Despite some efforts to prove the contrary, there can be little doubt
that the art of taking clichés of woodcuts, or of cuts engraved on soft
metal treated in the same way as wood, was quite unknown during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If one printer or publisher desired
the use of a set of cuts in possession of another, it was open to him to
try to borrow or buy them, and failing this to have them copied as best
he could, on the theory of artistic copyright having as yet been
broached. In the present paper, after a few words on the simpler
processes of borrowing and buying, I propose to bring together some
typical instances of the different methods in which cuts designed in one
country or district were copied in another, and incidentally, perhaps,
to throw a little new light on the relations of designers and
woodcutters in these early days of book-illustration.
[5] Reprinted by leave of Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and
Co., from 'Bibliographica,' vol. ii. (1895).
As to borrowing, there is not much to be said. I believe a few instances
of it may be found, _e.g._ Matthaeus Cerdonis tells us distinctly that
he printed an edition of a 'Cheiromantia' (Padua, 1484) 'Erhardi Ratdolt
instrumentis.' But it was undoubtedly, and for obvious reasons, very
rare, and where it existed mostly indicates some specially close
relations between the two firms. Thus Jacob Bellaert at Haarlem appears
to have borrowed some of Leeu's cuts for a 'Lijden ons Heeren,' printed
in December 1483, but on Bellaert's disappearance in 1486 most of his
cuts and types are found in the possession of Leeu, and it is doubtful
if we should not look on his press rather as a branch establishment of
Leeu's than as altogether independent. We have also to be very careful
in our examination of cuts before building any theories of borrowing, or
special relations between different firms, as in some cases, notably in
many of Vérard's 'Horae,' in which we seem at first sight to find cuts
from the editions of Philippe Pigouchet, we are really confronted with
copies so closely imitated that it requires a minute comparison to show
that they are printed from different blocks.
When we pass from borrowing to buying we open up an endless field for
investigation, and one rich in small surprises.
Mr. Falconer Madan showed me some years ago, in a Civil War Tract in the
Thomason Collection at the British Museum, a very worn cut, French in
appearance, representing S. John the Evangelist and the eagle by which
he is symbolised. It puzzled me at the time, but I soon afterwards
identified it with the printer's device of Robert Wyer, in use by him
more than a hundred years earlier. Almost as great an age was probably
attained by a head-piece of terminal archers, with rabbits, etc., which
I first noticed in the 1598 edition of Sidney's 'Arcadia,' and found
still retained in the fourteenth edition, dated 1670. The interval
between these two editions of itself exceeds the threescore and ten
years which ought to suffice for the life of a wood-block as of a man,
but I have since found the same head-piece in a prayer book, printed
about 1585, and as it is in no way appropriate to this, have no doubt
that its original appearance was even earlier.
[Illustration: FROM GEOFFROY TORY'S 'CHAMPFLEURY,' 1529.]
In another rather amusing series of migrations my pride as a discoverer
has been tempered by the verdict of a lynx-eyed friend that the blocks
in question at one period of their career have been recut, but their
history is still curious. If any one will turn to the 1575 edition of 'A
Ryght pithy pleasaunt and merie Comédie. Intytuled Gammer Gurton's
Needle. Played on stage, not longe ago in Christes Colledge in
Cambridge,' he will see that the title-page of this our second printed
comedy, 'made by Mr. S---- Mr. of Art,' and 'imprinted at London in
Fleete streat beneth the Conduit at the sign of S. John Evangelist by
Thomas Colwel,' is surrounded by a kind of garland supported by two fat
little boys; and if we turn next to the last leaf of the 'Champfleury,'
that most pedantical treatise, written and published by the French
artist-printer, Geoffroy Tory in 1529, there the same not very beautiful
design will confront us. The concatenation of the 'Champfluery' and
'Gammer Gurton's Needle' is of itself delightful, but chance has enabled
me to add two additional incongruities, for I have found it again in a
copy of the 'Christiani Hominis Institutio,' by Stephanus Paris, printed
in 1552 by Michael Fezandat for Vivantius Gaulterot, who had published
the second edition of the 'Champfleury' three years earlier, and once
more in William Copland's edition, dated 1553, of Bishop Douglas's 'XII.
Bukes of Eneados.' Thus we know within a few months the date at which
this block, which had previously been recut, crossed the Channel, and
there is some reason to believe that some more of Tory's old designs
came over with it, for I have lately noticed three fragments of borders
used in Tory's 'Horae' of 1525 reappearing in a 'Letter to Reginald
Pole,' by Tunstall and Stokesley, printed by Wolfe in 1560. Like the
larger design, these fragments have been recut, but with considerable
skill, so that we may be sure that the recutting was done in France, and
at no very long interval after 1525, the lines in the original blocks
being so fine that they would soon need replacing.
As an appendix to this section of my paper, it occurred to me to look at
the cuts in some of the Roxburghe Ballads, and a glance through the
first volume yielded some curious results. Thus a ballad entitled
'Friendly Counsaile,' by C. R. [Charles Records?], printed for J.
W[right], the younger, about 1630, has two cuts, the first of Christ
teaching the twelve Apostles, which can be traced back through the
'Kalender of Sheppards' to Vérard's 'Art de bien vivre et de bien
mourir' of 1492; the second of two of the three gay cavaliers, who met
their own corpses as they hunted (les trois vifs et les trois morts),
which occurs in French Horae of about the same date. Another ballad
entitled 'Christmas' Lamentation for the losse of his Acquaintance,
showing how he is forst to leave the country and come to London,' is
headed by a little figure of a man, which I first saw in the verso of
the title of Wynkyn de Worde's edition of 'Hycke Scorner,'[6] where it
is labelled 'Pyte.' This also is ultimately French, and was also
originally first cut for Vérard's French Terence. 'Doctor Dogood's
directions to cure many diseases' has in the first part half of a cut
from the 'Art de bien vivre,' representing Aaron and the Israelites
going to meet, not, as in the original, Moses, who bears the Tables of
the Law, but two English gentlemen, who are joined on in a block of much
smaller size. The second part has also an old cut, which appears to be
imitated from the Dutch. Another Dutch fifteenth-century design is used
in the second part of 'The Discontented Married Man,' and there are two
more fifteenth-century blocks (recut) in the 'Jovial Broom-man,' a cut
from a French 'Æsop' in 'A New Medley, or a Messe altogether,' and a
piece of an Augsburg block in 'The praise of our country Barley Brake.'
Besides these we may note the presence at the head of a ballad called
'Solomon's Sacrifice,' printed for Henry Gosson, of the cut of a
printing-press which occurs in 'The Ordinarie of Christians,' printed by
Scoloker about 1548. Of other cuts I only suspect the history, and the
instances I have quoted are sufficient to show the long life these
designs enjoyed in England.
[6] One of those on the recto has a common original with that of an
elephant with a howdah in Doesborgh's 'Van Pape Jans landendes.'
Like some other branches of natural history, 'bibliology,' to use an
absurd word, would be very dull if it could all be mapped out and
tabulated ready to our hand, but in cut-hunting, as in fox-hunting,
there is pleasure to be gained from pursuit, if not from attainment, and
especially in English books of the sixteenth century there is never any
difficulty in finding a promising cut to hunt. It may be said, indeed,
that whoever attempts to write the history of wood-engraving in England
during this period will need to be quite as well acquainted with the
productions of the French press as of the English. Unfortunately this is
no easy matter, for except for a magnificent collection of Vérards
mostly from the old Royal Library, and a goodly number of Horae, the
British Museum is by no means rich in early French books, and I know of
no other English library which can do much to supply its deficiencies.
But the fact remains that between the large importation of French
blocks, the direct imitation of many others, and the probable presence
of French woodcutters working in England, the field for any one
desirous of tracing a native school of wood-engraving, if such a school
can be said to have existed, is full of pitfalls, from which only a very
wide knowledge of the cuts in contemporary French books (and to a less
extent also of Dutch and German ones) can offer deliverance.
The backwardness of England in the pictorial arts made it possible for
old wood blocks to enjoy here an unusually long life. In other countries
their career was cut short by decisive changes of taste. Thus the sudden
inroad of the Renaissance into Germany at the close of the fifteenth
century swept away almost the whole of the delightfully simple work
produced between 1470 and 1490. One curious case of survival is perhaps
worth mentioning. In an edition of Wyle's 'Translation oder Deutschungen
etlicher Bücher,' printed at Augsburg in 1536, the cuts to all the
stories but one show contemporary work of the usual kind. The exception
is the tale of Guiscard and Sigismund, the illustrations to which must
be quite half a century earlier, and exhibit all the simplicity of
feeling and workmanship of the artists of Augsburg, in their best days.
In France we have the same tale, for it is impossible to conceive not
merely of the Estiennes, but of a popular publisher like Jean de
Tournes, decorating his books with the simple cuts we find in books by
Vérard or Trepperel. In the Horae the publisher's needs were sometimes
too imperative to be resisted, and amid the coarse and realistic
engravings which, to the destruction of the charm of these books, came
into vogue about 1505, the old designs from the editions of Pigouchet
and Vérard are often found for some ten years longer. Italy is in
somewhat a different position, for there, in the fifteenth century, the
distinction between the books of the people and the books of the rich
had been unusually clearly marked, and while the tastes of the rich
changed the popular literature was far more conservative. The little
Florentine cuts, of which examples are given in another article, are by
far the most striking example of this stability of the popular taste. It
is probable that no new ones were designed after 1520 at the latest, but
the old designs continued in use for more than sixty years after this
date, battered by successive editions till their borders were knocked to
pieces, but still retaining much of their old beauty, and occasionally,
by some lucky chance, finding a printer who did them justice. When the
old blocks became unusable, the designs were recut, and it is sometimes
possible to trace them through as many as three different stages of
successive deterioration. In Venice the little vignettes, so popular
between 1490 and 1500, enjoyed a similar, but much shorter, extension of
life, the preference for the heavier style of engraving which came in
with the turn of the century driving them down into the chap-books,
where their original delicacy of line soon procured their destruction at
the hands of hasty printers.
Though the vagaries of fashion were thus slightly tempered at the great
centres of printing in Italy, fashion interfered with the borrowing of
blocks in another way in this country. Germany and France were each
fairly homogeneous in art matters. We may trace different schools, but
their differences are not very strongly marked, and their followers were
probably not very keenly conscious of them. In Italy the artistic
individuality of every district was clearly defined, and though, as we
shall see, the printers of one town made free use of the illustrations
in the books of those of another, there was scarcely any interchange of
blocks. In the 'De Structura compositionis' of Ferrettus, printed at
Forli in 1495, both of the two illustrations are of Venetian origin,
that of Theseus and the Minotaur being taken from the 'Plutarch' of
1491, and that of the lecture-hall from the 'Epigrammata Cantalycii' of
1493. But this is an almost unique instance of direct borrowing, the
rule being that while designs were freely imitated, they were, almost
invariably, recast in the style of art of the district in which they
were to appear.
[Illustration: FROM THE NAPLES EDITION OF THE 'ARTE DE ASTROLOGIA' OR
'LUNARE' OF GRANOLLACHS, FOR THE YEAR 1485. (REDUCED.)]
[Illustration: FROM THE 'LUNARE' OF GRANOLLACHS FOR 1493. PRINTED AT
ROME BY PLANNCK. REVERSED FROM THE NAPLES EDITION. (REDUCED.)]
Passing now from the purchase of woodcuts to their imitation, we may
look, first of all, at the simplest and easiest form in which a design
could be reproduced. The impression from a woodcut is, of course, a
reversal of the design as it appears on the block, and an artist not
very confident of his own skill would naturally shrink from the rather
difficult task of copying the printed cut in reverse in order that his
own sketch might print in the same way as its original. He preferred to
copy the printed cut as he saw it before him, with the result that in
the impressions from his copy everything is reversed, the right becoming
left, and the left right. Thus simplified his task was easy, and it was
even possible to avoid altogether the need of copying, by merely pasting
the illustration on the block, and cutting the wood through the paper.
When Antoine Vérard desired to bring out a French edition of the
'Metamorphoses,' his wood-cutters treated the designs in the edition by
Colard Mansion in this way, and as the originals were but poor work the
injury to them was not very great. It was the first of these designs,
that of Saturn devouring his children, which Vérard, a year or two
later, printed in his edition on vellum of the 'Miroir Historial' of
Vincent de Beauvais, to serve as a ground-plan to his illuminator, who,
by painting out Saturn's scythe, and the child in his mouth, and some
other objectionable details, turned it into a very moderately edifying
picture of the Holy Family. But this after-use is beside our point, nor
are the cuts in either Mansion's edition, or that of Vérard, worth
reproducing here. As an instance of this practice we will rather show
the original and a copy in reverse of the frontispiece of the
'Nobilissima Arte de Astrologia,' by Granollachs, an astronomer of
Barcelona, printed at Naples, with the calculations made for the year
1485, when it was presumably intended to be issued. That this is really
its date we have strong confirmatory evidence in the style, both of the
design and the cutting, which corresponds very closely to that of the
cuts to the life of Æsop prefixed to the Italian edition brought out at
Naples in the same year, 1485, by the jurist-publisher, Francisco de
Tuppo, and probably printed for him by Matthias Moravus. The designer
was a man of skill and imagination, and we may notice in this picture
the Saracenic type which he has given to the man whom we see at the
window, to suit with the presumably Moorish descent of its author.
The 'Arte de Astrologia' of Granollachs became popular, and in 1493
Plannck, a great printer of cheap books at Rome, brought out an edition
of it there under the altered title 'Lunare.' That it might not go
unillustrated, he seems to have commissioned his office-boy to reproduce
the Naples woodcut, and the result was the remarkable work of art which
is here set face to face with its original. By and by we shall see how a
Florentine artist fared when the same task was set him.
Reproduction in reverse was undoubtedly the refuge of the incompetent,
but we must remember that it was also the restoration of the design as
originally drawn on the wood, and the most skilful artists did not
disdain to save themselves trouble in this way. They had no objection to
copying another man's work, but their aim was not to see how closely
they could copy, but to make a pretty picture with the least expenditure
of pains, and if it looked as well when the rights and lefts were
reversed there was no fault to be found. Hence we shall find this method
employed in many cases where the second artist was no whit inferior to
the first. Examples of the servile reproduction of woodcuts by other
printers, without reversal, are hardly as numerous as we should expect,
and are naturally not very interesting. They group themselves chiefly
round a few popular books, such as the 'Fasciculus Temporum' of
Rolewinck, Steinhowel's 'Æsop' and Brant's 'Ship of Fools.' The home of
the 'Fasciculus Temporum' seems to have been Cologne, but the cuts in
the editions which we find printed in other towns of Germany, at Venice
by Walch and Ratdolt, and in Spain, all follow the same lines very
closely. Of the 'Æsop,' which started either from Sorg's press at
Augsburg, or from that of Knoblochzer at Strasburg, no less than eleven
editions were printed in different towns in Germany during the fifteenth
century, the cuts in all of which are on the same model, while the
actual blocks used by Sorg afterwards passed into the possession of
Gerard Leeu at Antwerp, and were again imitated by Christian Snellaert
at Delft. The cuts in the 'Narrenschiff' enjoyed no less widespread a
popularity.
A few single cuts, which from their subjects might be used as title-cuts
to a great variety of books, also attracted the attention of the more
pedestrian copyists. Thus in educational books printed in Germany
towards the close of the fifteenth century there are a bewildering
number of variants of a woodcut of a master and scholars with the legend
'_Accipies tanti doctoris dogmata sancti_,' and while a good many French
cuts found their way into England on their original blocks others were
copied for English use with the servility we should expect. Among the
few instances of direct copying in Italy, one of the most noteworthy is
the reproduction at the beginning of the 'Supplementum Chronicorum' of
Foresti, printed by Bernardino de Benaliis at Venice in 1486, of the
pictures of the Creation, the Fall, and the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel,
from the large Bible printed by Quentel at Cologne about six years
earlier. On the other hand, in my monograph on 'Italian
Book-Illustrations' (Portfolio, No. xii. Dec. 1894), I have already
alluded to a curious instance of the direct copying of Italian
ornamental initials by a German. In 1484, in a 'Boethius' printed by
Oliverius Servius at Rome, we find three very fine initials, and we can
trace back the set to which they belong to Sixtus Riessinger, who used
some of them in his edition of a 'Tractatus Solemnis,' by Philippus de
Barberiis in 1480. This is simple enough. But, when we find what looks
like the same set in the possession of Johann Müller at Nuremberg about
1473, we ask in some surprise how initials distinctively Italian should
appear first at Nuremberg and afterwards find their way back to Rome?
The answer to the puzzle is arrived at by tracing both the Nuremberg and
the Roman initials to a set cut for Sweynheym and Pannartz, but used by
them only in certain copies of a few books (_e.g._ the Rylands copy of
the 'Suetonius' of 1472) whose purchasers preferred them to be
ornamented thus rather than by illumination. One of these copies must
have fallen into the hands of Müller, who imitated the designs
remarkably closely, but with some minute differences, notably the
addition of a thick line to the left of the initials, which in the
originals are left unfinished on this side, so that they might be
attached at pleasure to an ornamental border running down the margin.
Thus the initials used by Müller are copies, while those of Riessinger
and Servius are from the original blocks, which must have passed to them
from Sweynheym and Pannartz. The difficulty in clearing up the little
mystery lay in the fact that it is possible to possess a copy of every
book Sweynheym and Pannartz ever printed without finding a single volume
in which the initials occur.
A well-known example of the close copying of a decorative border is the
conveyance by Joannes Paulus Brissensis of a border used by Edward
Whitchurch for the first prayer book of Edward VI., published in 1549.
Five years later a close imitation of this, even to the retention of the
initials E. W., appears on the title-page of a commentary on Aristotle
('Dialectica Resolutio cum textu'), published by Brissensis in Mexico.
We come now to the last and most interesting section of our subject, the
cuts in which one artist has borrowed the design of another, but whether
imitating it freely or closely has introduced modifications in technical
treatment which make it his own, harmonising it so closely with the work
of his own city or country that it easily takes its place with purely
native designs until by some chance its real origin is discovered. For
various reasons these transformations are almost, though not entirely,
confined to Italy. Thus it would be idle to expect them in England
because there was no English school of design or engraving of sufficient
individuality to modify the style of the cuts it borrowed. In Germany,
on the other hand, the native school was immensely productive, and had a
long start of France and Italy in point of time. Very shortly after 1470
we find illustrated books at Augsburg and Ulm of a simple excellence
which could not be bettered. In France and Italy we get a few good books
about 1480, but woodcuts do not become common till ten years later. One
of the few very early illustrated books of Italy, the 'Valturius,'
printed at Verona in 1472, was indeed copied in Germany, the cuts being
reproduced in reverse in an undated 'Vegetius,' probably printed at
Augsburg about 1475 by Johann Wiener, though it should be mentioned that
Dr. Muther, like a true Teuton, tries to claim priority for his
countrymen by bringing back the 'Vegetius' to about 1470. But this is a
solitary instance, which belongs, moreover, to an earlier section of our
subject, and, until Mr. Redgrave communicated to the Bibliographical
Society his paper on the early illustrated books of Oppenheim, I knew of
nothing more apposite. In that paper, however, Mr. Redgrave showed how
both the border of the 'Calendar,' printed by Ratdolt at Venice in 1476,
and some of Ratdolt's ornamental initials, were closely imitated by
Johann Köbel, in an undated 'Passio Domini.' The two books were
separated by an interval of quite thirty years, and Köbel in imitating
Ratdolt was not content with his delicate outline, but put in a heavy
background which does not improve it. Some late German prayer-books show
traces of the influence of the French 'Horae,' but beyond these I know
of nothing.
The case of Holland is somewhat similar to that of Germany. In the last
decade of the fifteenth century, the Dutch woodcutters imitated closely,
or directly borrowed, from the French 'Horae,' but the best work, which
is also the earliest, was entirely original.
In the sixteenth century the popular printers, like John of Doesborgh,
no doubt obtained their haphazard illustrations whence and how they
could. In the editions of 'Le Chevalier Délibéré,' by Olivier de la
Marche, printed at Antwerp in French and Spanish, in 1547, etc., I
thought, at first, that I had found an instance of artistic copying of a
very interesting nature, for there is a close connection in design
between these highly-finished cuts and the rude yet striking work in the
edition printed at Gouda, by Gottfried van Os, shortly after 1486.
Inasmuch, however, as La Marche had given elaborate directions for the
illumination of his poem, it is obvious that by following these
directions any two designers would obtain fairly similar results,
without any direct imitation of one by the other.
As far as my own information goes, the French wood-cutters trusted
almost entirely to their own imagination during the fifteenth century,
and, when they took to borrowing for their 'Horae,' borrowed outright
without any attempt at adaptation. One famous example of copying of a
later date deserves mention. In 1545 the younger Aldus printed at Venice
a second edition of the famous 'Hypnerotomachia,' and either this or the
original of 1499 attracted the attention of Gohorry, who made a
translation which was revised by Jean Martin and printed by Jacques
Kerver in 1546. The cuts to this translation have been variously
attributed to Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin, but a moment's glance at the
book will show that they are not all by the same hand. The majority of
the illustrations show wretched work, and are very clumsily cut, but
those at the beginning and a few in the latter part of the volume are
fine examples of artistic translation into a different manner. I give
here the scene of Poliphilo by the river bank from both the original and
the copy, and old favourite as the Venetian cut justly is, I think that
the French cut attains almost equal excellence in another style. No
finer example of free adaptation could easily be found.
[Illustration: CUT FROM THE 'POLIPHILO' OF VENICE, 1499. (REDUCED)]
[Illustration: THE SAME CUT AS REDRAWN IN THE FRENCH EDITION OF THE
'POLIPHILO,' 1546. (RATHER MORE REDUCED)]
When we come to Italy we find a wholly different set of conditions. Here
book-illustration started late, but during the twenty years from 1490 to
1510 its vogue was enormous, and great as was the fertility of the
Italian designers it was natural that in face of the demands made upon
them by the publishers they should seek help whereever they could find
it. But in Italy at this period every craftsman was an artist, and
whether he sought his inspiration in the paintings which he saw around
him, in the engravings on copper which had flourished long before
book-illustration became popular, in the cuts in foreign books, or in
those published in other districts of his own country, the Italian
woodcutter always put his own individuality into his work and made the
design he was copying his own. I am unfortunately unacquainted with the
pictures to which Dr. Lippmann and Dr. Kristeller have traced three or
four of the Venetian and Florentine woodcuts,[7] but the examples of
translation from engravings on copper to woodcuts in the Venetian
'Petrarch' of 1490, in the second Florentine edition of Bettini's 'Monte
Sancto di Dio' (1491), and in the illustration of the works of mercy in
the 'Libro delli Comandamente di Dio' of Fra Marco del Monte Sancta
Maria (Florence, 1496), are extremely interesting, and show how well the
workmen, especially those of Florence, understood the principle of
artistic selection.
[7] _e.g._ The cut of a preacher preceded by his little crucifer in
the 'Doctrina delle Vita Monastica' of Lorenzo Quistiniano (Venice,
_c._ 1495) to a picture by Gentile Bellini in the church of S.
Maria del Orto; the cut of S. Thomas in the 'Epistole et Evangeli'
of 1495 to the picture by Verrocchio in Or S. Michele, and that of
the beheading of S. John from a Pollaiuolo in the Baptistery at
Florence. The case of the illustrations to the 1467 'Meditationes'
of Turrecremata, which are professedly copied from the frescoes in
the church of S. Maria di Minerva at Rome, is an interesting
example of this copying, the excellence of the original designs
sometimes triumphing over the rudeness of the engraving. Unluckily
the frescoes themselves have perished.
[Illustration: CUT FROM THE QUENTELL BIBLE. (COLOGNE, _C._ 1480. MUCH
REDUCED)]
[Illustration: ADAPTATION OF THE COLOGNE CUT FOR THE MALERMI BIBLE.
(VENICE, 1490)]
No more characteristic example of free imitation can be found than in
the use made of the cuts in the Latin and German Bibles, printed by
Quentell at Cologne about 1480, by the illustrator of the Malermi Bible
ten years later. The German cuts are large and clumsy (measuring about
7-1/2 x 5 in.), overcrowded with figures, and with the rudest ideas of
perspective and arrangement. The little Italian vignettes, on the other
hand, are gracefully and delicately designed, and it is only from the
presence of some purely fanciful accessory, such as the pond and the
swan swimming in it in the examples here given, that we are compelled to
recognise the debt of the Venetian artist to his German predecessor.
Another, though a less interesting example of the adaptation of large
and rather clumsy cuts to the scale of the little Venetian vignettes is
the imitation in the 'Terence,' published by Simon de Luere at Venice in
1497, of the illustrations in Trechsel's edition which had appeared at
Lyons four years earlier. Again, if, as I believe, we should attribute
the first illustrated Italian edition of the 'Ars Moriendi,' printed in
1490, 'co li figure accomodati per Johanne clein & Piero himel de
alamanis,' to Venice rather than to Lyons, we may claim the majority of
the cuts in this as additional examples of intelligent, if not very
original, adaptation by Venetian artists, the originals, in this case,
being the designs first used in the German block-books, imitated again
two years later, by Vérard at Paris.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION ON THE BACK OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF THE 'ARTE
DEL BEN MORIRE,' PRINTED IN 1490 BY JOHANN CLEYN AND PIERO HIMEL,
PROBABLY AT VENICE]
[Illustration: FLORENTINE ADAPTATION OF THE SAME CUT USED ON THE
TITLE-PAGE OF THE SOMMA 'OMNIS MORTALIUM CURA' OF S. ANTONINO. PACINI,
1507]
It is true that after 1496 Cleyn was printing at Lyons, and that there
is a Lyonnese book with the probably erroneous date 1478 by him, but we
have no evidence, I believe, of his whereabouts in 1490, and there is
one cut in the book, for which, as far as I know, the artist drew
entirely on his own imagination, and this appears to me to be much more
Venetian in its character than Lyonnese.[8] I give this cut from a copy
in the British Museum which has unluckily been heavily coloured, so that
the reproduction was no easy matter. It comes within our subject, not
only as evidence for the Venetian origin of the edition, but as the
original of the little cut on the title of the 'Omnis Mortalium Cura' of
S. Antonino, printed for Pacini in 1507; the differences between the
copy and the original being characteristic of the alteration in tone
always introduced by Florentine artists when dealing with foreign work.
The border has been simplified and at the same time given the usual
black background. The recesses of the church are in unrelieved black
instead of merely shaded. The figures are slighter and more graceful,
and good taste is shown in the removal of the whispering devils, one of
whom bears a scroll with the words '_nolo dire_,' while the other
inscription contains the word '_vergogna_' (shame), preceded by some
other letters which I cannot decipher in the Museum copy. It will be
noticed that the Florentine artist has reversed the positions of the
figures, but not the little altar-piece. The other cuts in the 1490
'Arte del Morire' also found Florentine imitators, as I cannot doubt
that it was through them that the illustrator of the Florentine editions
of _c._ 1495 and 1513 obtained his knowledge of the German designs which
he followed in ten of his cuts. Some of the designs are copied in
reverse, others directly, but in nearly every instance we find that by a
number of small touches the cut has been made to assume a distinctly
Florentine appearance.
[8] The Venetian origin of this cut is made almost certain by the
character of its border. In style and touch (cleverly as the
reproduction here given has been made from the thickly-painted
original, the lines are necessarily thickened) the design is
closely akin to the borders in the 'Omelie et Sermones' of S.
Bernard (1491), and the 'Dialogo de la Seraphica Virgine S.
Caterina' (1494), while in the border and woodcut initials of the
'Supplementum Chronicarum' of 1492 we get both the bull's skull and
the dolphin's, and in the 'Rudimenta Grammatices' of Donatus 1493, a
top border to the first page which resembles the lower border in
our cut. There is no suggestion of copying here, but a series of
designs probably all by the same artist which begin with this
border to the 'Arte' in 1490 and can be traced for several years,
always at Venice.
Among other books in which Florence followed the lead of Venice the
'Meditazioni' of San Bonaventura and the 'Fior di Virtù' are perhaps the
most important. For my frontispiece to this article, however, I have
preferred to hark back to the 'Lunare' of Granollachs, the Florentine
edition of which (1496) is as good an instance of artistic imitation of
that of Naples, as is the Roman (see page 83) of incompetent servility.
I have already written at greater length than I intended, and am
conscious that all I have said is dry, fragmentary, and disjointed.
There is, however, still one point which I should like to put forward in
connection with these different styles of copying. In 'The Masters of
Wood-Engraving' Mr. Linton has endeavoured to limit our idea of the work
of the early woodcutters to the mere faithful cutting on the wood the
lines marked down for them by the designer. In this theory Mr. Linton
stands at the opposite extreme to Sir W. M. Conway, who, in 'The
Woodcutters of the Netherlands,' hardly made sufficient allowance for
the differences in cutting which might be produced by different designs.
Of the two, however, Sir W. M. Conway seems to me to be the nearer to
the truth, and I think these instances in which we have both the design
and the woodcutter's copy before us help us to understand the method of
work. No one can believe that the hand of any artist intervened between
the Naples 'Granollachs' and its Roman interpreter, and I feel
tolerably sure myself that in the two Florentine cuts I have given, the
differences of treatment are also due to the craftsman. In the Venetian
translation from the cuts in the Cologne Bible and in the French
adaptation of the 'Hypnerotomachia' we have, of course, a different set
of conditions, and we must not try to ignore them. But until positive
evidence to the contrary is produced, it is reasonable to believe that
the craftsman often supplied his own designs, and the artist was often
his own woodcutter, and the examples of imitation at which we have been
looking seem to me to strengthen this theory.