often graceful and well-arranged; there is but little attempt at marking
shadows; there is less stiffness in the forms, and the draperies follow
the lines of the forms better than in either earlier or later work of a
similar kind, and there is also much less unconscious caricature and
grimace. A whole series needs to be looked at before one can appreciate
the interest which these designs have in indicating the subjects on
which imagination and thought were then exercised, and the modes in
which they were exercised. Symbolism and mysticism pervade the whole.
All nature and history seem to have existed only to prefigure the life
of the Saviour: imagination and thought hover about him, and take color,
shape, and light only from that central form; the stories of the Old
Testament, the histories of David, Samson, and Jonah, the massacres,
victories, and miracles there recorded, foreshadow, as it were in
parables, the narrative of the Gospels; the temple, the altar, and the
ark of the covenant, all the furnishings and observances of the Jewish
ritual, reveal occult meanings; the garden of Solomon’s Song, and the
sentiment of the Bridegroom and the Bride who wander in it, are
interpreted, sometimes in graceful or even poetic feeling, under the
inspiration of mystical devotion; old kings of pagan Athens are
transformed into witnesses of Christ, and, with the Sibyl of Rome,
attest spiritual truth. This book and others like it are mirrors of the
ecclesiastical mind; they picture the principal intellectual life of the
Middle Ages; they show the sources of that deep feeling in the earlier
Dutch artists which gave dignity and sweetness to their works. Even in
the rudeness of these books, in the texts as well as in the designs,
there is a _naïveté_, an openness and freshness of nature, a confidence
in limited experience and contracted vision, which make the sight of
these cuts as charming as conversation with one who had never heard of
America or dreamed of Luther, and who would have found modern life a
puzzle and an offence. The author of the _Speculum_ laments the evils
which fell upon man in consequence of Adam’s sin, and recounts them:
blindness, deafness, lameness, floods, fire, pestilence, wild beasts,
and lawsuits (in such order he arranges them); and he ends the long list
with this last and heaviest evil, that men should presume to ask “why
God willed to create man, whose fall he foresaw; why he willed to create
the angels, whose ruin he foreknew; wherefore he hardened the heart of
Pharaoh, and softened the heart of Mary Magdalene unto repentance;
wherefore he made Peter contrite, who had denied him thrice, but allowed
Judas to despair in his sin; wherefore he gave grace to one thief, and
cared not to give grace to his companion.” What modern man can fully
realize the mental condition of this poet, who thus weeps over the
temptation to ask these questions, as the supreme and direst curse which
Divine vengeance allows to overtake the perverse children of this world?
A better illustration of the sentiment and grace sometimes to be found
in the block-books is the _Historia Virginis Mariæ ex Cantico
Canticorum_, or History of the Virgin, as it is prefigured in the Song
of Solomon. This volume is the finest in design of all the block-books.
In it the Bride, the Bridegroom, three attendant maidens, and an angel
are grouped in successive scenes, illustrating the mystical meaning of
some verse of the Song. The artistic feeling displayed in the
arrangement of the figures is such that the designs have been attributed
directly to Roger Van der Weyden, the greatest of Van Eyck’s pupils.
This book, like the _Biblia Pauperum_ and the _Speculum_, came from the
engravers and the printers of the Netherlands; but it shows progress in
art beyond those works, more elegance and vivacity of line, more ability
to render feeling expressively, and especially more delight in nature
and carefulness in delineating natural objects.
In spite of these three chief monuments of the art of block-printing in
the Netherlands, the claim of that country to the invention of the
block-books is not undisputed. The _Historia Johannis Evangelistæ
ejusque Visiones Apocalypticæ_, or the Apocalypse of St. John, much
ruder in drawing and in execution, is the oldest block-book according to
most writers, and especially those who maintain the claims of Germany to
the honor of the invention. This volume has been ascribed by Chatto to
Upper Germany, where some Greek artist may have designed it; but with
more probability, by Passavant, to Lower Germany, and especially to
Cologne, on account of the coloring, which is in the Cologne manner. The
volume bears a surer sign of early work than mere rudeness of execution:
it is hieratic rather than artistic in character; the artist is
concerned more with enforcing the religious lesson than with designing
pleasant scenes. But although for this reason a very early date
(1440-1460) must be assigned to the book, the question of the origin of
the art of block-printing remains unsettled, even if it be granted that
the volume is of German workmanship. Some evidence must be shown that
the Netherlands imported the art from Cologne or some other German city,
and this is lacking; indeed, the absence in early Flemish work of any
trace of influence from the school of art which flourished at Cologne
before the Van Eycks painted in the Netherlands, is strong negative
evidence against such a supposition. On the other hand, it must be
remembered that Germany produced the St. Christopher, and many other
early prints. In some of the German block-books Heinecken recognized the
modes of the German card-makers; but this may be explained otherwise
than by supposing that the card-makers invented the art of
block-printing. On the whole, the rudeness of early German block-books
must be held to be a result of the unskilfulness and tastelessness of
German workmen, rather than an indication that the art was discovered by
them. The engraving of the Apocalypse, like all other German work, will
bear no comparison with the Netherland engraving, either in refinement,
vivacity, or skill.
The other block-books, many of which are in themselves interesting and
curious, do not elucidate the history of the art, and therefore need not
be discussed. It is sufficient to say that they are less valuable than
those which have been described, and far ruder in design and execution.
Some of them throw light upon the time. The _Ars Memorandi_, a series of
designs meant to assist the memory in recalling the chapters of the
Apocalypse, is a very curious monument of an age when such a device was
useful; and the _Ars Moriendi_, or Art of Dying, in which were depicted
frightful and eager devils about a dying man’s couch, is a book which
may stir our laughter, but was full of a different meaning for the poor
sinner to whose bedside the pious monks carried it to bring him to
repentance, by showing him designs of such horrible suggestion,
enforced, no doubt, by exhortations hardly more humane. These books were
all reproduced many times. This Art of Dying, for example, appeared in
Latin, Flemish, German, Italian, French, and English, with similar
designs, although there were variations in the text. Once popular, they
have long since lost their attraction; few care for the ideas or the
pictures preserved in them; the bibliophile collects them, because they
are rare, costly, and curious; the scholar consults them, because they
reveal the unprofitableness of mediæval thought, the needs and
characteristics of the class that could prize them, the poverty of the
civilization of which they are the monuments, and because they disclose
glimpses of actual human life as it then was, with its humors, its
burdens, and its imaginations. The world has forgotten them; but they
hold in the history of civilization an honorable place, for by means of
them wood-engraving led the way to the invention of printing, and
thereby performed its greatest service to mankind.
III.
_EARLY PRINTED BOOKS IN THE NORTH._
[Illustration: I FIG 7.--Source of this letter unknown.]
In 1454 the art of printing in movable types and with a press had been
perfected in Germany; soon afterward the art of block-printing, although
it continued to be practised until the end of the century, began to fall
into decay, and the ancient block-books, in which the text had been
subsidiary to the colored engravings, speedily gave place to the modern
printed book, in which the engravings were subsidiary to the text. This
change did not come about without a struggle between the rival arts. In
all the great cities of Germany and the Low Countries, the
block-printers and wood-engravers had long been organized into strong
and compact guilds, enforcing their rights with strict jealousy, and
privileged from the first to make use of movable types and the press;
the new printers, on the other hand, were comparatively few in number,
disunited and scattered, accustomed to go from one town to another, and
every attempt by them to insert woodcuts into their books was looked
upon and resented as an encroachment on the art of the block-printers
and the wood-engravers. At first the new printers closely imitated the
manuscripts of their time. They used woodcuts to take the place of the
miniatures with which the manuscripts were embellished. They copied
directly the handwriting of the scribes in the forms of their type, and
were thus led to the use of ornamental initial letters like those which
had long been designed by the scribes and illuminated by the
rubricators; such are the beautiful initial letters in the Psalter of
Faust and Scheffer, published at Mayence in 1457, which are the earliest
wood-engravings in a dated book, and are designed and executed with a
skill which has rarely been surpassed. It was by such attempts that the
new printers incurred the hostility of the wood-engravers, which was
soon actively shown. Even as late as 1477, the guild at Augsburg, which
was then the most numerous and best-skilled in Germany, opposed the
admission of Gunther Zainer, who had just set up a printing-press there,
to the rights of citizenship, and he owed his freedom from molestation
to the interference of the friendly abbot, Melchior de Stamham. The
guild succeeded in obtaining an ordinance forbidding Zainer to insert
woodcuts or initials engraved on wood into his books--a prohibition
which remained in force until he came to an understanding with them, by
agreeing to use only such woodcuts and initials as should be engraved by
them. In this, or similar ways, as in every displacement of labor by
mechanical improvements, after a short struggle the cheaper and more
rapid art prevailed; the wood-engravers gave up to the printers the
principal part in the making of books, and became their servants.
The new printers were most active in the great German cities--Cologne,
Mayence, Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, Strasburg, and Basle--and from the
presses of these cities the greatest number of books with woodcuts were
issued. This is one reason why the mastering influence from this time in
Northern wood-engraving was German; why German taste, German rudeness,
coarseness, and crudity became the main characteristics of
wood-engraving in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The Germans
had been, from the first, artisans rather than artists. They had
produced many anonymous prints and block-books, but they had never
attained to the power and elegance of the Flemish school. Now the
quality of their work became even less excellent; for decline had set
in, and the increasing popularity of the new art of copperplate-engraving
combined with the unfavorable influences resulting from printing, which
required cheap and rapid processes, to degrade the art still lower. The
illustrations in the new books had ordinarily little art-value: they
were often grotesque, stiff, ignorant in design, and careless or
inexpert in execution; but they had nevertheless their use and their
interest.
The German influence was made more powerful, too, by other causes than
the foremost part taken by Germany in printing. The Low Countries,
hitherto so civilized and prosperous, the home and cradle of early
Northern art, the influence of which had spread abroad and become the
most powerful even over the German painters themselves, were now
involved in the turbulence and disaster of the great wars of Charles the
Bold. They not only lost their honorable place at the head of Northern
civilization, but on the marriage of their Duchess, Mary of Burgundy,
the daughter of Charles the Bold, to the Emperor Maximilian, they
yielded in great part to the German influence, and became more nearly
allied in character and spirit to the German cities, as they had before
been more akin to France. The woodcuts in the books of the Netherlands,
where printing was introduced by German workmen, share in the rudeness
of German art; in proportion as their previous performance had been more
excellent, the decline of the art among them seems more great. There
are, occasionally, traces of the old power of design and execution in
their later work; but from the time that books began to be printed
Germany took the lead in wood-engraving.
The German free cities were then animated with the new spirit which was
to mould the great age of Germany, and result in Dürer and Luther. The
growing weakness of the Empire had fostered independence and
self-reliance in the citizens, while the increase of commerce, both on
the north to the German Ocean, and on the south through Venice, had
introduced the wants of a higher civilization, and afforded the means to
satisfy them. Local pride, which showed itself in the rivalries and
public works of the cities, made their enterprise and industry more
active, and gave an added impulse to the rapid transformation of
military and feudal into commercial and democratic life. In these
cities, where the body of men interested in knowledge and with the means
of acquiring it, became every year more numerous, the new presses sent
forth books of all kinds--the religious and ascetic writings of the
clergy, mediæval histories, chronicles and romances, travels, voyages,
botanical, military, and scientific works, and sometimes the writings of
classic authors; although, in distinction from Italy, Germany was at
first devoted to the reproduction of mediæval rather than Greek and
Latin literature. The books in Latin, the learned tongue, were usually
without woodcuts; but those in the vulgar tongues, then becoming true
languages, the development and fixing of which are one of the great
debts of the modern world to printing, were copiously illustrated, in
order to make them attractive to the popular taste.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--The Grief of Hannah. From the Cologne Bible,
1470-’75]
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Illustration of Exodus I. From the Cologne
Bible, 1470-’75.]
The great book, on which the printers exercised most care, was the
Bible. Many editions were published; but the most important of these, in
respect to the history of wood-engraving, was the Cologne Bible (Figs.
8, 9), which appeared before 1475, both because its one hundred and nine
designs were, probably, after the block-books, the earliest series of
engraved illustrations of Scripture, and were widely copied, and also
because they show an extension of the sphere of thought and increased
intellectual activity. The designers of these cuts relied less upon
tradition, displayed more original feeling, and showed greater variety
and vivacity in their treatment, than the artists who had engraved the
_Biblia Pauperum_. The latter volume contained, as has been seen, nearly
the last impression of century-old pictorial types in the mediæval
conventional manner; the Cologne Bible defined conceptions of Scriptural
scenes anew, and these conceptions became conventional, and re-appeared
for generations in other illustrated Bibles in all parts of Europe; not,
however, because of an immobility of mind characteristic of the
community, as in earlier times, but partly because the printers
preserved and exchanged old wood-blocks, so that the same designs from
the same blocks appeared in widely distant cities, and partly because it
was less costly for them to employ an inferior workman to copy the old
cut, with slight variations, than to have an artist of original
inventive power to design a wholly new series. Thus the Nuremberg Bible
of 1482 is illustrated from the same blocks as the Cologne Bible, and
the cuts in the Strasburg Bible of 1485 are poor copies of the same
designs. From the marginal border which encloses the first page of the
Cologne Bible it appears that wood-engraving was already looked on, not
only as a means of illustrating what was said in the text, but as a
means of decoration merely. Here, among the foliage and flowers, are
seen running animals, and in the midst the hunter, the jongleur, the
musician, the lover, the lady, and the fool--an indication of delight in
nature and in the variety of human life, which, simply because it is not
directly connected with the text, is the more significant of that freer
range of sympathy and thought characteristic of the age. Afterward these
decorative borders, often in a satiric and not infrequently in a gross
vein, wholly disconnected with the text, and sometimes at strange
variance with its spirit, are not uncommon. The engravings that follow
this frontispiece represent the customary Scriptural scenes, and the
series closes with two striking designs of the Last Judgment and of
Hell. In the former angels are hurling pope, emperor, cardinal, bishop,
and king into hell, and in the latter their bodies lie face to face with
the souls marked with the seal of God--a satire not unexampled before
this time, and indeed hardly bolder than hitherto, but of a spirit which
showed that Luther was already born. “It is no small honor for our
wood-engravers,” says Renouvier, “to have expressed public opinion with
such hardihood, and to have shown themselves the advanced sentinels of a
revolution.” The engraving in this Bible tells its own story without
need of comment; but, heavy and rude as much of it is, it surpasses
other German work of the same period; and it must not be forgotten that
the awkwardness of the drawing was much obscured by the colors which
were afterward laid on the designs by hand. It is only by accident or
negligence that woodcuts were left uncolored in early German books, for
the conception of a complete picture simply in black and white was a
comparatively late acquisition in art, and did not guide the practice of
wood-engravers until the last decade of the century, when, indeed, it
effected a revolution in the art.
Of the many other illustrated Bibles which appeared during the last
quarter of the fifteenth century, the one published at Augsburg, about
1475, and attributed to Gunther Zainer, alone has a peculiar interest.
All but two of its seventy-three woodcuts are combined with large
initial letters, occupying the width of a column, for which they serve
as a background, and by which they are framed in; these are the oldest
initial letters in this style, and are original in design, full of
animation and vigor, and rank with the best work of the early Augsburg
wood-engravers. It is not unlikely that these novel and attractive
letters were the very ones of which the Augsburg guild complained in the
action that they brought against Zainer in 1477. Afterward the German
printers gave much attention to ornamented capitals, both in this style,
which reached its most perfect examples in Holbein’s alphabets, and in
the Italian mode, in which the design was relieved in white upon a black
ground.
Next to the Bibles, the early chronicles and histories are of most
interest for the study of wood-engraving. They are records of legendary
and real events, intermingled with much extraneous matter which seemed
to their authors curious or startling. They usually begin with the
Creation, and come down through sacred into early legendary and secular
history, recounting miracles, martyrdoms, sieges, tales of wonder and
superstition, omens, anecdotes of the great princes, and the like. Each
of them dwells especially upon whatever glorifies the saints, or touches
the patriotism, of their respective countries. They are filled with
woodcuts in illustration of their narrative, beginning with scenes from
Genesis. Thus the Chronicle of Saxony, published at Mayence in 1492,
contains representations of the fall of the angels, the ark of Noah,
Romulus founding Rome, the arrival of the Franks and the Saxons, the
deeds of Charlemagne, the overthrow of paganism, the famous emperors,
Otho burning a sorcerer, Frederick Barbarossa, and the Emperor
Maximilian. The Chronicle of Cologne, published in 1492, is similarly
illustrated with views of the great cathedral, with representations of
the Three Kings, the refusal of the five Rhine cities to pay impost, and
like scenes.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--The Fifth Day of Creation. From Schedel’s
“Liber Chronicarum.” Nuremberg, 1493.]
The most important of the chronicles, in respect to wood-engraving, is
the Chronicle of Nuremberg (Figs. 10, 11, 12), published in that city in
1493. It contains over two thousand cuts which are attributed to William
Pleydenwurff and Michael Wohlgemuth, the latter the master of Albert
Dürer; they are rude and often grotesque, possessing an antiquarian
rather than an artistic interest; many of them are repeated several
times, a portrait serving indifferently for one prophet or another, a
view of houses upon a hill representing equally well a city in Asia or
in Italy, just as in many other early books--for example, in the History
of the Kings of Hungary--a battle-piece does for any conflict, or a man
on a throne for any king. The representations were typical rather than
individual. In some of the designs there is, doubtless, a careful
truthfulness, as in the view of Nuremberg, and perhaps in some of the
portraits. The larger cuts show considerable vigor and boldness of
conception, but none of them are so good as the illustrations, also
attributed to Wohlgemuth, in the _Schatzbehalter_, published in the
same city in 1491. The distinction of the Nuremberg chronicle does not
consist in any superiority of design which can be claimed for it in
comparison with other books of the same sort, but in the fact that here
were printed, for the first time, woodcuts simply in black and white,
which were looked on as complete without the aid of the colorist, and
were in all essential points entirely similar to modern works. This
change was brought about by the introduction of cross-hatching, or lines
crossing each other at different intervals and different angles, but
usually obliquely, by means of which blacks and grays of various
intensity, or what is technically called color, were obtained. This was
a process already in use in copperplate-engraving. In that art--the
reverse of wood-engraving since the lines which are to give the
impression on paper are incised into the metal instead of being left
raised as in the wood-block--the engraver grooved out the crossing lines
with the same facility and in the same way as the draughtsman draws them
in a pen-and-ink sketch, the depth of color obtained depending in both
cases on the relative closeness and fineness of the hatchings. In
engraving in wood the task was much more difficult, and required greater
nicety of skill, for, as in this case the crossing lines must be left in
relief, the engraver was obliged to gouge out the minute diamond spaces
between them. At first this was, probably, thought beyond the power of
the workmen. The earliest woodcut in which these cross-hatchings appear
is the frontispiece to Breydenbach’s Travels, published at Mayence in
1486, which is, perhaps, the finest wood-engraving of its time. In the
Nuremberg chronicle this process was first extensively employed to
obtain color, and thus this volume marks the beginning of that great
school in wood-engraving which seeks its effects in black lines.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--The Dancing Deaths. From Schedel’s “Liber
Chronicarum.” Nuremberg, 1493.]