In the same year (1494) as the Narrenschiff, Bergmann printed another of Brant's works, his poems 'In laudem Virginis Mariae' and of the Saints, with fourteen cuts, and in 1495 his De origine et conservatione bonorum regum et laude civitatis Hierosolymae, which has only two, but these of considerable size. In the following year Brant transferred his patronage to Michael Furter, who printed his Passio Sancti Meynhardi, with fifteen large cuts, by no means equal to those of the Narrenschiff. In 1498 the indefatigable author employed both his printers, giving to Bergmann his Varia Carmina and to Furter his edition of the Revelatio S. Methodii, which is remarkable not only for its fifty-five illustrations, but for Brant's allusion to his own theory, 'imperitis pro lectione pictura est,' to the unlearned a picture is the best text. After 1498 Brant removed to Strassburg, where his influence was speedily apparent in the illustrated books published by Johann Grüninger, who in 1494 had issued as his first illustrated book an edition of the Narrenschiff, and in 1496 published an illustrated and annotated Terence. He followed these up with other editions of the Narrenschiff, Brant's Carmina Varia, and a Horace (1498), with over six hundred cuts, many of which, however, had appeared in the printer's earlier books. In 1501 he produced an illustrated Boethius, and in the next year two notable works, Brant's Heiligenleben and an annotated Virgil, each of them illustrated with over two hundred cuts, of which very few had been used before.

The year 1494 was notable for the publication not only of the Narrenschiff, but of a Low Saxon Bible printed by Stephan Arndes at Lübeck, where he had been at work since 1488. The cuts to this book show some advance upon those in previous German Bibles, but they are not strikingly better than the work in the Nuremberg Chronicle, to whose designers we must now return. In 1496 we find Wohlgemuth designing a frontispiece to an Ode on S. Sebaldus, published by Conrad Celtes, a Nuremberg scholar, with whom he had previously entered into negotiations for illustrating an edition of Ovid, which was never issued. In 1501 Celtes published the comedies of Hroswitha, a learned nun of the tenth century, who had undertaken to show what charming religious plays might be written on the lines of Terence. By far the finest of the large cuts with which the book is illustrated is the second frontispiece, in which Hroswitha, comedies in hand, is being presented by her Abbess to the Emperor. The designs to the plays themselves are dull enough, a fault which those who are best acquainted with the good nun's style as a dramatist will readily excuse. Her one brilliant success, a scene in which a wicked governor, who has converted his kitchen into a temporary prison, is made to inflict his embraces on the pots and pans, instead of on the holy maidens immured amidst them, was not selected for illustration.

The woodcuts to the plays of Hroswitha were designed by Wohlgemuth or his scholars, and this was also the case with those in the Quatuor libri amorum, published by Celtes in 1502, to which Albrecht Dürer himself contributed three illustrations. For three years, from St. Andrew's Day 1486, Dürer had served an apprenticeship to Wohlgemuth, and when he returned to Nuremberg after his 'Wanderjahre,' during which he seems to have executed a single woodcut of no great merit for an edition of the Epistles of S. Jerome, printed by Nic. Kesler, at Basel, in 1492, he too began to work as an illustrator. His first important effort in this character is the series of sixteen wood-engravings, illustrating the Apocalypse, printed at Nuremberg in 1498. The first leaf bears a woodcut title Die heimliche Offenbarung Johannis, and on the verso of the last cut but one is the colophon, 'Gedrücket zu Nurnbergk durch Albrecht Dürer maler, nach Christi geburt M.CCCC und darnach im xcviij iar.' It has also in one or more editions some explanatory text, taken from the Bible, but in spite of these additions it is a portfolio of engravings rather than a book, and as such does not come within our province. On the same principle we can only mention, without detailed description, the Epitome in Divae Parthenices Mariae historiam of 1511, the Passio Domini nostri Jesu, issued about the same date, and the Passio Christi, or 'Little Passion,' as it is usually called, printed about 1512. All these have descriptive verses by the Benedictine monk Chelidonius (though these do not appear in all copies), but they belong to the history of wood-engraving as such, and not to our humbler subject of book-illustration. Still less need we concern ourselves with the 'Triumphal Car' and 'Triumphal Arch' of the Emperor Maximilian, designed by Dürer, and published, the one in 1522, the other not till after the artist's death. Besides these works and the single sheet of the Rhinoceros of 1513, Dürer designed frontispieces for an edition of his own poems in 1510, for a life of S. Jerome by his friend Lazarus Spengler in 1514, and for the Reformation der Stadt Nürnberg of 1521. In 1513 also he drew a set of designs for half-ornamental, half-illustrative borders to fill in the blank spaces left in the Book of Prayers printed on vellum for the Emperor Maximilian in 1514. By him also was the woodcut of Christ on the Cross, which appears first in the Eichstätt Missal of three years later. For us, however, Dürer's importance does not lie in these particular designs, but in the fact that he set an example of drawing for the wood-cutters, which other artists were not slow to follow.

In directing the attention of German artists to the illustration of books, the Emperor Maximilian played a more important part than Dürer himself. As in politics, so in art, his designs were on too ambitious a scale, and of the three great books he projected, the Theuerdank, the Weisskunig, and the Freydal, only the first was brought to a successful issue. This is a long epic poem allegorising the Emperor's wedding trip to Burgundy, and though attributed to Melchior Pfintzing was apparently, to a large extent, composed by Maximilian himself. The printing was entrusted to the elder Hans Schoensperger of Augsburg, but for some unknown reason, when the book was completed in 1517, the honour of its publication was allowed to Nuremberg. A special fount of type was cut for it by Jost Dienecker of Antwerp, who indulged in such enormous flourishes, chiefly to any g or h which happened to occur in the last line of text in a page, that many eminent printers have imagined that the whole book was engraved on wood. The difficulties of the setting up, however, have been greatly exaggerated, for the flourishes came chiefly at the top or foot of the page, and are often not connected with any letter in the text. In the present writer's opinion it is an open question whether the type, which is otherwise a very handsome one, is in any way improved by these useless appendages. They add on an average about an inch at the top and an inch and a half at the foot to the column of the text, which is itself ten inches in height, and contains twenty-four lines to a full page. The task of illustrating this royal work was entrusted to Hans Schäufelein, an artist already in the Emperor's employment, and from his designs there were engraved one hundred and eighteen large cuts, each of them six and a half inches high by five and a half broad. The cuts, which chiefly illustrate hunting scenes and knightly conflicts, are not conspicuously better than those produced about the same time by other German artists, but they have the great advantage of having been carefully printed on fine vellum, and this has materially assisted their reputation.

The Weisskunig, a celebration of Maximilian's life and travels, and the Freydal, in honour of his knightly deeds, were part of the same scheme as the Theuerdank. The two hundred and thirty-seven designs for the Weisskunig were mainly the work of Hans Burgkmair,[8] an Augsburg artist of repute; its literary execution was entrusted to the Emperor's secretary, Max Treitzsaurwein, who completed the greater part of the text as early as 1512. But the Emperor's death in 1519 found the great work still unfinished, and it was not until 1775 that it was published as a fragment, with the original illustrations (larger, and perhaps finer, than those in the Theuerdank), of which the blocks had, fortunately, been preserved. The Freydal, though begun as early as 1502, was left still less complete; the designs for it, however, are in existence at Vienna. The 'Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian,' another ambitious work, with one hundred and thirty-five woodcuts designed by Burgkmair, was first published in 1796.

The death of Maximilian in 1519 and the less artistic tastes of Charles V. caused German illustrators to turn for work to the Augsburg printers, and during the next few years we find them illustrating a number of books for the younger Schoensperger, for Hans Othmar, for Miller, and for Grimm and Wirsung, all Augsburg firms. The most important result of this activity was the German edition of Petrarch's De Remediis utriusque Fortunae, for which in the years immediately following the Emperor's death an artist named Hans Weiditz, whose identity has only lately been re-established, drew no less than two hundred and fifty-nine designs. Owing to the death of the printer, Grimm, the book was put on one side, but was finally brought out by Heinrich Steiner, Grimm's successor, in 1532. In the interim some of the cuts had been used for an edition of Cicero De Senectute, and they were afterwards used again in a variety of works. Despite the excellence of the cuts the Petrarch is a very disappointing book. To do justice to the fine designs the most delicate press work was necessary, and, except when the pressmen were employed by an Emperor, the delicacy was not forthcoming; it may be said, indeed, that it was made impossible by the poorness and softness of the paper on which the book is printed. At this period it was only the skill of individual artists which prevented German books from being as dull and uninteresting as they soon afterwards became.

Books of devotion in Germany never attained to the beauty of the French Horae, but they did not remain uninfluenced by them. In or before 1496 we find a Nouum B. Mariae Virginis Psalterium printed at Zinna, near Magdeburg, with very beautiful, though florid, borders. In 1513 there appeared at Augsburg a German prayer-book, entitled Via Felicitatis, with thirty cuts, all with rich conventional borders, probably by Hans Schäufelein, and we have already seen that in the same year Dürer himself designed borders for the Emperor's own Gebetbuch. In 1515, again, Burgkmair had contributed a series of designs, many of which had rich architectural borders, to a Leiden Christi, published by Schoensperger at Augsburg. In 1520 the same artist designed another set of illustrations, with very richly ornamented borders of flowers and animals, for the Devotissimae Meditationes de vita beneficiis et passione Jesu Christi, printed by Grimm. The use of borders soon became a common feature in German title-pages, especially in the small quartos in which the Lutherans and anti-Lutherans carried on their controversies; but it cannot be said that they often exhibit much beauty.

The innumerable translations of the Bible, which were another result of the Lutheran controversy, also provided plenty of work for the illustrators. The two Augsburg editions of the New Testament in 1523 were both illustrated, the younger Schoensperger's by Schäufelein, Silvan Othmar's by Burgkmair. Burgkmair also issued a series of twenty-one illustrations to the Apocalypse, for which Othmar had not had the patience to wait.

At Wittenberg the most important works issued were the repeated editions of Luther's translation of the Bible. Here also Lucas Cranach, who had previously (in 1509) designed the cuts for what was known as the Wittenberger Heiligthumsbuch, in 1521 produced his Passional Christi und Antichristi, in which, page by page, the sufferings and humility of Christ were contrasted with the luxury and arrogance of the Pope. At Wittenberg, too, the thin quartos with woodcut borders to their title-pages were peculiarly in vogue, the majority of the designs being poor enough, but some few having considerable beauty, especially those of Lucas Cranach, of which an example is here given. Meanwhile, at Strassburg, Hans Grüninger and Martin Flach and his son continued to print numerous illustrated works, largely from designs by Hans Baldung Grün, and a still more famous publisher had arisen in the person of Johann Knoblouch, who for some of his books secured the help of Urs Graf, an artist whose work preserved some of the old-fashioned simplicity of treatment. At Nuremberg illustrated books after Koburger's death proceeded chiefly from the presses of Jobst Gutknecht and Peypus, for the latter of whom Hans Springinklee, one of the minor artists employed on the Weisskunig, occasionally drew designs. At Basel Michael Furter continued to issue illustrated books for the first fifteen years of the new century, Johann Amorbach adorned with woodcuts his editions of ecclesiastical statutes and constitutions, and Adam Petri issued a whole series of illustrated books, chiefly of religion and theology. To Basel Urs Graf gave the most and the best of his work, and there the young Hans Holbein designed in rapid succession the cuts for the New Testament of 1522, for an Apocalypse, two editions of the Pentateuch, and a Vulgate, besides numerous ornamental borders. Some of these merely imitate the rather tasteless designs of Urs Graf, in which the ground plan is architectural, and relief is given by a profusion of naked children, not always in very graceful attitudes. Holbein's best designs are far lighter and prettier. The foot of the border is usually occupied by some historical scene, the death of John the Baptist, Mucius Scævola and Porsenna, the death of Cleopatra, the leap of Curtius, or Hercules and Orpheus. In a title-page to the Tabula Cebetis he shows the whole course of man's life—little children crowding through the gate, which is guarded by their 'genius,' and the fortune, sorrow, luxury, penitence, virtue, and happiness which awaits them. The two well-known borders for the top and bottom of a page, illustrating peasants chasing a thieving fox and their return dancing, were designed for Andreas Cratander, for whom also, as for Valentine Curio, Holbein drew printers' devices. Ambrosius Holbein also illustrated a few books, the most noteworthy in the eyes of Englishmen being the 1518 edition of More's Utopia, printed by Froben. His picture of Hercules Gallicus, dragging along the captives of his eloquence, part of a border designed for an Aulus Gellius published by Cratander in 1519, is worthy of Hans himself. While the German printers degenerated ever more and more, those of Basel and Zurich maintained a much higher standard of press-work, and from 1540 to 1560, when the demand for illustrated books had somewhat lessened, produced a series of classical editions in tall folios, well printed and on good paper, which at least command respect. They abound with elaborate initial letters, which are, however, too deliberately pictorial to be in good taste. In Germany itself by the middle of the sixteenth century the artistic impulse had died away, or survived only in books like those of Jost Amman, in which the text merely explains the illustrations. It is a pleasure to go back some seventy or eighty years and turn our attention to the beginning of book-illustration in Italy.

CHAPTER V

Surrounded by pictures and frescoes, and accustomed to the utmost beauty in their manuscripts, the Italians did not feel the need of the cheaper arts, and for the first quarter of a century after the introduction of printing into their country, the use of engraved borders, initial letters, and illustrations was only occasional and sporadic. Perhaps not very long after the middle of the century an Italian block-book of the Passion had been issued, probably at Venice, as it was there that most of the cuts were used again in 1487 for an edition of the Devote Meditatione, attributed to S. Bonaventura. A copy of this is in the British Museum; of the block-book eighteen leaves are preserved at Berlin. Despite some ungainliness in the figures and rather coarse cutting, the pictures are vigorous and effective, but quite unlike any later Venetian work. Something of the same kind may be said of those in an edition of the Meditationes of Cardinal Turrecremata, printed by Ulrich Hahn at Rome in 1467, the first work printed in Italy with movable type, in which woodcut illustrations were used. The cuts are thirty-four in number, and professed to illustrate the same subjects as the frescoes recently painted by the cardinal's order in the Church of San Maria di Minerva at Rome.[9] The execution is so rude, that it is impossible to say whether they are the work of a German influenced by Italian models, or of an Italian working to please a German master, nor is the point of the slightest importance. Thirty-three of the cuts were used again in the editions printed at Rome in 1473 and 1478, and it is from the 1473 edition that the accompanying illustration of the Flight into Egypt is taken. This in its original size is one of the best of the series, but the reduction necessary for its appearance on one of our pages has had a more than usually unfortunate effect, both on the cut itself and on the printer's type which appears below it.

In 1481, the courtier-printer, Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, issued an edition of the Opuscula of Philippus de Barberiis adorned with twenty-nine cuts representing twelve prophets, twelve sibyls, St. John the Baptist, the Holy Family, Christ with the Emblems of His Passion, the virgin Proba, and the philosopher Plato. Plato, Malachi, and Hosea are all represented by the same cut, another serves for both Jeremiah and Zechariah, and two of the Sibyls are also made to merge their individualities. With the exception of the figure of Christ, which is merely painful, the cuts are pleasantly and even ludicrously rude. Nevertheless, they are not without vigour, and are, to my thinking, greatly preferable to the more conventional figures of the twelve Sibyls and Proba which appeared shortly afterwards in an undated edition of the same book, printed by Sixtus Riessinger. In this edition the figures are surrounded by architectural borders, and we have also a border to the first page and several large initial letters, all in exact imitation of the interlacement work, which is the commonest form of decoration in Italian manuscripts of the time. Riessinger's mark, a girl holding a black shield with a white arrow on it, and a scroll with the letters S.R.D.A. (Sixtus Riessinger de Argentina), is found in the 'register' at the end of the book. To Riessinger we also owe a Cheiromantia, with figures of hands, which I have not seen, while from Lignamine's press there was issued an edition of the Herbarium of Apuleius Barbarus (who was, of course, confused with his famous namesake), which has rude botanical figures and, at the end of the book, a most man-like portrait of a mandrake, with a dog duly tugging at one of his fibrous legs. The list of illustrated books printed at Rome before 1490 also includes[10] some little editions, mostly by Silber or Plannck, of the Mirabilia Romae, a guidebook to the antiquities of the city, in which there are a few cuts of pilgrims gazing at the cloth of S. Veronica, of SS. Peter and Paul, of Romulus and Remus, and other miscellaneous subjects. The interest of all these books is purely antiquarian.

If we turn from Rome to the neighbouring city of Naples, we shall find evidence of much more artistic work. In 1478 Sixtus Riessinger printed there for Francesco Tuppo an edition of Boccaccio's Libro di florio e di bianzefiore, or Philocolo, illustrated with forty-one woodcuts, of no great technical merit, but by no means without charm. Two years later a representation of the supposed origin of music by the figures of five blacksmiths working at an anvil occurs in an edition of the Musices Theoria of Francesco Gafori, printed in 1480 by Francesco di Dino. Much more important than this is a handsome edition of Æsop published in 1485 by Francesco Tuppo, and printed for him by an anonymous firm known to bibliographers as the 'Germain fidelissimi.' This contains eighty-seven large cuts heavily cut, but well drawn and with a massive vigour, one of which, representing the death of Æsop, occupies a full page. The cuts illustrating the fabulist's life have rather commonplace borders to them, but when the fables themselves are reached, these are replaced by much more important ones. Into an upper compartment are introduced figures of Hercules wrestling with Antæus, Hercules riding on a lion, and a combat between mounted pigmies. The fables have also a large border surrounding the first page of text, used again in the Hebrew Bible of 1488. The ground-work of all the borders is black, but this has not always enabled them to escape the hand of the colourist. The book is also adorned by two large and two smaller printed initials. To the same artist as the illustrator of the Æsop must be attributed the title-cut of Granollach's Astrologia, issued in or about the same year. In 1486, again, Matthias Moravus printed one of the few Italian Horae, a charming little book, three inches by two, with sixteen lines of very pretty Gothic type, printed in red and black, to each of its tiny pages, and four little woodcuts, which in the only copy I have seen have been painted over. A daintier prayer-book can hardly be conceived.

When we turn from the south to the north of Italy, we find that an Italian printer at Verona had preceded the German immigrants in issuing an important work with really fine woodcuts as early in 1472. This is the De Re Militari of Robertus Valturius, written some few years previously, and dedicated to Sigismund Malatesta. In this fine book, printed by John of Verona, there are eighty-two woodcuts representing various military operations and engines, all drawn in firm and graceful outline, which could hardly be bettered. The designs for these cuts have been attributed to the artist Matteo de' Pasti, whose skill as a painter, sculptor, and engraver, Valturius had himself commended in a letter written in the name of Malatesta to Mahomet II. The conjecture rests solely on this commendation, but seems intrinsically probable. The book has no other adornment save these woodcuts and its fine type. Another edition was printed in the same town eleven years later by Boninus de Boninis.

Besides the Valturius, the only other early Verona book with illustrations known to me is an edition of Æsop in the Italian version of Accio Zucco, printed by Giovanni Alvisio in 1479. This has a frontispiece in which the translator is seen presenting his book to a laurel-crowned person sitting in a portico, through which there is a distant view. This is followed by a page of majuscules containing the title of the book, but ending with a 'foeliciter incipit.' On the back of this is a tomb-like erection, bearing the inscription 'Lepidissimi Æsopi Fabellae,' which gives it the rank of the second ornamental title-page (see p. 32 for the first). Facing this is a page surrounded by an ornamental border, at the foot of which is the usual shield supported by the usual naked boys. Within the border are Latin verses beginning:

the lines being spaced out with fragments from the ornamental borders which surround each of the pictures in the body of the book. These, on the whole, are not so good as those in the Naples edition of 1485, but were helped out, at least in some copies, by rather pretty colouring. The chief feature in the book is the care bestowed upon the preliminary leaves.

In Florence, before 1490, we have no example of wood-engraving employed in book illustration, but in 1477, Nicolaus Lorenz of Breslau issued there the first of three books with illustrations engraved on copper. This is an edition of Bettini's Monte Santo di Dio with three plates, representing respectively (1) the Holy Mountain, up which a man is climbing by the aid of a ladder of virtues; (2) Christ standing in a 'mandorla' or almond-shaped halo formed by the heads of cherubs; and (3) the torments of Hell. This was followed in 1481 by a Dante with the commentary of Landino, with engravings illustrating the first eighteen cantos. Spaces were left for engravings at the head of the other cantos, but the plan was too ambitious, and they were never filled up. Some copies of the book have no engravings at all, others only two, those prefixed to Cantos 1 and 3, the first of which is most inartistically introduced on the lower margin of the page, tempting mutilation by the binder's shears. The other venture of Nicolaus Lorenz, which has engraved work, is the Sette Giornate della Geographia of Berlinghieri, in which he introduces numerous maps.

At Milan only two illustrated books are known to have been issued before 1490, both of which appeared in 1479. The rarer of these, which is seldom found in perfect condition, is the Summula di pacifica Conscientia of Fra Pacifico di Novara, printed by Philippus de Lavagna, and illustrated with three copper-plates, one of which represents the virtues of the Madonna, the others containing diagrams exhibiting the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. The other book is a Breviarium totius juris canonici, printed by Leonard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenceller, with a woodcut portrait of its author, 'Magister Paulus Florentinus ordinis Sancti Spiritus,' otherwise Paolo Attavanti.

The illustrated books printed in Italy which we have hitherto noticed are of great individual interest, but they led to the establishment of no school of book-illustration, and the value of wood engravings was as yet so little understood that the cuts in them often failed to escape the hands of the colourists. At Venice, on the other hand, where Bernhard Maler and Erhard Ratdolt introduced the use of printed initials and borders in 1476, we find a continuous progress to the record of which we must now turn. The border to the title-page of the Kalendars of 1476 has already been noticed: both the Latin and the Italian editions also contained printed initials of a rustic shape, resembling those in some early books in Ulm, but larger and better. The next year the partners made a great step in advance in the initials and borders of an Appian, and an edition of Cepio's Gesta Petri Mocenici. These were followed by an edition of Dionysius Periegetes, and in 1478 by the Cosmographia of Pomponius Mela. Three distinct borders are used in these books, all of them with light and graceful floral patterns in relief on a black ground. The large initials are of the same character, and both these and the borders are unmistakably Italian. In 1478 Ratdolt lost the aid of Bernhard Maler, who up to that date seems to have been the leading spirit of the firm, and the books subsequently issued are much less decorative. In 1479 another German, Georg Walch, issued an edition of the Fasciculus Temporum with illustrations mostly poor enough, but with a quaint little attempt at realism in one of Venice. These cuts of Walch's, and also a decorative initial, Ratdolt was content to copy on a slightly larger scale in an edition of his own the next year. He also printed an undated Chiromantia, with twenty-one figures of heads, a reprint of which bearing his name and that of Mattheus Cerdonis de Windischgretz was issued at Padua in 1484. In 1482, came the Poetica Astronomica of Hyginus, with numerous woodcuts of the astronomical powers, those of Mercury (here very slightly reduced) and Sol being perhaps the best. To the same year belongs a reprint of the Cosmographia of Pomponius Mela with a curious map and a few good initials, also a Euclid with mathematical diagrams and a border and initials from the Appian of 1477.

After 1482 Ratdolt does not seem to have printed any new illustrated books, and in 1486 he ceased printing at Venice and returned, as we have seen, to Augsburg. Subject to the doubt as to whether he has not been credited with praise which really belongs to Bernhard Maler, his brief Italian career entitles him to a place of some importance among the decorators of books, for though his illustrations were unimportant, his borders and initials are among the best of the fifteenth century.

In 1482 Octavianus Scotus printed three Missals with a rude cut of the Crucifixion, and these were imitated by other printers in 1483, 1485, and 1487.

The year 1486 was marked by the publication, by Bernardino de Benaliis, of an edition of the Supplementum Chronicarum of Giovanni Philippo Foresti of Bergamo, with numerous outline woodcuts of cities, for the most part purely imaginary and conventional, the same cuts being used over and over again for different places. Four years later a new edition was printed by Bernardino de Novara, in which more accurate pictures were substituted in the case of some of the more important towns, notably Florence and Rome. In both issues the first three cuts, representing the Creation, the Fall, and the sacrifice of Cain and Abel, are copied from those in the Cologne Bible.

The year after his edition of the Supplementum, Bernardinus de Benaliis printed an Æsop with sixty-one woodcuts adapted from those in the Veronese edition of 1479. Of this edition Dr. Lippmann, who had the only known copy under his charge at Berlin, remarks that 'the style of engraving is, to a large extent, cramped and angular, and the entire appearance of the work is that of a genuine chapbook.'

In 1488 we arrive at the first of the numerous illustrated editions of the Trionfi of Petrarch. This was printed by Bernardino de Novara, and has six full-page cuts, measuring some ten inches by six, and illustrating the triumphs of Love, of Chastity, Death, Fame, and Time, and of the true Divinity over the false gods. The designs are excellent, but the engraver had very imperfect control over his point, and his treatment of the eyes of the figures introduced is by itself sufficient to spoil the pictures. Curiously enough, the ornamental border of white figures on a black ground is certainly better cut than the pictures themselves.

The same inferiority of the engraver to the designer is seen in the illustrations to the 1489 edition of the Deuote Meditatione sopra la passione del nostro signore attributed to S. Bonaventura. The first illustrated edition of this book, with eleven illustrations taken (slightly cut down) from the block book of the Passion already mentioned, had been printed in 1487 by Ieronimo de Santis. The 1489 edition was printed by Matteo di Codecha (or Capcasa) of Parma, who republished the book no less than six times during the next five years, after which the cuts were used by other printers,—e.g. by Gregorio di Rusconi, from whose edition in 1508 our illustration of the mocking of Christ is taken. It is interesting to compare this Venetian series with the Florentine edition published a little later by Antonio Mischomini, whose engraver, while taking many hints from the designs of his predecessor, greatly improved on them. The next year witnessed the first Venetian edition of another work in which the artists of the two cities were to be matched together. This is the Fior di Virtù, whose title-cut of Fra Cherubino da Spoleto gathering flowers in the convent garden shows a great advance on previous Venetian work. Unfortunately the British Museum copy has been slightly injured, so that I am obliged to take my reproduction from the second of two similar editions published by Matteo Codecha in 1492, 1493. These have each thirty-six vignettes in the text, illustrating the examples in the animal world of the virtues which the author desired to inculcate.

We must now turn to the first illustrated edition of Malermi's Italian version of the Bible, printed in 1490. After the woodcut basis for the six little illuminations in the Spencer copy of Adam of Ammergau's edition of 1471, the first Biblical woodcuts at Venice are a series of thirty-eight small vignettes which decorate an edition of the Postilla or sermons, of Nicolaus de Lyra, printed for Octavianus Scotus in 1489. In the Bible itself, printed the next year by Giovanni Ragazzo for Lucantonio Giunta, the illustrations are on a very lavish scale, numbering in all three hundred and eighty-three, of which a few are duplicates, and about a fourth are adapted in miniature from the cuts in the Cologne Bibles, which formed a model for so many other editions. Some of the best cuts in this and other Venetian books are signed with a small b, which by some writers has been supposed to stand for the name of the artist who designed them, but is more probably to be referred to the workshop at which they were engraved. The craftsmen employed on the New Testament were quite unskilled, but many of the illustrations to the Old Testament are delightful. The first page of the Bible is occupied by six somewhat larger cuts, illustrating the days of Creation, joined together within an architectural border. Other editions containing the same cuts, with additions from other books, were issued in 1494, 1498, and 1502. A rival edition, printed by Guglielmo de Monteferrato, with a new set of cuts of a similar character appeared in 1493.

These three religious works, the Meditatione, the Postilla, and the Malermi Bible thoroughly established the use of vignettes, or small cuts worked into the text, as an alternative to full-page illustrations, like those in the Petrarch, and it was natural that this method of decoration should soon be applied to the greatest of Italian works, the Divina Commedia. In producing an illustrated Dante, Venice had been anticipated not only by the Florentine edition of 1481, though the engravings in this are only found in the first few cantos, but by a very curious edition published at Brescia in 1487, with full-page cuts, surrounded by a black border with white arabesques. These large cuts, which measure ten inches by six, are very coarsely executed, and have no merit save what the earlier ones derive from their imitation of those in the Florentine edition. In the course of the year 1491 two illustrated Dantes were published at Venice, the first on March 3rd by Bernardino Benali and Matteo [Codecha] da Parma, the second on November 18th by Pietro Cremonese. The earlier edition has a fine woodcut frontispiece illustrating the first canto, but the vignettes which succeed it are so badly cut as to lose all their beauty. In the later edition the same designs appear to have been followed, but the vignettes are larger and much better cut, so that they are at least somewhat less unworthy of their subject. Both editions have printed initials, but of the poorest kind, and in both the text is hidden away amid the laborious commentary of Landino.

After Dante's Divina Commedia it is natural to expect an edition of Boccaccio's Decamerone, and this duly followed the next year from the press of Gregorius de Gregoriis. The first page is occupied by a woodcut of the ten fine ladies and gentlemen who tell the stories, seated in the beautiful garden to which they had retired from the plague which was raging around them. Beneath this are seventeen lines of text, with a blank left for an initial H, and woodcut and text are surrounded by an architectural border, at the foot of whose columns little boys standing on the heads of lions are blowing horns, while in the lower section of the design the usual blank shield is approached from either side by cupids riding on rams. The blank for the initial is a great blot on the page, as any coloured letter would have destroyed the delicacy of the whole design. In the body of the work each of the ten books is headed by a double cut, in one part of which the company of narrators is standing in front of a gateway, while one of their number is playing a guitar; in the other they are all seated before a fountain, presided over by a wreath-crowned master of the story-telling. The vignettes which illustrate the different tales vary very much in quality, though some, like the little cut of the Marquis and his friends approaching Griselda as she brings water from the well, could hardly be bettered.

The Boccaccio of 1492 heralded a long series of illustrated books from the press of Gregorius de Gregoriis and his brother John. Most of these were devotional in their character, e.g. the Zardine de Oratione, the Monte dell' Oratione, the Vita e Miracoli del Sancto Antonio di Padova, the Passione di Cristo, &c. The Novellino of Masuccio Salernitano formed a pendant to the Boccaccio, and was published in the same year. To the Gregorii we also owe the magnificent border, in white relief on a black ground, to the Latin Herodotus of 1494, repeated again in the second volume of the works of S. Jerome published in 1497-98. Equally famous with any of these is the same printer's series of editions of the Fascicolo de Medicina of Johannes Ketham. In the first of these, printed in 1491, the illustrations are confined to cuts of various dreadful-looking surgical instruments; but in 1493 large pictures were added, each occupying the whole of a folio page, and representing a dissection, a consultation of physicians, the bedside of a man struck down by the plague. The dissection was printed in several colours, but this experiment was abandoned, and a new block was cut for the subsequent editions. In some of his later books Gregorius repaired the mistake of the Boccaccio, and used excellent woodcut initials.

The Herodotus of 1494 has only its magnificent border by way of illustration, but other classical authors received much more generous treatment during this decade. An Italian Livy, with numerous vignettes, was printed in 1493 by Giovanni di Vercelli, and a Latin one in 1495 by P. Pincio, Lucantonio Giunta in each case acting as publisher.[11] In 1497 Lazarus de Soardis printed for Simon de Luere a Terence with numerous vignettes; and in the same year there appeared an illustrated edition, several times reprinted, of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the printer being Giovanni Rossi and the publisher once more Lucantonio Giunta. The cuts in this work measure something over three inches by five, and have little borders on each side of them; but the fineness of the designs is lost by poor engraving. Some of them are signed ia, others N.

We now approach one of the most famous books in the annals of Venetian printing, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili printed by Aldus in 1499, at the expense of a certain Leonardo Crasso of Verona, 'artium et iuris Pontificis consultus,' by whom it was dedicated to Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino. The author of the book was Francesco Colonna, a Dominican friar, who had been a teacher of rhetoric at Treviso and Padua, and was now spending his old age in the convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, his native city. Colonna's authorship of the romance is revealed in an acrostic formed by the initial letters of the successive chapters, which make up the sentence, 'Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna peramavit': 'Brother Francesco Colonna greatly loved Polia.' Who Polia was is a little uncertain. In the opening chapter she tells her nymphs that her real name was Lucretia, but she has been identified with a Hippolita Lelio, daughter of a jurisconsult at Treviso, who entered a convent after having been attacked by the plague, which visited Treviso from 1464 to 1468. On the other hand, it is plausibly suggested that Polia (πολια), 'the grey-haired lady,' is only a symbol of Antiquity, and at the beginning of the book there is at least a pretence of an allegory, though this is not carried very far.

In the story Polifilo, a name intended to mean 'the lover of Polia,' imagines himself in his dream as passing through a dark wood till he reaches a little stream, by which he rests. The valley through which it runs is filled with fragments of ancient architecture, which form the subjects of many illustrations. As he comes to a great gate he is frightened by a dragon. Escaping from this, he meets five nymphs (the five senses), and is brought to the court of Queen Eleuterylida (Free Will). Then follows a description of the ornaments of her palace and of four magnificent processions, the triumphs of Europa, Leda, and Danaë, and the festival of Bacchus. After this we have a triumph of Vertumnus and Pomona, and a picture of nymphs and men sacrificing before a terminal figure of Priapus. Meanwhile Polifilo has met the fair Polia, and together they witness some of the ceremonies in the Temple of Venus, and view its ornaments and those of the gardens round it. The first book, which is illustrated with one hundred and fifty-one cuts, now comes to an end. Book II describes how the beautiful Polia, after an attack of the plague, had taken refuge in a temple of Diana; how, while there, she dreamt a terrifying dream of the anger of Cupid, so that she was moved to let her lover embrace her, and was driven from Diana's temple with thick sticks; lastly, of how Venus took the lovers under her protection, and at the prayer of Polifilo caused Cupid to pierce an image of Polia with his dart, thereby fixing her affections as firmly on Polifilo as he could wish—if only it were not all a dream! This second book is illustrated with only seventeen woodcuts, but as these are not interrupted by any wearisome architectural designs, their cumulative effect is far more impressive than those of the first, though many of the pictures in this—notably those of Polifilo in the wood and by the river, his presentation to Eleuterylida, the scenes of his first meeting with Polia, and some of the incidents of the triumphs—are quite equal to them. Unfortunately, the best pictures in both books are nearly square, so that it is impossible to reproduce them in an octavo except greatly reduced.

The woodcuts of the Polifilo have been ascribed to nearly a dozen artists, but in every case on the very slenderest grounds. Some of the cuts, like some of those in the Mallermi Bible, are marked with a little b; but this, as has been said, is almost certainly indicative of the engraver's workshop from which they proceeded, rather than of the artist who drew the designs. The edition of 1499 is a handsome folio; the text is printed in fine Roman type, with three or four different varieties of beautiful initial letters. The title and headings are printed in the delicate majuscules which belong to the type, and have a very graceful appearance. A second edition of the Polifilo was published in 1545, with, for the most part, the same cuts. This was followed in the next year by a French translation by Jean Martin, printed at Paris by Jacques Kerver, and republished three times during the century. For the French editions the cuts were freely imitated, the rather short, plump Italian women reappearing as ladies of even excessive height. In England in 1592 Simon Waterson printed an abridged translation with the pretty title, Hypnerotomachia, or the Strife of Love in a Dreame, with a few cuts copied from the Italian originals. The book, now extremely rare, was apparently not well received, for Waterson, abandoning all hope of a second edition, speedily parted with his wood-blocks. Four of the cuts are found amid the most incongruous surroundings in the Strange and wonderful tidings happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, in his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries, though this egregious work was printed by A. I. for William Barley in 1595, only three years after the Strife of Love in a Dreame.

As we have noted, Aldus printed the Hypnerotomachia on commission, and save for two discreditably bad cuts in his Musaeus and a rather fine portrait of S. Catherine of Siena in his edition of her Letters printed in 1500, he troubled himself with no other illustrations. In his larger works he revived the memory of the stately folios of Jenson, and in his popular editions sought no other adornment than the beauty of his italic type. If pictures were needed to make a book more acceptable to a rich patron, he did not disdain to have recourse to the illuminator. Some of his Greek books have most beautiful initial letters, and in the Aristotle of 1497 he employs good head-pieces, though these fall far short of the large oriental design, printed in red, placed by his friendly rival, Zacharias Kaliergos, at the top of the first page of the Commentary of Simplicius on Aristotle of 1499.