[1] Reprinted, by leave of the editor, from 'The Pageant.'
[Illustration]
Between the twelfth century and the sixteenth nearly every country in
Europe possessed some sort of a religous drama, which in many cases has
lingered on, nearly or quite, to the present day. Even in England--in
Yorkshire, in Dorset and Sussex, and perhaps in other counties--the old
Christmas play of S. George and the Dragon is not quite extinct, though
in its latter days its action has been rendered chaotic by the
introduction of King George III., Admiral Nelson, and other national
heroes, whose relation to either the Knight or the Dragon is a little
difficult to follow. The stage directions, which are fairly numerous in
most of the old plays which have been preserved, enable us to picture to
ourselves the successive stages of their development with considerable
minuteness. In some churches the 'sepulchre' is still preserved to
which, in the earliest liturgical dramas, the choristers advanced, in
the guise of the three Maries, to act over again the scene on the first
Easter-day; while of that other scene, when at Christmas the shepherds
brought their simple offerings, a cap, a nutting-stick, or a bob of
cherries to the Holy Child, a trace still exists in the representation,
either by a transparency or a model, of the manger of Bethlehem, still
common in Roman Catholic churches, and not unknown in some English ones.
When the scene of the plays was removed from the inside of the church to
the churchyard, we hear of the crowds who desecrated the graves in their
eagerness to see the performance; and later still, when the craft-guilds
had burdened themselves with the expenses of their preparation, we have
curious descriptions of the waggons upon which each scene of the great
cycles 'of matter from the beginning of the world to the Day of
Judgment,' was set up, in order that scene after scene might be rolled
before the spectators at the street corners or the market place,
throughout the length of a midsummer day. Artists with an antiquarian
turn have endeavoured to picture for us these curious stages. In Sharp's
'Dissertation on the Coventry Mysteries' there is a frontispiece giving
an imaginary view of a performance; and only a few years ago an article
was published in an American magazine, with really delightful
illustrations, depicting the working of the elaborate stage machinery
behind the scenes, as well as the effects with which the spectators were
regaled. But of contemporary illustrations the lack remains grievous and
irreparable. In England we have nothing at all for the Miracle Plays,
while for the moralities by which they were superseded, the only
manuscript illustration is a picture of the castle in the 'Castle of
Perseverance,' in which, with the aid of his good angels, its occupant,
Man, was set to resist the attacks of the deadly sins and all the hosts
of hell! The later moralities, printed by Wynkyn de Worde and his
contemporaries early in the sixteenth century, have in one or two
instances a few figures on the face or back of the title-page, to which
labels bearing the names of the characters are attached. But these were
venerable cuts, which had done duty on previous occasions for other
subjects; and so far from being specially designed to represent the
players on an English stage, were really French in their origin, and
only copied from old woodcuts of Antoine Vérard's 'Terence.'
In France we have much the same tale. It is true that so many of the old
French Mysteries still remain in manuscript, unexplored, that there is a
possibility of some pleasant surprise in store for us. But the printed
plays were either not illustrated at all, or sent forth with only a
handful of conventional cuts. One little ray of light, however, we have
in the pictures, especially of the Annunciation to the Shepherds and
their Adoration, in many of the numerous editions of the 'Hours of the
Blessed Virgin' (the lay-folk's prayer-books, as they have been called,
of those days), which, from about 1490 onwards, attained the same
popularity in print which they had previously enjoyed in manuscript. In
these illustrations we see the shepherds, with their women-folk about
them, as they watched their flocks till startled by the angel's
greeting, and again crowding round the manger at Bethlehem. In one
edition, from which a reproduction is given in a later essay in this
volume, they even bear on labels the names Gobin le gai, le beau Roger,
Mahault, Aloris, etc., by which they were known in the plays.
But however ready we may be to trace the influence of the miracle plays
in these pictures, as illustrations of the plays themselves they are
very inadequate; and the fact remains that in only one country, and
practically only in one city in that country (for the Siena editions are
merely reprints) did the religious plays, which in one form or another
were then being acted all over Europe, receive any contemporary
illustration. This one city was Florence; and alike for the special form
in which the religious drama was there developed, for the causes which
contributed to its popularity at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and for its close connection with the popular art of the day,
the subject is one of considerable interest. On its literary and
religious side, the late John Addington Symonds discussed it in 'Studies
of the Italian Renaissance' with his usual ability, and many of the
plays have been reprinted by Signor Ancona. Of late years the little
pictures by which they are illustrated have also received attention, a
fact amply attested by the extraordinary rise in their market value. But
it is worth while to bring together, even if only in outline, the
pictures and the plays to which they belong, more closely than has
hitherto been attempted, and this is my object in the present paper.
[Illustration: FROM JACOPONE DA TODI'S 'LAUDE,' 1490]
Book-illustration in Italy began very early with the publication in
1467, by Ulric Hahn, at Rome, of an edition of the 'Meditations' of
Cardinal Torquemada on the Life and Passion of Christ. For the next
twenty years its progress was only sporadic, and though we find
illustrations of greater or less artistic value in books printed at
Naples, Rome, Ferrara, Verona, and Venice, we can only group them
together in twos and threes; there is absolutely no trace of any school
of illustrators. From this sporadic growth Florence was not entirely
excluded, for besides a treatise on geography we find in the 1477
edition of Bettini's 'Monte Santo di Dio,' and the famous 1481 'Dante,'
pictures of very considerable interest. They differ, however, from those
of the illustrated books of other Italian towns, in being not woodcuts
but engravings on copper, and it is a remarkable fact that until the
year 1490 no Florentine book is known which contains a cut. The signs of
wear in a woodcut of the dead Christ which appears early in that year,
has given rise to a belief that there may have been some previous
illustrated edition, now lost; but it is more probable that the picture
had only been printed separately for pasting into books of devotion. In
any case, it stands apart, with but one other cut, slightly later in
date, from all other Florentine work, and must be looked on only as an
example of the sporadic illustrations of which we have spoken as
appearing in other districts. But from the 28th of September, 1490,
onwards for twenty years, we have a succession of woodcuts which, amid
all the differences which give them individuality, are yet closely
linked together in style, and form, on the whole, by far the finest
series of book-illustrations of early date. The popularity which these
woodcuts attained is attested by the repeated editions of the works in
which they appear; while the suddenness with which they sprang up, the
general similarity of style, and the nature of the books they
illustrate, all suggest that we have here to deal with a conscious and
carefully directed movement as opposed to the haphazard use of
illustrations in other cities during the previous twenty years. The book
in which the first characteristic Florentine woodcut appears is an
edition of the 'Laude,' of Jacopone da Todi, printed by Francesco
Buonaccorsi; and both the choice of the book and the name of the
printer offer a tempting basis for theory-making. Printing, we must
remember, though it had been in use for more than a third of a century,
was even then a new craft, and was still taken up sometimes as a
side-employment by many persons who had been bred to other trades or
professions. Our own Caxton, as we all know, was a mercer; the first
printer at St. Albans, a schoolmaster; Francesco Tuppo, of Naples, a
jurist; Joannes Philippus de Lignamine, of Rome, a physician; and so on.
In natural continuation, however, of the work of the Scriptorium in many
monasteries, we find that a large number of the early printers were
members of monasteries or priests, and it was to this latter order that
the Buonaccorsi who printed the 'Laude' belonged. Now, the name
Buonaccorsi is the name of the family of Savonarola's mother. A few
months before the appearance of the 'Laude' the great Dominican has been
recalled to Florence by Lorenzo de' Medici, and his first public sermon
there--a sermon which had stirred the whole city to its depths--had been
preached on the previous 1st of August. In the next year we find
Buonaccorsi printing the first edition of the 'Libro della vita
viduale,' the earliest dated Savonarola tract of which I know; and I
have not been able to resist hazarding the conjecture that between the
preacher-monk and the priest-printer there may have been some tie of
blood, and that it was to Savonarola that the splendid series of
Florentine illustrated books owed their origin.
That this should be the case would not be surprising. Savonarola was no
Puritan, or rather he was like the Puritans of the better sort, and
loved art so long as it was subservient to the main object of man's
being. The pamphlets with which he flooded Florence during the next few
years are, for the most part, decorated with a cut on their first page
or title; and if the subject were ever worked out, it would probably be
found that this was uniformly the case with the original editions, and
those issued with the author's supervision, while the unillustrated
copies are mere reprints, which the absence of any law of copyright made
it possible for any printer, who thought it worth his while, to issue,
with or without the author's leave. The woodcuts to the Savonarola
tracts number from forty to sixty, according as we include or reject
variants on the same subject, and fall naturally into three divisions,
illustrating respectively the Passion of Christ, the duties of Prayer
and Preparation for Death, and various aspects of Savonarola's activity,
in which, however, the representations of him are always imaginary,
never drawn from life. As an example of these cuts, I give that which
decorates the title-page of an undated edition (_circa_ 1495) of the
'Operetta della oratione mentale.' I have had occasion to use this
before in my little work on 'Early Illustrated Books,' but there is a
certain largeness of pictorial effect about it which gives this cut, I
think, quite the first place in the series, and makes me unwilling to
take any other as an example. The cuts in the 'Rappresentazioni' are
seldom quite as good as this, but they form a parallel series to those
of the Savonarola tracts, occasionally borrowing an illustration from
those on the Passion of Christ, and evidently inspired by the same aims.
The same types (our only means of fixing the printers of these dateless
little books), were used in many of the works of both the series, and it
does not seem fanciful to believe that Savonarola, either directly or
through some trusted disciple, was nearly as intimately connected with
the one as he undoubtedly was with the other.
[Illustration: FROM SAVONAROLA'S 'DELLA ORATIONE MENTALE,' S.A.]
We have said that the choice of the work in which appeared the first
typical Florentine woodcut was not without interest for our subject.
Jacopone da Todi, whom the cut exhibits kneeling in an ecstasy of prayer
before a vision of the Blessed Virgin, was a Franciscan mystic,
eccentric to the verge of madness in his manners, but a spiritual poet
of no mean ability, and the reputed author of the 'Stabat Mater.' He
died in 1306, and was probably old enough to have remembered that
strange epidemic of the _Battuti_, when thousands of frenzied men and
women marched from city to city, scourging themselves almost to death
for the sinfulness of the world, till their career had to be stopped by
the free use of the gallows. When the frenzy was past, those who
survived it formed themselves into companies for the continuance of
their religious exercises in a more moderate form, and from their
meeting together to sing their 'Laude,' hymns of a peculiarly personal
fervour, in the chapels of their guilds, they obtained the name
'Laudesi.' Of the writers of these 'Laude,' Jacopone da Todi was the
greatest, and it was out of the 'Laude' that the later
'Rappresentazioni' were gradually developed. In his excellent account of
the 'Rappresentazioni,' to which I have already alluded, Mr. J. A.
Symonds seems to me to have laid rather undue stress on the manner in
which this development took place, as offering a contrast to the history
of the religious drama in other countries. It is true that in England
the plays which have come down to us belong almost exclusively to the
great cycles which unrolled the history of man from the creation till
the crack of doom, but we have mention of several plays on the lives of
the Saints--_e.g._ one on S. George and the Dragon, and another (which
survives) on S. Mary Magdalene, and the popularity at one time of these
Miracle Plays, properly so called, is witnessed by the fact that it is
their name under which the cycles of Scriptural dramas generally passed.
At Florence these longer dramas were not wholly unknown, but they seem
to have been acted only in pantomime or dumb-show, in the great
pageants on S. John's Day, the shorter plays developing from the 'Laude'
just as, at an earlier period, the liturgical dramas had developed in
France and England out of the dramatic recital of the gospel of the day.
It is worth noting, by the way, that the 'Laude' themselves were not
superseded, but continued to be written and sung when the
'Rappresentazioni' were already becoming popular. Two of the writers of
them during this period have a special interest for us--Maffeo Belcari,
as the author also of the earliest printed 'Rappresentazione,' and
Girolamo Benivieni, as the friend and disciple of Savonarola, whose
doctrine and prophecies he defended in 1496 in a tract, printed, this
also, by Buonaccorsi.
[Illustration: FROM 'LAUDE DEVOTE DI DIVERSI AUTORI,' S.A.]
In an edition of a collection of 'Laude' by various writers, there is an
interesting cut representing the 'Laudesi,' standing before a Madonna,
singing her praise. In course of time dramatic divisions had been
admitted into the 'Laude,' and under the name of 'Divozioni' they were
recited with appropriate action in dialogue form. The actors were for
the most part boys, who were formed into confraternities, while the
expenses of the plays were doubtless defrayed by their parents. As the
dramatic element in the performances became more decided, the plays came
at last to be generally termed 'Rappresentazioni,' and under this name
they attained a great popularity during the last quarter of the
fifteenth century, and the first of its successor.
Unlike the northern Miracle Plays, which are almost without exception
anonymous, many of the earliest 'Rappresentazioni' which have come down
to us contain the names of their authors, and in editions separated by
half a century the text remains substantially unaltered. In English
plays the text often appears to have grown up by a process of accretion,
so that a cycle, or even a single play, in the form in which it has
survived, could hardly with justice be assigned to a single author, even
if we knew the name of the first writer concerned in it. The difference
is not unimportant, and is one of numerous small signs which tell us
that the religious drama in Florence, at least in this stage of its
development, was less popular, less spontaneous, than in our own
country, and more the result of deliberate religious effort.
The earliest 'Rappresentazione' printed was the 'Abraham' of the Maffeo
(or Feo) Belcari, whom we have already mentioned. It was printed in
1485, the year after Belcari's death at a good old age (he was born in
1410), so that all Belcari's plays were published posthumously. Among
them are plays on the Annunciation, on S. John the Baptist visited by
Christ in the Desert, and on S. Panuntius. Of the last two of these I
have seen fifteenth-century editions--the one at the British Museum, the
other at the Bodleian Library, each with a single charming woodcut. No
less a person than Lorenzo de' Medici was the author of the play of 'San
Giovanni e San Paolo,' which has also come down to us in its original
edition with a graceful cut; and Bernardo Pulci, who died in the first
year of the sixteenth century, produced a play on the legend of Barlaam
and Josaphat. But the most prolific of these dramatists seems to have
been a woman, Bernardo's wife Antonia, to whose pen we owe plays on the
Patriarch Joseph, the Prodigal Son, S. Francis of Assisi, S. Domitilla,
S. Guglielma, etc. The names of a few other writers are known; but there
were also numerous anonymous plays, written very much on the same lines,
to some of which we shall have to allude.
Almost invariably the plays begin with a Prologue spoken by an Angel,
who is represented in the title-cut of Lorenzo de' Medici's 'San
Giovanni e San Paolo' as standing behind the two saints in a kind of
pulpit. In other early plays the Angel is represented in a separate
woodcut (shown at the beginning of this article) whose lower border is
cut off, so as to fix on to the border of the special title-cut of the
play. Later on, another design was substituted for this, without any
border at all. I think it probable that these angelic prologuisings were
mostly spoken from some machine at the back of the stage, especially
contrived for celestial appearances. In other respects, the services of
the stage-carpenter do not seem to have been much called for. The plays
were acted, we are told, either in the chapel of the guild or
confraternity, or in the refectory of a convent, and the arrangements
were probably very similar to those in modern school-plays, the
imagination of the spectators being often required to take the place of
a change of scene. In the so-called 'Coventry' Plays we hear of a device
by which a new scene, or perhaps rather a new centrepiece, with the
actors all in their places, could be wheeled round to the front; but
more often all the _dramatis personae_ were grouped at the back or
sides, and individual actors merely stepped forward when their turn
came. In the play of 'San Lorenzo' we are expressly told that two scenes
were shown simultaneously on different parts of the stage, Decius and
his satellites offering their heathen sacrifices on the one side, while
Pope Sixtus comforts the faithful against the coming persecution on the
other. This combination of two scenes in one is a familiar feature in
mediæval art, and is not unknown even in these Florentine woodcuts,
small as they are: witness our cut on p. 29, in which the bartering at
the pawnshop, and the indignities offered to the sacred wafer, tell the
story of the play by means of its two most prominent scenes.
[Illustration: FROM ANTONIA PULCI'S 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. FRANCESCO,'
S.A.]
[Illustration: FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. LORENZO,' S.A.]
Of the literary value of the 'Rappresentazioni' it is not possible to
speak with much enthusiasm. From a literary standpoint, indeed, the
lives of the Saints, with which most of them have to do, are a difficult
and not very promising subject. Most stories of heroism are best told in
ten lines at longest; and to attempt to spin them out into several
hundred, without any considerable material in the way of authentic
detail, leads inevitably to weakness and exaggeration. In this respect
the 'Rappresentazioni' are neither much worse nor much better than the
average 'Legenda Sanctorum' in verse or prose. They follow these, in
fact, with remarkable fidelity, and as they are written for the most
part in the familiar _octava rima_, it is only by the speeches being
made in the first person, instead of in historical narration, that they
differ very greatly from them. Thus, to take the plays from which we
have chosen our illustrations, that of S. Francis of Assisi, by Antonia
Pulci, faithfully records all the main incidents as told in the
legends--the colloquy with the beggar during which he was stricken with
compunction, the theft from his father of money to repair a church, the
founding of his Order, the conference with the Pope, and the reception
of the stigmata; this last being, as might be expected, the subject
chosen by the artist for the woodcut on the title. The play of 'San
Lorenzo' shows us the martyrdom of Pope Sixtus in the Decian
persecution, and then the torture and death of S. Laurence for his
refusal to surrender the treasure which the Pope had bequeathed to the
poor of the church. Both of the woodcuts to these two plays are of great
beauty. The first probably follows the traditions of the many pictures
on the subject rather than that of the stage, though it was, no doubt,
for a scene like this that the stage-managers of the day used their
utmost resources. In the martyrdom of S. Laurence, on the other hand, we
may be sure that we have a very exact picture of the scene as played on
some convent stage.
Both these plays belong to the fifteenth century, and, as is mostly the
case in the earliest editions, have only a rough woodcut each. This was
not invariably so, as in the Bodleian Library there are copies of
editions of the plays of 'Stella' and 'S. Paulino,' which have every
appearance of having been printed before 1500, but yet have sets of
several cuts, all obviously designed especially for them. These,
however, are exceptions; and as a rule where we find several cuts, it is
easy to trace most of them back, either to other plays, or to other
illustrated books of the time, such as the 'Epistole e Evangelii,' the
'Fior di Virtù,' Pulci's 'Morgante Maggiore,' etc. Thus, of the two cuts
given here as illustrations to the curious 'Rappresentazione d'uno
miracolo del corpo di Gesù,' the first alone occurs in the
fifteenth-century edition, while in that of 1555 (probably sixty years
later) this original cut reappears, with three others added to it. The
first, here shown, representing a drinking scene, is borrowed, I
strongly suspect, from the 'Morgante Maggiore'; while the second, which
shows a man being burnt, and the third, in which a king is consulting
his counsel, may be called stock-pictures, and reappear with frequency.
[Illustration: FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE D'UNO MIRACOLO DEL CORPO DI
GESÙ,' 1555]
This play of the 'Corpo di Gesù' is an Italian version of a miracle
which was constantly being reported during the middle-ages, and was
often the excuse for a cruel persecution of the Jews. The well-known
'Croxton' 'Play of the Sacrament,' is cast on the same lines, and a
detailed comparison of the two would yield some points of interest. In
the 'Rappresentazione' the story is well told, and with unusual
vivacity. After the angelic prologue there is an induction, in which a
miracle of a consecrated wafer, dripping blood, is announced to Pope
Urban, who discourses on it with a cardinal and with S. Thomas Aquinas
and S. Bonaventura. The play itself begins with a drinking scene, in
which a wicked Guglielmo squanders his money, and then takes his wife's
cloak to the Jewish pawnshop to get more. The poor woman goes herself
to the Jew to try to get her cloak back, and is then persuaded to filch
a wafer at mass and bring it to the Jew, on his promise to restore her
garment. Her horror at his proposal is overcome by the pretext that his
object is to use the Host as a charm to heal his sick son, and that if
this succeeds he and all his family will become Christians. This, of
course, is a mere fiction, but it serves the woman in good stead; for
when the Jew is discovered by the unquenchable flow of blood from the
wafer he maltreats, he is promptly burnt, while the Judge is warned by a
special revelation to spare the life of his accomplice, whose guilt
might easily be represented as the greater of the two.
[Illustration: FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE D'UNO MIRACOLO DEL CORPO DI
GESÙ,' S.A.]
[Illustration: FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI S. CECILIA,' S.A.]
An edition of the play of 'S. Cecilia,' probably printed about 1560,
affords a good example of the gradual addition of cuts in later
reprints. This little tract of about twenty pages has no fewer than
eighteen pictures in it, three of which, however, are only repetitions
of one of the most familiar cuts in the whole series of
'Rappresentazioni'--a Christian virgin dragged before a king; while
three other well-worn cuts are each repeated twice, so that the number
of blocks used was only thirteen, though these yielded eighteen
impressions. As might be expected, the little pictures are often dragged
in with very little appropriateness. Thus, the Roman soldiers sent to
arrest Cecilia gave the publisher an excuse to show a party of knights
riding in the country, and so on. On the other hand, the pleasant
picture of a disputation here shown, though undoubtedly executed in the
first instance for some other work, probably gives us a very correct
representation of the costume and grouping of the actors.
[Illustration: FROM THE 'RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI SANTA MARIA MADDALENA,'
S.A.]
One point in the text of the 'S. Cecilia,' deserves noting. In the main
it resembles very closely indeed the legend as it is known to lovers of
English poetry from the version which Chaucer made in his early days and
afterwards inserted, with little revision, into the 'Canterbury Tales.'
But when Cecilia has gone through the form of marriage with the husband
who is forced upon her, and is proceeding with him to his home, the lads
of the neighbourhood bar their passage with a demand for petty gifts, to
which the virgin submits with good grace--a fragment of Florentine life
thus cropping up amid the rather unreal atmosphere of the old legend.
Whatever the shortcomings of the 'Rappresentazioni,' their popularity
was very great, and they were reprinted again and again throughout the
sixteenth century. Naturally the woodcuts suffered from continual use,
and the stock-subjects, like that of a general martyrdom shown on page
10, are often found in the later editions with their little frames or
borders almost knocked to pieces. Recutting was also frequent, and in
the same edition of the play of S. Mary Magdalene, from which, for the
sake of the unusual freedom in the handling, I have taken the title-cut
as one of our illustrations, this is repeated later on from a new block,
clumsily cut in imitation of the old one.
[Illustration: FROM THE 'CONTRASTO DI CARNEVALE E QUARESIMA,' S.A.]
[Illustration: FROM ANGELO POLITIANO'S 'GIOSTRA DI GIULIANO DE' MEDICI,'
S.A.]
[Illustration: FROM ENEA SILVIO PICCOLOMINI'S 'STORIA DI DUE AMANTI,'
S.A.]
As the 'Rappresentazioni' and their illustrations are connected with the
Savonarola tracts on the one hand, so on the other we find them
influencing some less dramatic forms of literature. Thus, among the
early Florentine illustrated books we find a number of 'Contrasti'--the
contrast of men and women, of the living and the dead, of riches and
poverty, etc. These were rather poems than plays, but the name
'Rappresentazione' is sometimes applied to them in later editions. This
is so, for instance, with the famous 'Contrasto di Carnesciale e la
Quaresima,' from which the first of the two cuts is here given, the
second representing a visit to the fish and vegetable market for Lenten
fare when the days of Carnival are over. Again we find the same methods
of illustration applied to the 'Giostre' of Giuliano and Lorenzo de'
Medici, the story of Orpheus, by Angelo Politiano, which forms part of
the former, being adorned with no fewer than ten admirable woodcuts, of
which the picture here reproduced, of Orpheus frightened by a fury from
attempting a second time to visit Hell in quest of his lost Eurydice, is
quite one of the finest. The same methods of illustration were also used
in the 'novelle,' including the 'Storia di due amanti' of Pope Pius II.,
from which we take our last illustration, and other secular chapbooks,
which have nothing either religious or dramatic about them. It is clear,
however, that the religious use was the earlier of the two, and that
while the writers of the 'Laude' anticipated the practice of later
revivalists in turning profane songs and tunes into hymns of devotion,
it was the secular literature which was the borrower in the matter of
illustrations.
As to the authors of these charming woodcuts we know absolutely nothing.
Dr. Paul Kristeller has lately attempted to trace out three or four
distinctive schools of style in them, but no name of any artist can be
connected with them; and we can only conjecture that there were one or
two special workshops in Florence where they were designed and executed,
and that printers and publishers applied to these workshops when they
were in need of cuts.
[Illustration: FROM AN ITALIAN BIBLE. VENICE, 1493]