PRINTED BOOKS WITH PAINTED ILLUMINATIONS.
During the last few years of the fifteenth century and the first twenty or
thirty years of the sixteenth century Paris was remarkable for the
production of a beautiful class of books which form a link between printed
books and illuminated manuscripts.
_Paris Horae on vellum._
_Effect of colouring._
These are the numerous _Books of Hours_ printed on vellum, richly decorated
with wood-cut[144] borders and pictures, and frequently illuminated by
painting in gold and opaque colours over the engravings. One of the
earliest of these vellum-printed _Horae_ was produced by Pigouchet for the
bookseller Simon Vostre in 1487[145]; the pictures and borders are very
simply treated in broad outline, which the illuminator was meant to fill in
with colour, aided only in the general design by the wood-cut[146]. In 1498
Pigouchet began to execute for S. Vostre _Books of Hours_ of quite a
different and still finer style, with engravings of the most exquisite
beauty of design and delicacy of detail, perfect masterpieces of the
engraver's art. The decorative borders in these lovely books have dotted
(_criblée_) backgrounds, and the whole effect, though merely in black and
white, is rich and decorative in the highest degree. The comparatively
coarse touch of the illuminator ruins the beauty of these _Horae_; but
luckily a good many copies have escaped this tasteless treatment, which
must have appealed only to a very ignorant love of gold and gaudy colour on
the part of the purchasers.
_Decadence of style._
In the early part of the sixteenth century immense numbers and varieties of
these vellum-printed _Horae_[147] were issued by Pigouchet and Vostre,
Antoine Verard[148], Thielman Kerver and his widow, the brothers Hardouyn,
and other Paris printers and publishers. The cuts from the earlier,
fifteenth century editions[149], were reproduced, and a great number of new
ones were cut; but after the year 1500 there was a most rapid deterioration
of style. Even between the cuts of 1498 and those of 1503 a very marked
change for the worse is apparent, the fine mediaeval French style being
replaced by somewhat feeble imitations of the works of the Italian
Renaissance.
These Parisian prayer-books gradually superseded the coarse manuscript
_Horae_ which were still produced in the early part of the sixteenth
century; and the latest examples of these vellum-printed books, the work of
Geoffroi Tory and others as late as 1546, came to be sold without any
assistance from the hand, one can hardly say the art, of the illuminator in
his extreme decadence.
_Latest decadence._
In a feeble way the art of writing and illuminating manuscripts, as a sort
of plaything for the wealthy, lingered on in Paris till the seventeenth
century. An illuminated _Book of Hours_ (_Office de la Sainte Vierge_),
with four miniatures and many floriated head-pieces of very minute
workmanship, which was in the Perkins collection[150], is signed _N. Jarry
Parisinus Scribebat_, 1660. Other elaborate examples of Nicholas Jarry's
work exist in the Paris library, mostly painted in _grisaille_.
_Early printing._
_The Mentz Psalter._
A few words on the connection between early printing and the art of
manuscript illumination may not here be out of place. The inventors of
printing, Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, appear to have had no idea of
producing cheap books by their new art, but that for a fixed sum they could
produce a more magnificent and beautiful book than a scribe could for the
same price. Such a finished masterpiece of art as the _Mazarine Bible_,
issued by Gutenberg in the year 1455, was not sold at a lower rate than the
price of a manuscript Bible; but it was cheaper than a manuscript of equal
splendour. So also very few scribes of the fifteenth century could with the
utmost labour have produced such a marvel of beauty as the _Mentz Psalter_
of 1559, printed on the finest vellum and illuminated with 280 large
initials printed in blue and red--perfect marvels of technical skill in the
perfect fit of the two colours, or _registration_ as it is now called[151].
It is not known at what price this magnificent Psalter was originally sold,
but existing records show that copies of the _Vulgate_ produced in 1462 at
Mentz by the same printers, Fust and Schoeffer, were sold in Paris for no
less than sixty gold crowns, equal in modern value to double that number of
sovereigns.
_Illumination and printing._
_The various arts of the printer._
For this reason, as beauty rather than cheapness was aimed at by the
inventors of printing, they left spaces for the introduction of richly
illuminated and historiated initials, which were frequently inserted by the
most skilful miniaturists of the time. Thus the art of printing and
illumination for more than half a century walked hand in hand. Some of the
earliest printers had originally been illuminators of manuscripts, as, for
example, Peter Schoeffer de Gernsheim[152], Mentelin of Strasburg, Bämler
of Augsburg and many others[153]. The workshop of an early printer included
not only compositors and printers, but also cutters and founders of type,
illuminators of borders and initials, and skilful binders who could cover
books with various qualities and kinds of binding[154]. A purchaser in
Gutenberg's shop having bought, for example, his magnificent Bible[155] in
loose sheets would then have been asked what style of illumination or
rubrication he was prepared to pay for, and then what kind of binding and
how many brass bosses and clasps he wished to have[156].
_Early Italian printing._
In Central and Northern Italy especially, the printed books of the
fifteenth and first decade of the sixteenth century were decorated with
illuminations of the most beautiful kind. Books printed in Venice about
1470-5 by Nicolas Jenson of Paris and Vendelin of Spires, and Florentine
books, even of a few years later date, frequently contain masterpieces of
the illuminator's art. The Magnificent Lorenzo de' Medici and others of his
family were liberal patrons of this class of work; as were also many of the
Venetian Doges and prelates, especially various members of the Grimani
family.
_Early colophons._
There are no grounds whatever for the belief that the early printed books
were passed off as manuscripts, or that Fust was accused of having
multiplied books by magical arts. The early printers usually inserted a
statement in their _colophon_ to the effect that the book was produced
"without the aid of a pen (either of reed, quill or bronze), by a new and
complicated invention of printing characters." Many different varieties of
this statement occur.
In the Mentz _Psalter_ printed by Fust and Schoeffer in 1459 the printer's
statement at the end is, _Presens Psalmorum codex venustate capitalium
decoratus, rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus, adinvencione
artificiosa imprimendi ac characterizandi; absque ulla calami exaracione
sic effigiatus et ad laudem Dei...._ In the Mentz _Catholicon_ of 1460 the
phrase is used, _Non calami, stili aut penne suffragio...._
It was not till about half a century after the invention of printing that
the new art grew into an important means for the increase of knowledge
through the copious production of cheap books.
_Aldine books._
No other typographer did so much for the advancement of learning as Aldus
Manutius, a Venetian scholar and printer, who, in the year 1501, initiated
a new and cheaper form of book by the printing of his Virgil in small 12mo.
size, with a new and more compact form of character, now commonly known as
the _Italic_ type[157]. As Aldus records in three verses at the beginning
of the Virgil, the new Italic fount of type was designed and cut by
Francesco Francia, the famous Bolognese painter, goldsmith and die-cutter.
These small _italic_ books of Aldus were not all intended for sale at a low
rate; many copies exist which are magnificently illuminated, and some are
even printed on vellum.
The issue of the cheaper Aldine classics gave the death-blow to the
illuminator's art, which the early large and costly printed folios had done
little or nothing to supersede.
_Wood-cuts in MSS._
It should also be noticed that half a century before the invention of
printing with moveable types, quite at the beginning of the fifteenth or
towards the close of the fourteenth century, some few manuscripts of a
cheap and inferior sort had their miniature illustrations not drawn by
hand, but printed from rudely cut wood-blocks. These prints were afterwards
coloured by hand. Manuscripts of this class are very rare, and are now
chiefly of value as supplying the earliest known European examples of wood
engraving[158].
One of the most notable examples of these manuscripts illustrated with
wood-cuts is described by Mr Quaritch in his catalogue No. 291 of
1873[159]. This is a South-German manuscript of about the year 1400,
containing certain pious _Weekly Meditations_ written on 17 leaves of
coarse vellum; throughout the manuscript text are scattered 69 wood-cuts of
Saints and Prophets, with Biblical and other sacred scenes, averaging in
size three inches by two inches and a quarter. These miniature designs are
all richly illuminated with gold and colours; some of them have names and
other inscriptions forming part of the engraved block.
_Block-books._
This method of combining printing and manuscript very soon led to the next
stage, that of _Xylographic_ printing or "block-books"; in which not only
the illustrations but the text itself was cut on blocks of wood and printed
like the wood-cut pictures; each page occupying a separate plank of
wood[160].
These block-book illustrations were coloured by hand in a very decorative
and effective way, very superior to the coarse gaudy painting in opaque
pigments with which the Parisian illuminators so often spoilt the exquisite
miniatures and the borders in the vellum-printed _Horae_. The block-books
are not painted over with _opaque_ pigment, but delicately washed in with
_transparent_ tints, without obliterating the outlines of the printed
pictures, which, though simple and even rude in treatment, are often full
of real beauty and great decorative charm[161].
_Illumination and printing._
Thus we see that as early as about the year 1400 the printer's art had
begun to supplement that of the manuscript illuminator[162]; and the two
arts continued to work, as it were, hand in hand till after the close of
the fifteenth century when the illumination of manuscripts ceased to be a
real living art and gradually degenerated into a mere appendage to
individual pomp and luxury.