's charming vignettes and hunting scenes. Thielman Kerver, who had begun with better things, soon made his surrender to the new fashion, and his firm continued to print Horae, for which it is difficult to find a good word until about 1556. His activity was more than equalled by Gilles Hardouyn, who with his successors was responsible for some seventy editions during the first half of the sixteenth century. Guillaume Eustace, Guillaume Godard, and François Regnault were less formidable competitors, and besides these some thirty or forty editions are attributable to other printers.

On January 16th (or to use the affected style of the colophon itself, 'xvii. Kal. Febr.'), 1525, Geoffroy Tory, the scholar, artist, and printer, in conjunction with his friend Simon Colines, brought out a Horae, which is certainly not open to the charge of bad taste. The printed page measures 6¼ in. by 3¾, the type used is a delicate Roman letter with a slight employment of red ink, but no hand work, the borders are in the most delicate style of the Renaissance. The illustrations number twelve, of which one, that of the Annunciation, occupies two pages. There are no unusual subjects, except that in the picture of the Crucifixion Tory displays his classical pedantry by surrounding the central picture with four vignettes illustrating Virgil's 'Sic vos non vobis' quatrain, on the sheep, the bees, the birds, and the oxen, whose life enriches others but not themselves. In the picture of the Adoration by the Magi, here given, Tory obtains an unusually rich effect by the figure of the negro. He repeats this, on a smaller scale, in the black raven, croaking Cras, Cras, in the picture of the Triumph of Death. The tone of the other illustrations is rather thin, and the length of the faces and slight angularity in the figures (effects which Tory, the most affected of artists, no doubt deliberately sought for) cause them just to fall short of beauty. Compared, however, with the contemporary editions of other printers, Tory's Horae seem possessed of every beauty. We know of five editions before his death or retirement in 1533, and of some seven others before the close of the half century. After 1550 the publication of Horae in France almost entirely ceased, but some pretty editions were issued at Antwerp by the French printer Christopher Plantin in 1565 and 1575, and perhaps in other years. The decree of Pope Pius V. making the use of the Office no longer obligatory on the clergy seems to have been preceded by a great falling off of the popularity of the Hours among the laity, in whom the booksellers had found their chief customers, and after 1568 a very few editions sufficed to supply the demand of those who were still wedded to their use.

CHAPTER IX

Sir Martin Conway divided his book into three parts, the first giving the history of the woodcutters, the second a catalogue of the cuts, and the third a list of the books containing them. Putting on one side the blocks imported or directly copied from France and Germany, he attributes the illustrations in fifteenth century Dutch books to some five-and-twenty different workmen and their apprentices. His first group is formed of—

(i.) A Louvain woodcutter who worked for John and Conrad de Westphalia, for whom he cut two capital little vignette portraits of themselves, and for Veldener, for whom he executed the nine illustrations in an edition of the Fasciculus Temporum, published on December 29, 1475.

(ii.) A Utrecht woodcutter, whose most important works are a set of cuts to illustrate the Boeck des gulden throens, published by a mysterious printer, Gl., in 1480, some additional cuts for a new edition by Veldener of the Fasciculus Temporum, and a set of thirty-nine cuts, chiefly on the life of Christ, for the same printer's Epistolen ende ewangelien of 1481.

(iii.) A Bruges woodcutter, possibly the printer himself, who illustrated Colard Mansion's French edition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1484); and

(iv.) A Gouda woodcutter, by whose aid Gerard Leeu started on his career as a printer of illustrated books with the Dialogus Creaturarum (of which he printed six editions between June 3, 1480, and August 31, 1482), and the Gesten van Romen, Vier Uterste, and Historia Septem Sapientum.

Of these books, whose illustrations are grouped together as all executed in pure line work, the most interesting to us are the Metamorphoses and the Dialogus. The former is handsomely printed in red and black in Mansion's large type, and has seventeen single-column cuts of gods and goddesses and as many double-column ones illustrating the Metamorphoses themselves. The larger cuts are the more successful, and are certainly superior to the average French work of the day, to which they bear a considerable resemblance. Uncouth as they are, they were thought good enough by Antoine Vérard to serve as models for his own edition of 1493. The Metamorphoses, Mansion's first illustrated book, was also the last work issued from his press; and part of the edition was not published till after his disappearance from Bruges. The hundred and twenty-one cuts in Leeu's Dialogus Creaturarum are the work of a far more inspired, if very child-like, artist. With a minimum of strokes the creatures about whom the text tells its wonderful stories are drawn so as to be easily recognisable, and we have no reason to suppose that the humour which pervades them was otherwise than intentional.

We come now to the best period of Dutch illustration, which centres round the presses of Leeu at Gouda and Antwerp, and of Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem, whose business was probably only a branch of Leeu's. During his stay at Gouda, Leeu commissioned an important set of sixty-eight blocks, thirty-two of which were used in the Lijden ons Heeren of 1482, and the whole set in a Devote Ghetiden, which Sir Martin Conway conjectures to have been published just after the printer's removal to Antwerp in the summer of 1484. Fifty-two of them were used again, in conjunction with other cuts, in the Boeck vanden leven Christi of Ludolphus in 1487, and the history of many of them can be traced in other books to as late as 1510. Thus they were evidently popular, though neither their design nor their cutting calls for much praise. Another set of seven cuts, to each of which is joined a sidepiece showing a teacher and a scholar, appears in Leeu's last Gouda book, the Van den Seven Sacramenten of June 19, 1484, and evinces a much greater mastery over his tools on the part of the engraver. The little sidepiece, which was added to bring the breadth of the cuts up to that of Leeu's folio page (5½ in.), is particularly good.

After Leeu's removal to Antwerp his activity as a printer of illustrated books suffered a temporary check, and our interest is transferred to the office of Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem, who, after borrowing some of Leeu's cuts for a Lijden ons Heeren, issued in December 1483, in the following February had printed under the name of Der Sonderen troest a Dutch version of the Belial of Jacobus de Theramo. This has altogether thirty-two cuts, the first of which occupies a full page, and represents in its different parts the fall of Lucifer and of Adam and Eve, the Flood, the Passage of the Red Sea, and the Baptism of Christ. Six half-page cuts represent incidents of the Harrowing of Hell, the Ascension, and the Day of Pentecost. The other illustrations at a hasty glance seem to be of the same size (5 in. by 3¾), but are soon discovered to be separable into different blocks, usually three in number. Eight blocks of 2½ in. each, and seventeen of half this width, are thus arranged in a series of dramatic combinations. Thus we are first shown the different persons who answer the citation of Solomon, whose judgment hall is the central block in thirteen illustrations; then the controversy in heaven before Christ as the judge; then scenes in a Royal Council Chamber, &c. Our illustration is taken from the opening of Solomon's Court, with Belial appearing to plead on one side, and Christ answering the summons of the messenger, Azahel, on the other.

In October of the same year, 1484, Bellaert printed an edition of the Boeck des gulden throens, in which four cuts, representing the soul, depicted as a woman with flowing hair, being instructed by an elder, serve as illustrations to all the twenty-four discourses. In 1485 we have first of all two romances, the Historie vanden vromen ridder Jason and the Vergaderinge der Historien van Troyen, both translated from Raoul le Fèvre, and illustrated with half-folio cuts, which I have not seen. At the end of the year came a translation of Glanville's De Proprietatibus Rerum, with eleven folio cuts, of which the most interesting are the first, which shows the Almighty seated in glory within a circle thrown up by a black background, and the sixth, which contains twelve little medallions, representing the pleasures and occupations of the different months. During 1486 Bellaert printed three illustrated books, an Epistelen ende Euangelien, Pierre Michault's Doctrinael des tyts, an allegory, in which Virtue exhibits to the author the schools of Vice, and a Dutch version of Deguileville's Pélerinage de la vie humaine. The ten cuts in the second of these three books are described by Sir Martin Conway as carefully drawn, the more numerous illustrations in the others showing hasty work, probably produced by an inferior artist.

After 1486 Bellaert disappears, and most of his cuts and types are found in the possession of Gerard Leeu, who, since his removal to Antwerp, had lacked the help of a good engraver. He apparently secured the services of Bellaert's artist, and now printed French and Dutch editions of the romance of Paris and Vienne (May 1487), an edition of Reynard the Fox, of which only a fragment remains, the already-mentioned edition of Ludolphus, for which he used cuts both new and old, a Kintscheyt Jhesu (1488), Dutch and Latin versions of the story of the Seven Wise Men of Rome, who saved the young prince from the wiles of his step-mother, and numerous religious works. At the time of his death, in 1493, he was engaged on an edition of the Cronycles of England, which has on its title-page a fine quarto cut showing the shield of England supported by angels.

In 1485 Leeu had copied (Sir Martin Conway says, 'borrowed,' but this is a mistake) blocks from Anton Sorg, of Augsburg, for an edition of Æsop, and in 1491, in his Duytsche Ghetiden, he employed a set of woodcuts imitated from those in use in the French Horae. Sir Martin assigns these directly to a French wood-cutter, but the work, both in the cuts and the borders, appears to me sufficiently distinctive to be set down rather as an imitation than as produced by a foreign artist. Its success was immediate, and the designs appear in half a dozen books printed by Leeu during the next two years, and in nine others issued by Lieseveldt, their purchaser, between 1493 and the end of the century.

We must now look very briefly at some of the illustrated books printed in other Dutch towns. At Zwolle, from 1484 onwards, Peter van Os issued a large number of devotional works, the cuts in many of which were copied from sets made for Leeu. This, however, is not the case with a folio cut of the Virgin manifesting herself to S. Bernard, which is given as a frontispiece to three editions of the Saint's Sermons (1484, &c.), and is of great beauty. At Delft, Jacob van der Meer also copied Leeu's books; in 1483 he produced an original set of illustrations to the ever-popular Scaeckspul of Jacobus de Cessolis, and three years later, a Passionael, with upwards of ninety cuts, which were used again and again in more than a score of similar works or editions. He was succeeded by Christian Snellaert, who, in 1491, endeavoured to imitate Leeu's French cuts in an edition of the Kerstenen Spieghel. John de Westphalia continued to work at Louvain until 1496, but his illustrated books were few and unimportant. At Gouda, Gotfrid de Os, after borrowing blocks from Leeu, when the latter had departed for Antwerp, issued a few books with woodcuts, notably the romance of Godfrey of Boulogne (Historie hertoghe Godeuaerts van Boloen), and Le Chevalier Délibéré by Olivier de Lamarche, with sixteen large and very striking woodcuts, which have been reproduced in facsimile by the Bibliographical Society from the reprint issued about the end of the century at Schiedam.

At Deventer, Jacobus de Breda and Richard Paffroet, from 1486 onwards, printed a large number of books with single cuts, none of any great importance. In the last decade of the century, Hugo Janszoen commissioned several sets of crude religious cuts, while the illustrated books issued at Antwerp by Godfrey Back, who had married the widow of an earlier printer, Mathias van der Goes, do not seem to have been much better. This decline of good work Sir Martin Conway attributes chiefly to the influence of the French woodcuts introduced by Leeu. 'The characteristic quality,' he says, 'of the French cuts is the large mass of delicately cut shade lines which they contain. The workmen of the Low Countries finding these foreign cuts rapidly becoming popular, endeavoured to imitate them, but without bestowing upon their work that care by which alone any semblance of French delicacy could be attained. From the year 1490 onwards, Dutch and Flemish cuts always contain large masses of clumsily cut shade. The outlines are rude; the old childishness is gone; thus the last decade of the fifteenth century is a decade of decline.'

When we pass from the illustrations to the other decorations in early Dutch books, we find that large borders of foliage, boldly but rather coarsely treated, were used by Veldener in his Fasciculus Temporum of 1480, and in Gerard Leeu's edition of the Dyalogus Creaturarum the following year. Veldener's is accompanied by a fine initial O, in which the design of the border is carried on. Leeu's page contains a rather heavy S, and the woodcut of the faces of the sun and moon.

In 1491, as we have seen, Leeu printed a Psalter of the Blessed Virgin, by S. Bernard, in imitation of the French Horae. This has very graceful little floral borders in small patterns on grounds alternately black and white. After Leeu's death, they passed into the possession of Adrian van Lieseveldt, who used them for a Duytsche Ghetyden in 1495.

The most noteworthy initial letters are the five alphabets, printed in red, used by John of Westphalia. In the smallest the letters are a third of an inch square, in the largest about an inch and a quarter. This and the next size are picked out with white scroll-work, somewhat in the same way as Schoeffer's. Peter van Os at Zwolle used a large N, four inches square, with intertwining foliage. He had also a fount of rustic capitals, almost undecipherable. Leeu, besides his large S, had several good alphabets of initials. A very beautiful D, reproduced by Holtrop from the Vier Uterste (Quatuor novissima) of 1488, is much the most graceful letter in any Dutch book. No other initials of the same style have been found. Eckert van Hombergh also had some good initials, in which the ground is completely covered with a light floral design. Gotfrid van Os at Gouda, M. van der Goes at Antwerp, Jacob Jacobsoen at Delft, and Lud. de Ravescoet at Louvain, were the chief other possessors of initials, the use of which continued for a long time to be very partial.

Several of the devices of the Dutch printers are very splendid. The borders which surrounded the unicorn of H. Eckert van Hombergh and the eagle of Jacob Bellaert give them special magnificence. The Castle at Antwerp was used as a device by Gerard Leeu, and subsequently by Thierry Martens, and a printer at Gouda placed a similar erection on an elephant, perhaps as a pun between howdah and Gouda. Peter van Os at Zwolle had a large device of an angel holding a shield; M. van der Goes at Antwerp a still larger one of a ragged man flourishing a club, while his shield displays a white lion on a black ground. Another Antwerp printer, G. Back, used several varieties of bird-cages as his marks, in one of which the Antwerp castle is introduced on a shield hanging from the cage. Several printers—e.g. Colard Mansion at Bruges, Jacob Jacobsoen at Delft, and Gerard Leeu at Gouda, contented themselves with small devices of a pair of shields braced together. Leeu, however, while at Gouda, used also a large device of a helmeted shield supported by two lions.

CHAPTER X

The book-hand in use in Spain's manuscripts during the fifteenth century was unusually massive and handsome, and the same characteristics naturally reappear in the majority of the types used by the early printers in Spain. A considerable proportion of these were Germans, whose tradition of good press-work was very fairly maintained by their immediate successors, so that throughout a great part of the sixteenth century Spanish books retain much of the primitive dignity which we are wont to associate only with 'incunabula.' From a very early period, also, they are distinguished by the excellence of their initial letters, which are almost as plentiful as they are good; the great majority of books printed after 1485, which I have seen, being fully provided with them. The prevailing form of initial exhibits very delicate white tracery on a black ground. In a few instances, as in a Seneca printed by Meinardo Ungut and Stanislao Polono, at Seville, in 1491, some of the initials are in red, and have a very decorative effect. A fine capital L and A appear in a work of Jean de Mena, issued by these printers in 1499, and a good M in their Claros Varones of Pulgar in the following year. A Consolat, printed, it is said, by Pedro Posa at Barcelona in 1494, is very remarkable for its profusion of fine initials. Engraved borders are not of common occurrence in Spanish books, though I shall have to notice two striking instances of their use in books printed at Zamora and Valencia. Borders are found, also, on the title-pages of various laws printed at Barcelona during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, but these are of no great beauty, and some of the pieces of which they are composed are poor copies from the French Horae.

As a rule, Spanish title-pages are handsome and imposing. During the last few years of the fifteenth century and the beginning of its successor, the titles of books were often printed in large woodcut letters. A Spanish Livy, printed at Salamanca in 1497, a Vocabulary of Antonio Lebrixa, printed by Kromberger at Seville in 1506, and a Mar de Istorias printed at Valladolid in 1512, supply examples of this practice. In an Obra a llaors del benauenturat lo senyor sant Cristofol, printed at Valencia in 1498, the woodcut title is in white on a black ground, which is also relieved by a medallion of the saint fording the stream. Pictures were also used in connection with the more ordinary woodcut titles in black—e.g. in Juan de Lucena's Tratado de la vita beata, printed by Juan de Burgos in 1502, we have a cut of a king, bearing his sword of justice and surrounded by his counsellors; and in a Libro de Consolat tractant dels fets maritims of the same year, printed by Johan Luschner at Barcelona, beneath the woodcut title there is a large figure of a ship up whose masts sailors are climbing, apparently in quest of a very prominent moon.

Woodcut pictures of the hero decorate the title-pages of the romances of Spain as of other countries, and these pictorial title-pages are found also, though less frequently, in works of devotion and in plays. Such pictures are less common in Spain than elsewhere, because of the great popularity there of the heraldic title-page, in which the arms of the country, or of the hero or patron of the work, form a singularly successful method of ornament. These heraldic title-pages are found in a few books, printed before 1500, and were in common use throughout the sixteenth century.

The earliest Spanish illustrated book with which I am acquainted is the Libro delos Trabajos de Hercules of the Marquis Enrique de Villena, printed by Antonio de Centenera at Zamora, on January 15th, 1483 (1484). This has eleven woodcuts, illustrating the hero's exploits, and so rudely executed that they are plainly the work of a native artist. Far more interesting than these 'prentice cuts are the illustrative initials, apparently engraved on soft metal, in a Copilacion de Leyes, promulgated in 1485, and supposed to have been printed by Centenera in the same year. These initials are nine in number, and must have been designed and executed by finished artists, whose work is so fine that the printer in most instances has failed to do justice to it. On the first page of text an initial P contains within it figures of a king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella. This page has at its foot a border containing a hunting scene, with a blank shield in its centre. The rest of the page is surrounded by a text, printed decoratively, so as to form an open-work border. The first section of the laws, treating of 'la Santa Fe,' has an initial E, showing God the Father upholding the crucified Christ. The second section sets forth the duty of the king to hear causes two days a week, and begins with an L, here reproduced, in which the king is unpleasantly close pressed by the litigants.

Two knights spurring from the different sides of an S head the laws of chivalry; a Canonist and his scholars in an A preside over Matrimony; money-changers in a D over Commerce, while a luckless wretch being hanged in the midst of a T warns evil-doers of what they may expect under the criminal law. The pages containing these initials are enriched also by a border in two pieces, the lower part of which shows a shield, with a device of trees, supported by kneeling youths. The perpendicular piece running up the outer margin bears a floral design. All the letters, while directly illustrating the subjects of the chapters which they begin, are at the same time essentially decorative, and they are certainly the best pictorial initials I have ever seen, though it must be reckoned against them that they were unduly difficult to print with the text.

The page here reproduced, unfortunately only about one-third of its original size, from the famous romance of Tirant lo Blanch, gives us another example of this peculiar style of engraving. It is taken from the edition printed at Valencia in 1490, and may fairly be reckoned as one of the most decorative pages in any fifteenth-century book. The rest of the volume has no other ornament than some good initials.

The first Spanish book with woodcuts of any artistic merit with which I am acquainted is an edition of Diego de San Pedro's Carcel d'Amor, printed at Barcelona in 1493. This has sixteen different cuts, some of which are several times repeated. The title-cut, showing love's prison, is here reproduced, and gives a very good idea of a characteristic Spanish woodcut. The other illustrations show the lover in various attitudes before his lady, a meeting in a street, the author at work on his book, &c. Another edition of the Carcel d'Amor, with the same woodcuts, was printed at Burgos in 1496 by Fadrique Aleman.

Most of the other Spanish incunabula with woodcuts, which I have seen, were printed at Seville by Meinardo Ungut and Stanislao Polono. The first of these, Gorricio's Contemplaciones sobre el Rosario de nuestra señora, issued in 1495, has some good initials, two large cuts nearly the full size of the quarto page, and fifteen smaller ones, with graceful borders mostly on a black ground. The small cuts illustrate the life of Christ and of the B. Virgin, and are, to some extent, modelled on the pictures in the French Horae. In the same year, the same printers published Ayala's Chronica del Rey don Pedro, with a title-cut of a young king, seated on his throne, and also the Lilio de Medicina of B. de Gordonio with a title-cut of lilies. In 1496, a firm of four printers, 'Paulo de Colonia, Juan Pegnicer de Nuremberg, Magno y Thomas,' published an edition of Juan de Mena's Labirinto or Las CCC (so called from the number of stanzas in which it is written) with a title-cut of the author (?) kneeling before a king. Three years later, still at Seville, Pedro Brun printed in quarto the romance of the Emperor Vespasian, with fourteen full-page cuts of sea voyages, sieges, the death of Pilate, &c. Against these books printed at Seville, during the last decade of the century, I have only notes of one or two books issued at Salamanca, Valencia, and Barcelona, with unimportant title-cuts, and a reprint at Burgos of the Trabajos de Hercules (1499) with poor illustrations fitted into the columns of a folio page. But it is quite possible that my knowledge is as one-sided as it is limited, and I must, therefore, refrain from building up any theory that Seville, rather than any other town, was the chief home of illustrated books in Spain. After 1500 the Spanish books which I have met have no important illustrations beyond the cuts which appear on some of their title-pages. But here, also, I should be sorry to make my small experience the basis of a general statement.

The devices of the Spanish printers were greatly influenced by those of their compeers of Italy and France. The simple circle and cross, in white on a black ground, with the printer's initials in the semicircles, is fairly common, while Diego de Gumiel and Arnaldo Guillermo Brocar varied it, according to the best Italian fashion, with very beautiful floral tracery. The tree of knowledge and pendant shields, beloved of the French printers, appear in the marks of Meinardo Ungut and Stanislao Polono, and of Juan de Rosembach. Arnaldo Guillermo had another and very elaborate mark, showing a man kneeling before the emblems of the Passion, and two angels supporting a shield with a device of a porcupine. One of the quaintest of all printers' marks was used by a later printer of the name Juan Brocar, whose motto 'legitime certanti' is illustrated by a mail-clad soldier grasping a lady's hair while he himself is being seized by the devil!

CHAPTER XI

It may be taken, I think, for granted that at the time Caxton set up his press at Westminster, that is, in the year 1476, there was no wood-engraver competent to undertake the work of illustrating his books. We see, for instance, that in the first edition of the Canterbury Tales there are no woodcuts, while they appear in the second edition; and it is not likely that Caxton would have left a book so eminently suited for illustration without some such adornment had the necessary craftsmen been available. As it was, it was not till 1480 that woodcuts first appeared in an English printed book, the Mirror of the World. In this there are two series of cuts. One, consisting of diagrams, is found in most of the MSS. of the book; the other, which represents masters teaching their scholars or at work alone, was a new departure of Caxton's. It is quite probable that they were intended for general use in books, indeed we find some used in the Cato, but they do not appear to have been employed elsewhere. The diagrams are meagre and difficult to understand, so much so that the printer has printed several in their wrong places. The necessary letterpress occurring within them is not printed (Caxton had not then a small enough type), but is written in by hand, and it is worth noticing that this is done in all copies in the same hand, and so must have been done in Caxton's office, some are fond enough to suppose by Caxton himself.

In the next year appeared the second edition of the Game of Chesse, with a number of woodcuts. The first edition, printed at Bruges by Caxton and Mansion, had no illustrations. The cuts are coarsely designed and roughly cut, but serve their purpose; indeed, they are evidently intended as illustrations rather than ornaments. Some controversy has at different times arisen as to whether these cuts were executed in England or abroad, but Mr. Linton has very justly decided in favour of England. The work, he says, is so poor that any one who could hold a knife could cut them, therefore there was no necessity to send abroad.

About 1484 we have two important illustrated books, the Canterbury Tales and the Æsop; the former with 28 illustrations, the latter with 186.

The cuts of the Canterbury Tales depict for the most part the various individuals of the Pilgrimage, and there is also a bird's-eye view of all the pilgrims seated at an immense round table at supper, which was used afterwards by Wynkyn de Worde for the 'Assembly of Gods.' The copies of German cuts in the Æsop, with the exception of the full-page frontispiece (known only in the copy in the Windsor Library), are smaller, and are the work of two, if not three, engravers. One cut seems to have been hurriedly executed in a different manner to the rest, perhaps to take the place of one injured at the last moment. It is not worked in the usual manner with the outlines in black—i.e. raised lines on the wood-block, but a certain amount of the effect has been produced by a white line on a black ground—i.e. by the cut-away lines of the wood-block.

The Golden Legend, which was the next illustrated book to appear, contains the most ambitious woodcuts which Caxton used. Those in the earlier part are the full width of a large folio page, and show, especially in their backgrounds, a certain amount of technical skill. The later part of the book contains a number of small cuts of saints very coarsely executed, and the same cut is used over and over again for different saints.

In 1487 Caxton first used his large woodcut device, which is probably, though the contrary is often asserted, of English workmanship. It is entirely un-French in style and execution, and was probably cut to print on the Missal printed by Maynyal for Caxton in order that the publisher might be brought prominently into notice.

About this time (1487-88) two more illustrated books were issued,—the Royal Book and the Speculum Vite Christi. The series cut for the Speculum are of very good workmanship, though the designs are poor, but all of them were not used in the book. One or two appear later in books printed by W. de Worde, manifestly from the same series. The Royal Book contains only seven cuts, six of which are from the Speculum. Some of the cuts occur also in the Doctrinal of Sapience and the Book of Divers Ghostly Matters.

It is impossible not to think when examining Caxton's books that the use of woodcuts was rather forced upon him by the necessities of his business, than deliberately preferred by himself. He seems to have wished to popularise the more generally known books, and only to have used woodcuts when the book absolutely needed them. He did not, as some later printers did, simply use woodcuts to attract the unwary purchaser.

What cuts Caxton possessed at the end of his career it is hard to determine. The set of large Horae cuts which W. de Worde used must have been Caxton's, for we find one of them, the Crucifixion, used in the Fifteen O'es, which was itself intended as a supplement to a Horae, now unknown. In the same way there must have been a number of cuts for use in the 8vo Horae, but as that is known only from a small fragment, we cannot identify them. From similarity of style and identity of measurement we can pick out a few from Wynkyn de Worde's later editions, but many must be passed over.

On turning to examine the presses at work at the same time as Caxton's one cannot but be struck by the scarcity of illustrations. Lettou and Machlinia, though they produced over thirty books, had no ornaments that we know of beyond a border which was used in their edition of the Horae ad usum Sarum, and passed into the hands of Pynson. They seem to have been without everything except type, not having even initial letters.

The St. Alban's press was a step in advance. A few cuts were used in the Chronicles, and the Book of St. Alban's contains coats of arms, produced by a combination of wood-cutting and printing in colour.

The Oxford press was the most ambitious, and was in possession of two sets of cuts, in neither case intended for the books in which they were used. One set was prepared for a Golden Legend, but no such book is known to have been issued at the Oxford press. One of these cuts appears as a frontispiece to Lyndewode's Constitutions. It represents Jacobus de Voragine writing the Golden Legend, so that it did equally well for Lyndewode writing his law-book. Others of the series are used in the Liber Festialis of 1486, but as that was a small folio and the cuts were large, the ends were cut off, and they are all printed in a mutilated condition. The other cuts used in the Festial are small, and form part of a set for a Horae, but no Horae is known to have been printed at the Oxford press. It would be natural to suppose in this case that these cuts had been procured from some other printer who had used them in the production of the books for which they were intended; but the most careful search has failed to find them in any other book. Besides these cuts the Oxford press owned a very beautiful border, which was used in the commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle by Alexander de Hales and the commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah by John Lattebury, printed in 1481 and 1482. The printers owned nothing else for the adornment of their books but a rudely cut capital G, which we find used many times in the Festial.

The poverty of ornamental letters and borders is very noticeable in all the English presses of the fifteenth century. Caxton possessed one ambitious letter, a capital A, which was used first in the Order of Chivalry, and a series of eight borders, each made up of four pieces, and found for the first time in the Fifteen O'es. They are of little merit, and compare very unfavourably with French work of the period. The best set of borders used in England belonged to Notary and his partners when they started in London about 1496. They are in the usual style, with dotted backgrounds, and may very likely have been brought from France. Pynson's borders, which he used in a Horae about 1495, are much more English in style, but are not good enough to make the page really attractive; in fact almost the only fine specimens of English printing with borders are to be found in the Morton Missal, which he printed in 1500. In this book also there are fine initial letters, often printed in red. It is hard to understand why, as a rule, English initial letters were so very bad; it certainly was not from the want of excellent models, for those in the Sarum missals, printed at Venice by Hertzog in 1494, and sold in England by Frederic Egmont, contain most beautifully designed initials, as good as can be found in any early printed book.

Wynkyn de Worde, when he succeeded in 1491 to Caxton's business, found himself in possession of a large number of cuts, a considerably larger number than ever appeared in the books of Caxton's that now remain to us. The first illustrated book he issued was a new edition of the Golden Legend, in which the old cuts were utilised. This was printed in 1493. In 1494 a new edition of the Speculum Vite Christi was issued, of which only one complete copy is known, that in the library at Holkham. It probably contains only the series of cuts used by Caxton in his edition, for the few leaves to be found in other libraries have no new illustrations. About the same time (1494) De Worde issued several editions of the Horae ad usum Sarum, one in octavo (known from a few leaves discovered in the binding of a book in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) and the rest in quarto. In the quarto editions we find the large series of pictures, among which are the three rioters and three skeletons, the tree of Jesse, and the Crucifixion, which occur in Caxton's Fifteen O'es. It is extremely probable that all the cuts in these editions had belonged to Caxton. The two cuts in the fragment of the octavo edition, however, are of quite a different class, evidently newly cut, and much superior in style and simplicity to Caxton's. It is much to be regretted that no complete copy of the book exists, for the neat small cuts and bold red and black printing form a very tasteful page.

A curious specimen of engraving is to be found in the Scala Perfectionis, by Walter Hylton, also printed in 1494. It represents the Virgin and Child seated under an architectural canopy, and below this are the words of the antiphon beginning, 'Sit dulce nomen d[=n]i.' These words are not printed from type, but cut on the block, and the engraver seems to have treated them simply as part of the decoration, for many of the words are by themselves quite unreadable and bear only a superficial resemblance to the inscription from which they were copied.

An edition of Bartholomaeus' De proprietatibus rerum issued about this time has a number of cuts, not of very great interest; and the Book of St. Albans of 1496 has an extra chapter on fishing, illustrated with a picture of an angler at work, with a tub, in the German fashion, to put his fish into. It has also a curiously modern diagram of the sizes of hooks. In 1498 De Worde issued an illustrated edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The cuts are very ambitious, but badly executed, and the hand of the engraver who cut them may be traced in several books. In 1499 an edition of Mandeville was issued, ornamented with a number of small cuts, and about this time several small books were issued having cuts on the title-page.

Richard Pynson's first illustrated book was an edition of the Canterbury Tales, printed some time before 1492. At the head of each tale is a rudely executed cut of the pilgrim who narrates it. These cuts were made for this edition, and were in some cases altered while the book was going through the press to serve for different characters: the Squire and the Manciple, the Sergeant and Doctor of Physic, are from the same blocks with slight alterations. In 1494 came an edition of Lydgate's Falle of Princis, a translation from the De Casibus virorum et feminarum illustrium of Boccaccio, illustrated with the cuts used by Jean Dupré in his Paris edition of a French version of the same work in 1483. One of the neatest of these, depicting Marcus Manlius thrown into the Tiber, is here shown. About 1497 an edition of the Speculum Vite Christi was issued, with a number of neatly executed small cuts, and in 1500 Pynson printed the beautiful Sarum Missal, known as the Morton Missal. Special borders and ornaments, introducing a rebus on the name of Morton, were engraved for this, and a full-page cut of the prelate's coat of arms appears at the commencement of the book.