Pictorial initials were not greatly in favour during the golden age of
printing, and there is much to be said against them on the score of
appropriateness and good taste. If capital letters were all either round
or oval, one great difficulty would be removed from the artist's path,
for a decorative circle or oval, even if a tail or handle has to be
added to it, makes no bad frame for a little picture. It is therefore
not surprising to find that the German designers, who were the first to
attack the problem, adopted a rounded form of the letter T, shortened
the shaft of a P to a minimum, and magnified the lower curve of a B or
S, while reducing the upper one as much as possible. These
accommodations do not make for clearness, and certain letters, such as
A, E, H, and M often remained stubbornly outside any such compromises.
[13] Reprinted, by leave of Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and
Co. from 'Bibliographica,' vol. iii. (1896).
This difficulty as to form had been experienced and, as far as was
possible, overcome, by the old illuminators, but the printers had a
trouble of their own which may have made them think that movable types
also were vanity. An illuminator who had to paint the same initial
twelve times probably found a pleasure in varying his miniatures, but
with the pictures which had not only to be drawn, but to be cut on wood
or soft metal, a printer was naturally less inclined to be profuse. We
know, of course, from their general practice that the early printers had
generous ideas as to the adaptability of any one picture of a town or a
battle to the representation of any other town or battle which might be
mentioned in the text; but there were only a few subjects capable of
this endless repetition, and when Leonard Holl prefixed to his edition
of Ptolemy's 'Cosmographia' (Ulm, 1482) the magnificent, if not very
easily recognisable, N, which shows the editor, Nicolaus Germanus,
presenting his book to Pope Paul II. (fig. 1), he must have known that
he would have to wait a long time before he could use it again.
[Illustration: 1. FROM PTOLEMY'S 'COSMOGRAPHIA,' PRINTED BY LEONARD
HOLL. ULM, 1482]
[Illustration: 2. FROM A 'JOSEPHUS' PRINTED BY LUCAS BRANDES AT LUBECK]
Lucas Brandes of Lubeck, in his splendid editions of 'Josephus' and the
'Rudimentum Noviciorum,' used a fine set of initials, into which various
pictures could be inserted at pleasure. Either from economy, however, or
from the poverty of invention of his designer, he had recourse to no
more than some half dozen subjects. In the 'Josephus' a battle-scene, a
cleric at his desk, and a military scribe, who has been identified as a
Knight Templar, and whose adjustable reading-desk reminds us of the
latest inventions for the comfort of invalids, recur again and again.
The scribe appears, conveniently enough, in the fine P here shown (fig.
2), and in a C, but we find him also huddled below the bar of an H, and
perched upon that of an A. In the same way the clerk, who is prettily
framed in a Q, is shown to much less advantage in an M, of which the
middle stem has been broken off to make room for him. One or two of the
letters have no picture to fill them in, the blocks being apparently all
engaged in other parts of the book. In the 'Rudimentum Noviciorum' we
find a David playing his harp within a D, and the same pictures, with
the loss of the ceiling and part of the floor, is repeated in a B. The
cleric and the battle-scene appear again from the 'Josephus,' and there
is also a C with a rather pretty picture of the Virgin adoring the Holy
Child.
As far as I am aware, the only books in which large pictorial initials
are profusely and appropriately employed are some of the great folio
German Bibles, where the certainty of a large sale and the probability
of future editions encouraged the printer to liberality. Thus in the
Bibles published by Günther Zainer at Augsburg in 1473 and 1477 the
prologue and each successive book begins with a large initial filled in
with a picture illustrating the subject of the text. The prologue begins
with a B, within which are seated S. Jerome and a Bishop; Genesis with
an I, to the right of which stands the Creator, while the stem is broken
by a circle showing Adam and Eve in Eden; Exodus with a D, illustrating
the passage of the Red Sea; Numbers with a U, within which stand Moses
and Aaron. In German Bibles D and U are the initials most in request,
and, though the U leaves little room for the picture, both are fairly
convenient letters. On the other hand, the initial E of Job and the A of
the First Book of Chronicles are awkwardly divided by their cross-bars,
so that each has to contain two insignificant little pictures instead of
a single important one. In most German Bibles I have seen these
pictorial initials are more or less thickly coloured, so that it is
impossible to reproduce them successfully, but I give here a fine I
taken from the Book of Esdras in the undated edition printed by
Sensenschmidt and Frisner at Nuremberg about 1476 (fig. 3).
[Illustration: 3. FROM THE GERMAN BIBLE PRINTED BY FRISNER AND
SENSENSCHMIDT AT NUREMBERG, ABOUT 1476]
[Illustration: 4. FROM AN 'OROSIUS' PUBLISHED BY VÉRARD, 1509]
[Illustration: 5. INITIAL L USED BY JACQUES MAILLET AT LYONS]
Outside Germany, as we have said, pictorial initials did not flourish
much in the early days of printing, for the finest printers, as a rule,
abjured initials altogether, and the few who used them rightly preferred
purely decorative designs. In France, in some editions of the 'Mer des
Histoires' and similar books, we find two or three of very large size, a
huge I, with a figure of Christ within it, and the P here reproduced
(fig. 4), with the usual picture of an author at his work. Vérard,
however, and the few other fifteenth-century publishers who employed
initials, preferred grotesques to pictures, which only occasionally, as
in the magnificent L from the 'Mer des Histoires' of Pierre Le Rouge,
have any high pictorial value. In another L, used at Paris and at Lyons,
we have intertwined the faces of an old man and a young couple flirting.
It was no doubt specially designed for the 1492 edition of the
'Matheolus,' or 'quinze joies du mariage,' in which it seems to have
made its first appearance. The monkey and bagpipes L of the 'Recueil des
histoires troyennes,' and the S. George-and-the-Dragon L of a Lyons
reprint of the 'Mer des Histoires' may also be reckoned as pictorial,
but the more ordinary varieties are purely grotesque combinations of
distorted faces. These had hardly gone out of fashion before the
Renaissance influence was paramount, and though I have found a few
small pictorial initials in sixteenth-century French books, notably a
very pretty set in a Utrecht Missal, printed by Wolfgang Hopyl at Paris
in 1505,[14] they are certainly exceptional.
[14] Hopyl's initials are an inch and a half square on a dotted
background. They were evidently designed specially for a Missal,
the pictures being appropriate to the services to which the
initials belong. They do not make up a complete alphabet, but of
several letters there are two or three variants, _e.g._ for R there
are pictures of Death, of the Annunciation, and of the
Resurrection; for S, of SS. Cosmo and Damian, of S. Martin and the
Beggar, and of the Blessed Virgin.
In Spain the dignity and severity which marks the work of the early
printers were opposed to any save purely decorative initials, which,
probably through the influence of the German printers in the Peninsula,
came into use at an early date, and were often strikingly good. The one
pictorial set I have found occurs in the 'Copilacion de Leyes,'
promulgated in 1485, and printed by Centenera at Zamora, probably in the
same year. Each of these initials, nine in number, is appropriate to the
section of the book which it heads. Thus in an S two knights in combat
herald the laws of chivalry; in an A a canonist and his scholar preside
over those of matrimony; for commerce we have money-changers in a D, and
so on. The initials are cut not in wood, but on soft metal, which
unluckily did not yield at all a good impression, a fault by which the
best Spanish decorative work is often marred.
In Italy pictorial initials do not make their appearance until quite
late. Except at Venice, indeed, printed initials of any kind were in no
high esteem, at Florence not coming into use until 1489. At Venice
Ratdolt's decorative alphabets found several imitators before this date,
and soon after 1490 we find alphabets of children on a black ground
coming into favour. In a 'Donatus,' printed, according to Signor
Ongania, in 1493, by Guilelmus Tridentis, we find an open-work P, within
which a boy is bringing a book to his master, and, under the date 1494,
we are shown a picture of Jacobus de Voragine at work under the shadow
of the same letter. Towards the end of the fifteenth century and in the
early years of the sixteenth the missals of Georgius Arrivabene and
Lucantonio Giunta are crowded with pictorial initials of very varying
value. That here shown (fig. 6), from the 'Missale Ordinis
Vallisumbrosae,' printed by Giunta in 1503, is a good example of the
heavier sort. The letter thus tricked out is a G, the initial of the
'Gaudeamus' with which the introit begins on the festival of the first
Abbot of Vallisumbrosa, Johannes Gualbertus. Numerous other examples
will be found figured in Ongania's 'Arte della Stampa,' though the
careful student will soon discover that the initial letters with which
its pages are crowded are usually fitted into any spaces which chance to
be vacant, and often have no connection of any kind with the larger
reproductions which they adjoin. Thus their source can seldom be traced
with certainty.
[Illustration: 6. FROM THE 'VALLISUMBROSA MISSAL,' PRINTED BY GIUNTA AT
VENICE, 1503]
With the exception of some portrait-initials at Pavia, of which Dr. Paul
Kristeller has written in 'Bibliographica,' vol. i. p. 356 _sq._, and a
few English ones of which we shall speak later, the initials in these
Venetian Service-books are the last of any importance in which the
artist has endeavoured to combine picture and letter into an harmonious
design. The artists of the Renaissance, unlike their craftsman
predecessors, had no feeling for book-work as such, and it must be
confessed that the printers repaid them by printing their delicate work
with a carelessness which in most cases completely obscures it.
Henceforth the predominant type of pictorial initial is one in which a
plain Roman capital is imposed upon a picture to which it has no
artistic relation, and which it often cruelly mutilates. Moreover, while
the reasonable preference for small books over bulky folios carried with
it a great reduction in the size of initials, the refusal of the artists
to simplify their designs, so as to accommodate them to these narrower
limits resulted in an absolute waste of much fine work. Thus for the
famous Holbein initials which came into use at Basel about 1520 I must
refer my readers to the illustrations in 'Butsch,' which, good as they
are, do not encourage me to attempt fresh reproductions. Even in the
original books in which the initials appear, much of the delicacy of the
designs is hopelessly lost, for it was impossible that a little picture,
often of less than an inch square, however carefully cut, should be
adequately rendered when printed in a page of type by workmen who had
already lost much of the cunning, or rather much of the capacity for
taking pains, of the early masters of the craft.
The new school of designers cast aside, as a rule, any attempt to suit
their pictures to the subject of any particular books, taking instead
some one theme or idea which they illustrated through all the letters of
the alphabet. Thus we have the Child Alphabet and Peasant Alphabet of
Holbein, and the same master's still more famous 'Dance of Death'
designed for letters slightly larger than the previous ones, but yet no
more than an inch square. The alphabet by the Master I. F. is more than
a half as large again as this, and is the most decorative of any, the
pictures being drawn in relief against a black ground. The early letters
of this alphabet illustrate the labours of Hercules, whose name and that
of his antagonists are inscribed upon them. When Hercules was exhausted,
the artist seems to have fallen back on the Scriptures, his R
representing Lot, his S Balaam, and so on.
These Basel initials, which appear chiefly in books printed by Froben,
Bebel, Cratander, and Froschover, were no doubt the parents of the small
pictorial initials which soon became popular in Germany, Italy, and
England. Their development in Germany may be traced in the pages of
Butsch, while the Italian initials of the middle of the sixteenth
century have already been dealt with in 'Bibliographica' in Mr. A. J.
Butler's interesting article (vol. i. pp. 418-27). No one, however, as
far as I am aware, has endeavoured to trace the history of pictorial
initials in our own country, and I hope that the notes which I have been
able to bring together on this part of the subject, scanty as they are,
may yet prove of some use as a beginning.
As Mr. Butler has shown, the idea of the Italian alphabets is that the
subject of each picture should begin with the letter which is imposed
upon it. In a scriptural set A may show us Abraham, B Babel or Balaam, C
Cain; in a mythological, A may be Ajax, B Bucephalus, C a Centaur, and
so with other subjects. In isolated instances we may trace this
connection between letter and word at a much earlier period. Thus in the
Lubeck 'Josephus' besides the large initials there is also a much
smaller D enclosing a picture of David, and it is at least possible that
the choice of the picture was suggested by the letter being the initial
of David's name. The novelty to which Mr. Butler drew attention consists
in the application of this system of illustration through an entire
alphabet, and I have found no good reason for challenging his claim that
this novelty originated in Italy. If it is to stand, however, we must
put back the first occurrence of these letters to some years before
1546, which is the first positive date he mentions, for in the first
Greek book printed in England, the 'Homiliae Duae' of S. Chrysostom,
published by Reyner Wolf in August 1543, there are four initials which,
despite some difficulties as to two of them, probably belong to this
class. The letters are (i) a D, here figured, which obviously stands
for Diogenes, (ii) an H (used as a Greek _eta_) showing Eli (or Heli)
and Samuel, (iii) a K, here figured, representing the fountain of
En-hakkore which sprang at Samson's prayer from the jaw-bone of the ass,
with which he had slain the thousand Philistines, and (iv) a Q
(repeated) depicting the Judgment of Solomon. Despite the existence of
two K's in En-hakkore, and the possibility of the Q standing for
Quaestio or Querimonia, the difficulty of fitting the right words to
these letters makes it possible that the propriety of the D and H may be
accidental, but on the whole the probability is the other way.
[Illustration: 7. D AND K FROM THE 'HOMILIAE' DUAE OF S. CHRYSOSTOM,
PRINTED BY R. WOLFE. LONDON, 1543]
The interesting question now arises where did Wolfe get these letters,
which have all the appearance of being used here for the first time?
Their similarity to the letters to which attention was first called by
Mr. Butler is so great that we can hardly doubt that, directly or
indirectly, they are of Italian origin. But the introduction of
gold-tooling into England by Berthelet, examples of which occur on books
printed as early as 1541, was undoubtedly effected through Italian
workmen, and it is quite possible that these letters were cut in England
by Italians living in this country. If, however, further investigation
should prove that they were imported, they may help us to determine from
what quarter Wolfe obtained his Greek type, of which no complete fount
had hitherto existed in England.
Six years after the 'Chrysostom' we find traces, in the edition by
Whitchurch (March 1549) of the first Prayer-Book of Edward VI., of
another set of scriptural initials of the same character. The four
letters which I have noted are an A (Abraham and Isaac), a B (Balaam),
an I (Jacob's dream), and an O (Olofernes). The letters are all very
much worn, so that the pictures in many instances are barely
decipherable.
Of the next pictorial alphabet in English books I have lately been
surprised to find one letter in a proclamation printed by Berthelet in
1546, my previous acquaintance of it beginning with books printed more
than ten years later. The pictures in this alphabet are all signed with
an A, at the top of which is a little projection suggesting that it
stands for the monogram of A. S. My friend Mr. Sayle has found initials
with this signature in books printed during the reign of Elizabeth and
James I., which nearly make up a complete alphabet, with some letters in
duplicate. According to Bryant and Nägler, the engraver Anton Sylvius,
who was born at Antwerp in 1526, and worked for Plantin from 1550 to
1573, used the monogram I have described. But I am not wholly satisfied
that this A. S. is the same man.
Another point of some difficulty is whether the pictures have any
relation to the letters. Some of them come in very neatly, thus E and
Europa riding on her bull, M and Mercury, T and a lady, who may very
well be Thetis, haranguing a council of Gods, another T with Neptune
flourishing a very prominent Trident, go well enough together, but why
should a W be illustrated by Hercules and Cacus, or an F by Cephalus and
Procris, or an I by the birth of Adonis? On the whole, pending further
explanations, it would seem that to connect letter and subject was
regarded by the designers rather as desirable than essential.
[Illustration: 8. PICTORIAL INITIAL ATTRIBUTED TO ANTON SYLVIUS]
The same point arises as to a much clumsier pictorial alphabet, with
large figures in it, found in books and proclamations, printed from 1547
onwards. Here the picture belonging to the T is of Christ and the
Tribute-money, but the pictures in other letters seem part of a set
illustrating the works of mercy (visiting prisoners, healing the
wounded, etc.) and to have no special appropriateness to their initials.
In 1554 we find Cawood in possession of both of these sets of initials.
He had obtained the first apparently from Berthelet, and the second from
Grafton. The ruder set seems to have soon fallen into disuse, though I
find some letters from it in the possession of John Day in 1563, but
that of A. S. (individual letters being re-cut as need arose) was passed
on to Barker, when he became Queen's Printer, and reappears in several
books of the seventeenth century.
[Illustration: 9. HERALDIC INITIAL FROM GRAFTON'S EDITION OF 'HALL.'
LONDON, 1548]
In 1548, in Grafton's edition of Hall's 'Union of the Families of
Lancashire and York,' we find a new experiment in the form of heraldic
initials. The dedication to Edward VI. begins with a large O, measuring
2-3/4 inches each way, and containing the very elaborate arms of the
author himself; the records of the reigns of Henry IV., V., and VIII.,
with an open H; that of Henry VI. with a D, of Edward IV. with a P, and
of Henry VII. with a fine C (fig. 9), each letter containing the king's
arms.
[Illustration: 10. FROM A BIBLE PRINTED BY JOHN DAY. LONDON, 1551. 4TO.]
In 1551, in the quarto Bible printed by John Day, the dedication to
Edward VI. by Edmond Becke begins with a really excellent pictorial E
(shown in fig. 10), representing the offer of a copy to the king. As in
the case of the initials for Hall's 'Chronicle,' this design must have
been specially prepared for the book, and therefore presumably in
England, so that we need not set down other letters too freely as
importations from abroad.
[Illustration: 11. HERALDIC INITIAL CONTAINING THE ARMS OF DUDLEY OF
LEICESTER]
In 1559, in Cunningham's 'Cosmographical Glass,' printed for him by John
Day, there are several large initials, very good of their kind and very
well printed. The heraldic D, which is peculiarly graceful, contains the
arms of the Earl of Leicester, to whom the book is dedicated. The
pictorial I and L (here shown) are both signed, the former I. D., a
signature which recurs on several of the illustrations, the latter I.
B., who was also the designer of the border to the title-page. An effort
seems to have been made to get Dudley's arms into a D, as the opening
allusion to Daedalus is certainly dragged in by the shoulders. The other
two letters shown, probably have reference to the subject of the book,
the Preface, in which the I is found, laying especial stress on the
importance of Cosmography in war. The other pictorial initials in the
book are an S, in which one man is pointing to a sun-dial and another to
the sun (signed with a monogram of a C and a small I within it), an A
with a procession of satyrs by the same artist, and a T showing
sea-gods navigating a ship (signed H).
[Illustration: 12. INITIAL SIGNED I. D.]
It is thus obvious that several designers, or engravers, were at work
about this time on pictorial initials, though it will probably be found
no easy matter to identify them.
[Illustration: 13. INITIAL SIGNED I. B.]
In 1563 most of the letters from the 'Cosmographical Glass' are found
again in the very rare edition of the music to Sternhold and Hopkins'
metrical version of the Psalms, also printed by Day. In the four parts
of the book there are three other initials of the same character, a W
representing the battle of the Pigmies and the Cranes, a P of Hercules
in the garden of the Hesperides, and an R with a hunting-scene (signed
with the monogram C. I.). All are excellent.
[Illustration: 11-13. INITIALS FROM CUNNINGHAM'S 'COSMOGRAPHICAL GLASS,'
PRINTED BY JOHN DAY, 1559]
Two or three more examples of these large initials will bring to a close
my notes of those which I have been able to find in English books of
this period, though doubtless others are awaiting the research of future
investigators. In the first edition of Ascham's 'Scholemaster,' printed
by Day in 1570, the large S is repeated from the 'Cosmographical Glass,'
and shows some signs of wear. Another letter of a slightly larger size
by the same designer is found prefixed to the 'History of Ireland' in
the 1577 edition of 'Holinshed' printed by Harrison. This is a T, and
the picture it contains shows an astronomer, whom we may perhaps
reasonably identify with Ptolemy. If so, we may remember that his name
used to be spelt all over Europe with the omission of its first letter,
though the true form seems to be that used in English books of the
period.
[Illustration: 14. FROM ASCHAM'S 'SCHOLEMASTER,' PRINTED BY JOHN DAY,
1570]
The other pictorial initial in the 1577 'Holinshed'[15] is the largest I
have found in any English book, measuring nearly three and a half inches
each way. The letter is an I, the subject of the picture the Creation,
and it is conceivable that, though we find it in an English history, it
was originally intended for the first page of a Great Bible, in which
it would fitly have illustrated the words 'In the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth.' It is possible, indeed, that this
applicability to a particular text may sometimes have been taken as a
motive, when it was found difficult to establish a connection between
the initial and the subject of a picture as summed up in any single
word. Thus a W, which is found in Cawood's books in connection with the
A. S. initials, represents the passage of the Red Sea, and irresistibly
reminds us of the verse 'When Israel came out of Egypt,' though not of
the word Exodus.
[15] Since this paper was in type I have been shown an earlier
example of this letter in a book printed by R. Wolfe in 1563.
Some very fine heraldic initials still remain to be noticed. The
initials in the early editions of the English Bible are disappointing,
but in the first and second editions of the so-called 'Bishops' Bible,'
printed by Jugge in 1568 and 1572, special attention seems to have been
paid to them, and besides many small pictorial and decorative letters of
interest, there are some really fine examples of heraldic designs. The
owners of the arms which I have identified are Archbishop Cranmer,
Archbishop Parker, Cecil, Dudley, and Francis Russell, second Earl of
Bedford. Parker's arms are exhibited in several different letters,
generally with his initials M. C. (Matthew of Canterbury) and the date.
The form of these heraldic letters is usually graceful, and they are
much more easily justifiable on artistic grounds than the pictorial
initials at which we have been looking.
The title-pages of the 'Bishops' Bible' are adorned with
copper-engravings of some merit of Elizabeth herself, Cecil, and Dudley.
One of these, I regret to say, has been turned into an initial at the
beginning of the Psalms by the simple device of giving Lord Burleigh a
large Roman B to hold in his hand. A less violent and more successful
effort after a portrait-initial is here shown from the edition of Foxe's
'Actes and Monumentes,' printed by Day in 1576. Another portrait-initial
of the Queen is found in an E, which heads one of her Proclamations
printed by Purfoot, and an inferior one in an F in another Proclamation
printed by Barker.
[Illustration: 15. FROM FOXE'S 'ACTES AND MONUMENTES,' PRINTED BY JOHN
DAY, 1576]
Some of the heraldic initials of the first and second editions of the
'Bishops' Bible' are repeated, with some additional ones of smaller
size, in the 1573 edition. Parker's arms are also to be found in the
edition of 'Matthew Paris' issued under his patronage in 1571, Cecil's
in the 1577 'Holinshed' already mentioned, and it is probable that a
good many others may be discovered. It seems to me, indeed, that
students of the history of English printing have hardly paid the
attention it deserves to the work of the forty years from 1540 to 1580.
The printers and bookmen of this period were not distinguished by much
originality, or by delicate artistic taste, but they were men of
considerable enterprise, and their interest in their books was great and
genuine. This interest and enterprise left a very distinctive mark on
the types, the illustrations and the bindings of the books of the
period, and though the ideas which underlie them were mostly borrowed
from abroad, they were developed with a certain freedom and largeness
which are not without their effect.