In the edition of Virgil published by Grüninger at Strassburg in 1502,
Sebastian Brant boasted that the illustrations to it, whose preparation
he had superintended, made the story of the book as plain to the
unlearned as to the learned:
'Hic legere historias commentaque plurima doctus,
Nec minus indoctus perlegere illa potest.'
The boast was no ill-founded one, though it must be granted that Virgil
would have been puzzled by the cannon here shown as employed in the
siege of Nova Troja, and similar mediævalisms abound throughout the
volume. Coming almost at the end of the first series of early
illustrated books, the Virgil of 1502 thus exemplifies two of the chief
features to which they owe their charm: the power of telling a story and
the readiness to import into the most uncongenial themes some touches of
the life of their own day. But by Brant's time illustration was already
losing its pristine simplicity. It could hardly be otherwise when such a
man as Brant, who had just gained a European reputation by his
'Narrenschiff,' was concerning himself with it. At the outset it had
been rather a craft than an art, alike in Germany, in Italy, in the
Netherlands, and in France, and, if we do not add England to the list,
it is only because in England the workmen, though naïve enough in all
conscience, were so entirely untrained that to call them craftsmen
would be too great a compliment. But whether skilled or unskilled, the
woodcutters' objects were everywhere the same: to render his design with
the greatest possible simplicity of outline, to tell the story with a
directness which often verges on caricature, and to keep his pictures in
decorative harmony with the type-page on which they were to appear,
printed with the same pull of the press, with the same excellent ink, on
the same excellent paper.
In papers brought together in this volume the reader is asked to look at
the woodcuts to two old Italian Bibles, at the beautiful cuts which make
the Florentine Miracle Plays or Rappresentazioni so highly esteemed, at
the illustrations to French editions of the 'Hours of the Blessed
Virgin,' and at some examples of the curious transformations and
vicissitudes which old wood blocks and the designs for them went through
ere yet either clichés or photographic processes had been invented. The
reproductions which accompany these and other articles will give a
better idea of these Old Picture Books to those who do not already know
them than could be conveyed by any verbal descriptions. Here it may
suffice to emphasise one or two points which are often overlooked.
In the first place, it may have been noticed that not only do we speak
of woodcuts, a common enough word, but also of woodcutters, a term
which, until Sir Martin Conway used it in the title of his 'The
Woodcutters of the Netherlands,' where it was ridiculed at the time as
suggesting the stalwart workmen who cut down trees, was hardly ever
employed in this sense. It cannot be denied that the use of the word
sometimes lands us in incongruities of phrase; but inasmuch as there is
no evidence of the graver having been used in woodcuts before the
eighteenth century, it is clearly wrong to speak of the early craftsmen
as engravers, and it is only fair in estimating their performance to
remember that they worked with no better tool than a knife.
As regards the material they used, it was no doubt as a rule wood; but
experts are agreed--I know not on what evidence--that instead of the
blocks cut across the grain adopted by the modern engraver, they used
wood sawn perpendicularly down the grain, as in an ordinary plank. It is
certain, however, that in addition to wood some soft kind of metal,
spoken of in one place (the list of border-cuts in one of Du Pré's
'Horae') as _cuivre_, or copper, but generally identified with pewter,
was also used. This use of metal encouraged in some of the French 'Books
of Hours,' notably in those of Philippe Pigouchet, a finer and closer
method of work than we can believe was at that time possible on wood;
but the general handling was precisely the same, and it is often only
when we see a thin line bending instead of breaking, as wood did, that
we know for certain that the craftsman was working on metal. For this
reason the term woodcut is often applied to metal cuts worked in the
style of wood as well as to woodcuts properly so called, and though
doubtless reprehensible, the confusion is not nearly so misleading as
that between cuts and engravings.
A third fact has already been emphasised, namely, that the makers of the
woodcuts, and I think we may add the designers of them also, never put
their names to their work or troubled themselves in any way to preserve
their individuality. Save for the 'Nuremberg Chronicle' of Hartmann
Schedel--a large book and a fine one, but of no unusual artistic
merit--the cuts in which are associated with the names of Wohlgemuth
(the father-in-law of Dürer) and Pleydenwurff, I do not know of any
single illustrated book of the fifteenth century the designs in which
can be attributed to a known artist. In Venetian cuts towards the end of
the century it is not uncommon to find a small initial letter, such as
the b in the Giunta Bibles, the F of a Livy, the N of an Ovid, appearing
on some of the blocks; but, after much learned disquisition, it is now
generally agreed that this is merely the mark of a woodcutter's
workshop. As to the organisation of these workshops, we have, unhappily,
no information. All that we know is that at Augsburg, where, before the
introduction of printing, woodcutting had been extensively employed for
playing-cards and figures of saints, the cutters had formed themselves
into a flourishing guild, and were able to insist that the making of the
illustrations for books should be left in their hands as a condition of
the printers being allowed to use them.
The only other point which it seems necessary to mention is that
illustrated books in the fifteenth century were intended to attract very
much the same class of purchasers for whose benefit they are produced at
the present day.
People often run away with one of two contradictory ideas, that all
early books were very costly and only prepared for princes, or that
illustrated books were then the Books of the People, and therefore
possessed all sorts of beautiful properties not discoverable in the
bourgeois volumes we get at Mudie's. Of course both these ideas have
some foundation. Profusely illuminated manuscripts, whether Prayer-Books
or Romances, were literally a luxury reserved for princes; but then a
profusely illuminated manuscript is not only a book, it is a
picture-gallery as well, and even now, when prices have risen to what
seem extravagant heights, the fine manuscripts which can be bought for
from one to two thousand pounds are probably the cheapest art-treasures
on the market. But until quite the end of the fifteenth century princes
cared very little for printed books, thinking them rather cheap and
common, even to the extent of refusing to have them in their libraries.
More than this, rich connoisseurs generally, and not merely princes,
when they patronised printed books at all, preferred them quite plain,
finely printed, but with no pictures in them. They even preferred them
without any printed initial letters, no doubt telling each other it was
so much nicer to have the initials prettily painted in by hand,--just as
there are some people who prefer books in paper covers, because they can
have them bound as they please. We all know that most paper-cover books
melt away and never get bound at all; and most of the books which were
to have painted initials remain to this day with the blank places still
unfilled. But it was a very pretty theory, and it shows clearly enough
that the rich people who held it cared nothing for printed ornaments,
and _à fortiori_ nothing for printed illustrations.
On the other hand, though some of the books we are concerned with were
probably sold for less than sixpence, sixpence in the fifteenth century
was worth five or six shillings now, and, in fact, from five shillings
to five guineas very fairly represents the range of prices of early
illustrated books. Thus the cheapest of them, the little Florentine
chap-books, are not really the equivalent of our modern penny dreadfuls,
but rather of the pretty gift-books with which publishers tempt us every
Christmas. There was no fifteenth century equivalent to our modern
penny dreadfuls, because the sort of people who now read penny dreadfuls
then read nothing at all. As soon as they began to read, plenty of bad
pictures were produced to please them.
If this prologue did not already threaten to be too long, it would be
interesting to advance the theory that the great body of readers in
every civilisation has always been drawn from much the same class as at
present, and also that the price of books, when we allow for the
different value of money, has varied equally little. In any case, it
should be understood that early illustrated books were neither very rare
nor very miraculously cheap, but cost about the same as the illustrated
books of to-day, and were intended for about the same class of readers.
Up to a few years ago it was possible for quiet folk of this class to
possess some specimens of the old books as well as of the new.
Unfortunately during the last quarter of a century, and more especially
during the last decade of it, the collecting of them has become a hobby
which can only be pursued by the very rich. Save perhaps the first
editions of masterpieces of our own literature, no books have advanced
so rapidly in market-value as those with illustrations. A recent lawsuit
has brought into prominence the case of the 'Quatriregio' of Bishop
Frezzi, a copy of which, bought some thirty years ago for sixty guineas,
has now to be valued by experts, who will apparently have to decide
whether its present worth should be fixed as nearer to five hundred or
eight hundred pounds, the two last prices at which copies are believed
to have changed hands. The little Florentine 'Rappresentazioni,' mostly
with only a single cut on their title, the subject of my first paper,
used to be purchasable for a few shillings apiece; they have now to be
bought with almost as many bank-notes, and a good example of a French
'Book of Hours' is supposed to be cheap at a hundred and twenty pounds.
It is well that beautiful books should be honoured, but book-lovers may
not unreasonably regret the days when it was still possible for a man of
moderate means to possess them.
[Illustration: FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. ORSOLA,' 1554]