published before the end of the century belongs to the bibliographer.
Should any one turn to them, he would find in the cuts that they contain
much diversity in character, but little in merit; he would meet at
Bamberg, in the works printed by Pfister, whose Book of Fables,
published 1461, is the first dated volume with woodcuts of figures,
designs so rude that they are generally believed to have been hacked out
by apprentices wholly destitute of training in the craft; he would
notice in the books of Cologne the greater self-restraint and sense of
proportion, in those of Augsburg the greater variety, vivacity, and
vigor, in those of Nuremberg the greater exaggeration and grotesqueness.
In the publications of some cities he would come upon the burning
questions of that generation: the siege of Rhodes by the Turks, the wars
of Charles the Bold against Switzerland, the martyrdom of John Huss;
elsewhere he would see naïve conceptions of mediæval romance and
chivalry, and not infrequently, as in the Boccaccio of Ulm, grossnesses
not to be described; at Strasburg he would hardly recognize Horace and
Virgil with their Teutonic features and barbaric garb; while at Mayence
botanical works, which strangely mingle science, medicine, and
superstition, would excite his wonder, and at Ulm military works would
picture the forgotten engines of mediæval warfare; in the Netherlands,
too, he would discern little difference in literature or in design;
everywhere he would find the unevenness of Gothic taste--one moment
creating works with a certain boldness and grandeur of conception, the
next moment falling into the inane and the ludicrous; everywhere German
realism making each person appear as if born in a Rhine city, and each
event as if taking place within its walls; everywhere, too, an
ever-widening interest in the affairs of past times and distant
countries, in the thought and life of the generations that were gone, in
the pursuits of the living, and the multiform problems of that age of
the Reformation then coming on. It is impossible to turn from this wide
survey without a recognition of the large share which wood-engraving, as
the suggester and servant of printing, had in the progress made toward
civilization in the North during that century. Woltmann does not
over-state the fact when he says: “Wood-engraving and
copperplate-engraving were not alone of use in the advance of art; they
form an epoch in the entire life of mind and culture. The idea embodied
and multiplied in pictures became, like that embodied in the printed
word, the herald of every intellectual movement.”
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Jews Sacrificing a Christian Child. From
Schedel’s “Liber Chronicarum.” Nuremberg, 1493.]
As typography spread from Germany through the other countries of Europe,
the art of wood-engraving accompanied it. The first books printed in the
French language appeared about 1475, at Bruges, where the Dukes of
Burgundy had long favored the vulgar tongue, and had collected many
manuscripts written in it in their great library, then one of the finest
in Europe. The first French city to issue French books from its presses
was Lyons, which had learned the arts of printing and of wood-engraving
from Basle, Geneva, and Nuremberg, in consequence of their close
commercial relations. If a few doubtful and scattered examples of early
work be excepted, it was in these Lyonese books that French
wood-engraving first appeared. From the beginning of printing in France,
Lyons was the chief seat of popular literature, and the centre of the
industry of printing books in the vulgar tongue, as Paris was the chief
seat of the literature of the learned, both in Latin and French, and
devoted itself to reproducing religious and scientific works.[32] At the
close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries the
Lyonese presses issued the largest number of first editions of the
popular romances, which were sought, not merely by French purchasers,
but throughout Europe. These books were meant for the middle class, who
were unable to buy the costly manuscripts, illuminated with splendid
miniatures, in which literature had previously been locked up. They were
not considered valuable enough to be preserved with care, and have
consequently become scarce; but they were published in great numbers,
and exerted an influence in the spread of literary knowledge and taste
which can hardly be over-estimated. Woodcuts were first inserted in them
about 1476; but for twenty years after this wood-engraving was practised
rather as a trade than an art, and its products have no more artistic
merit than similar works in Germany. In 1493 an edition of Terence, in
which the earlier rudeness gave way to some skill in design, showed the
first signs of promise of the excellence which the Lyonese art was to
attain in the sixteenth century.
In Paris, the German printers, who had been invited to the city by a
prior of the Sorbonne, had issued Latin works for ten years before
wood-engraving began to be practised. After 1483, however, Jean Du Pré,
Guyot Marchand, Pierre Le Rouge, Pierre Le Caron, Antoine Verard, and
other early printers applied themselves zealously to the publication of
volumes of devotion, history, poetry, and romance, in which they made
use of wood-engraving. The figure of the author frequently appears upon
the first page, where he offers his book to the king or princess before
whom he kneels; and here and there may be read sentiments like the
following, which is taken from an early work of Verard’s, where they are
inserted in fragmentary verses among the woodcuts: “Every good, loyal,
and gallant Catholic who begins any work of imagery ought, first, to
invoke in all his labor the Divine power by the blessed name of Jesus,
who illumines every human heart and understanding; this is in every deed
a fair beginning.”[33] The religious books, especially the _Livres
d’Heures_ (Fig. 13), were filled with the finest examples of the
Parisian art, which sought to imitate the beautiful miniatures for which
Paris had been famous from even before the time when Dante praised them.
In consequence of this effort the woodcut in simple line served
frequently only as a rough draft, to be filled in and finished by the
colorist, who, indeed, sometimes wholly disregarded it and overlaid it
with a new design. Before long, however, the wood-engravers succeeded in
making cuts which, so far from needing color, were only injured by the
addition of it; but these were considered less valuable than the
illuminated designs, and the wood-engravers were hampered in the
practice of their art by the miniaturists, who, like the guilds at
Augsburg and other German towns, complained of the new mode of
illustration as a ruinous encroachment on their craft.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.--Marginal Border. From Kerver’s “Psalterium
Virginis Mariæ.” 1509.]
Whether with or without color, the engravings in the _Livres d’Heures_
are beautiful. Each page is enclosed in an ornamental border made up of
small cuts, which are repeated in new arrangements on succeeding leaves;
here and there a large cut, usually representing some Scriptural scene,
is introduced in the upper portion of the page, and the text fills the
vacant spaces. Not infrequently the taste displayed is Gallic rather
than pious, and delights in profane legends and burlesque fancies which
one would not expect to meet in a prayer-book. These volumes were so
highly prized by foreign nations for the beauty of their workmanship,
that they were printed in Flemish, English, and Italian. Those which
were issued by Verard, Vostre, Pigouchet, and Kerver were the best
products of the early French art.[34] The secular works which contain
woodcuts are hardly worthy of mention, excepting Guyot Marchand’s La
Danse Macabre, first published in 1485, which is a series of twenty-five
spirited and graceful designs, marked by French vivacity and liveliness
of fancy. In all early French work the peculiar genius of the people is
not so easily distinguishable as in this example, but it is usually
present, and gives a national characteristic to the art, notwithstanding
the indubitable influences of the German archaic school in the earlier
time, and of the Italian school in the first years of the sixteenth
century.
French wood-engraving is remarkable, in respect to its technique, for
the introduction of _criblée_, or dotted work, which has previously[35]
been described, into the backgrounds on which the designs are relieved.
This mode of engraving is probably a survival from the goldsmiths’ work
of the first part of the fifteenth century, and it is not unlikely that,
as Renouvier suggests, these _criblée_ grounds were meant to represent
the gold grounds on which both miniatures and early paintings were
relieved. From an examination of the peculiarities of these engravings,
some authors[36] have been led to maintain that they were taken off
from metal plates cut in relief, and nearly all writers are ready to
admit that this was sometimes, but not always, the case. The question is
unsettled; but it is probable that wood was sometimes employed, and it
would be impossible to determine with certainty what share in these
prints belongs to wood-engraving and metal-engraving respectively. In
general, French wood-engraving, in its best early examples at Paris, was
characterized by greater fineness and elegance of line, and by more
feeling for artistic effects, than was the case with German
book-illustration; but the Parisian chronicles, histories, botanical
works, and the like, possessed no greater merit than similar
publications at Lyons or in the German cities, and their influence upon
the middle classes in furthering the advance of education and taste was
probably much less.
England was far behind the other nations of Europe in its appreciation
of art, and wood-engraving throve there as feebly as did the other arts
of design. The first English book with woodcuts was Caxton’s Game and
Playe of the Chesse, published about 1476, the first edition of which
was issued two years earlier, without illustrations. It is supposed by
some writers that Caxton imported the blocks from which these cuts were
printed, as he did the type for his text; and it is certain that in
later years wood-blocks and metal-plates were brought over from the
Continent for illustrating English books. It is not improbable that the
art was practised by Englishmen as a part of the printer’s craft, and
that there were no professional wood-engravers for many years; indeed,
Chatto doubts whether the art was practised separately even so late as
Holbein’s time. The cuts in Caxton’s works, and in those of the later
printers, Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson, were altogether rude and
uninteresting in design. If the honor of them belongs to foreign rather
than English workmen, no great hurt is done to English pride.
IV.
_EARLY ITALIAN WOOD-ENGRAVING._
[Illustration: P FIG. 14.--From Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Venice, 1518
(design, 1497).]
Previous to the time of Dürer wood-engraving in the North, as has been
seen, was little more than a trade, and has its main interest to the
scholar as an agent of civilization; in Italy it first became a fine
art, a mode of beautiful expression. The Italians, set in the midst of
natural loveliness and among the ruins of ancient art, had never wholly
lost the sense of beauty; they may have paid but slight attention to
what was about them, but they lived life-long in the daily sight of fair
scenes and beautiful forms, which impressed their senses and moulded
their nature, so that, when with the revival of letters they felt the
native impulses of humanity toward the higher life stirring once more in
their hearts, they found themselves endued with powers of perception and
appreciation beyond any other people in the world. These powers were not
the peculiar possession of a well-born class; the centuries had bred
them unobserved into the nature of the race, into the physical
constitution of the whole people. The artisan, no less than the prince,
took delight in the dawn of art, and welcomed it with equal worship. Nor
was this artistic instinct the only common acquisition; the enthusiasm
for letters was likewise widely shared, so that some of the best
manuscripts of the classics have come down to modern times from the
hands of humble Florentine workmen. Italy, indeed, was the first country
where democratic civilization had place; here the contempt of the
Northern lord for the peasant and the mechanic had never been
wide-spread, partly because mercantile life was early held to be
honorable, and partly because of peculiar social conditions. The long,
uninterrupted intercourse with the remains of Roman civilization in the
unbarbarized East, the contact with Saracenic civilization in the South,
the culture of the court of the Two Sicilies, and the invariably
levelling influence of commerce, had made Italy the most cosmopolitan of
European countries; the sharp and warlike rivalry of small, but
intensely patriotic, states, and the necessity they lay under of
utilizing for their own preservation whatever individual energy might
arise among them, perhaps most of all the powerful example of the
omnipresent Church in which the son of a swineherd might take the Papal
Throne, had contributed to make it comparatively easy to pass from lower
to higher social ranks; the aristocratic structure of society remained,
but the distinction of classes was obscured, and the excellence of the
individual’s faculties, the energy and scope of his powers, were
recognized as the real dignities which were worthy of respect. In this
recognition of the individual, and this common taste for art and
letters, lay the conditions of new and vigorous intellectual life; they
resulted in the great age of Italy. It was this in the main that made
possible the popular fervor for the things of the mind in the Italian
Renaissance, to which nothing else in the world’s history is comparable
but the popular enthusiasm of the modern Revolution for liberty. Dante
gave his country a native language, the Humanists gave it the literature
of Rome, the Hellenists the literature of Greece; poets sang and artists
painted with a loftiness and dignity of imagination, a sweetness and
delicacy of sentiment, an energy and reach of thought, a music of verse
and harmony of line and color, still unsurpassed. The gifts which these
men brought were not for a few, but for the many who shared in this
mastering, absorbing interest in the things of the mind, in beauty and
wisdom, which was the vital spirit of the Italian Renaissance.
[Illustration: FIG. 15.--The Creation. From the “Fasciculus Temporum.”
Venice, 1484.]
[Illustration: FIG. 16.--Leviathan. From the “Ortus Sanitatis.” Venice,
1511.]
Thus it happened that when the German printers brought over the Alps the
art which was to do so much toward civilizing the North, they found in
Italy a civilization already culminated, hastening on, indeed, to a
swift decline; they found the people already in possession of the
manuscripts which they came to reproduce and multiply, and the princes,
like Frederick of Urbino,[37] “ashamed to own a printed book” among
their splendid collections, where every art seemed to vie in making
beautiful their volumes of vellum and velvet. Wood-engraving, too, which
here as elsewhere accompanied printing, could be of no use in spreading
ideas and preparing the way for a popular knowledge and appreciation of
art; it was to receive rather than bestow benefits; it was to be made a
fine art before it could perform any real service. The printers,
however, proved the utility of their art, and were soon busily employed
in all the Italian cities in reproducing the precious manuscripts with
which Italy was stored; and from the first they called wood-engraving to
their aid. It is true that the earliest Italian woodcuts--which were,
however, Germanic in design and execution--were as rude as those of the
Northern workshops. They appeared for the first time in an edition of
Cardinal Turrecremata’s Meditations, published at Rome by Ulric Hahn, in
1467. In Venice, although without much doubt the art had been practised
there by the makers of cards and prints long before, woodcuts were first
introduced by the German printers. The accompanying cuts are fair
examples of their work (Figs. 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21), and at the same
time interesting reflections of popular fable. The views of Venice are
examples of the very common attempts to represent the actual appearance
of the great cities, which possess sometimes an historic value. This
Germanic work is but slightly different from that already noticed; but
as soon as the art became naturalized, and was practised by the Italian
engravers, it was characterized at once by beauty of design. There is
something more than promise in an edition of Æsop’s Fables, published at
Verona in 1481, as may be seen from these examples (Figs. 22, 23),
taken from a Venetian reprint of 1491. An Ovid, printed at Venice in
1497, is adorned with several excellent woodcuts, such as this of The
Contest of Apollo and Pan (Fig. 19); and there are other works of
similar merit belonging to the same period. The finest example of
Italian wood-engraving before it reached its highest perfection in the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or Dream of Poliphilo, is a volume which
contains the epistles of St. Jerome, and a description of cloistral
life. This is adorned with a large number of small woodcuts of simple
beauty, marked by grace and feeling, and full of reminiscences of moods
and sentiments which have long ceased to hold a place in human hearts
(Figs. 24, 25, 26). Here is pictured the religious life; the monk’s cell
is barely furnished, but it is seldom without shelves of books and a
window opening upon a distant prospect; the teacher expounds to his
pupils the great volume on the desk before him; the priest administers
consolation to the dying and the bereaved, and encourages the feeble of
spirit and the sinful; the preacher discourses to his brethren and the
crowding people the Blessed Word; the nuns of the sisterhood perform
their daily offices of religion, the panel of the confessional slides
back for them, they wash the feet of the poor, they sit at table
together; all the pieties of their life, which knew no close human
relation, which knew only God and mankind, are depicted; and now and
then there is a thought, too, of the worldly life outside--here the
beautiful youths stop to gaze at the convent gates barred against them.
There are other cuts, also, of landscape, towers, and cities. The great
themes of religion are not forgotten--the Resurrection and the Judgment
unfold their secrets of justice and of the life eternal. In all the
religious spirit prevails, and gives to the whole series a simple and
sweet charm. One may look at them long, and be content to look many
times thereafter.
[Illustration: FIG. 17.--The Stork. From the “Ortus Sanitatis.” Venice,
1511.]
[Illustration: FIG. 18.--View of Venice. From the “Fasciculus Temporum.”
Venice, 1484.]
[Illustration: FIG. 19.--The Contest of Apollo and Pan. From Ovid’s
“Metamorphoses.” Venice, 1518 (design, 1497).]
[Illustration: FIG. 20.--Sirens. From the “Ortus Sanitatis.” Venice,
1511.]
[Illustration: FIG. 21.--Pygmy and Cranes. From the “Ortus Sanitatis.”
Venice, 1511.]
[Illustration: FIG. 22.--The Woman and the Thief. From “Æsop’s Fables.”
Venice, 1491 (design, 1481).]
[Illustration: FIG. 23.--The Crow and the Peacock. From “Æsop’s Fables.”
Venice, 1491 (design, 1481).]
This volume of St. Jerome was, however, only a worthy forerunner of the
Dream of Poliphilo, in which Italian wood-engraving, quickened by the
spirit of the Renaissance, displayed its most beautiful creations. It
was written by a Venetian monk, Francesco Columna, in 1467, and was
first printed by Aldus, in 1499. It is a mystical work, composed in
Italian, strangely mingled with Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, and
its theme, which is the praise of beauty and of love, is obscured by
abstruse knowledge and by much varied learning. It recalls Dante’s poem
in some ways. The Renaissance Dominican, too, was a lover with a human
Beatrice, of whom his dream is the memorial and the glory; like Dante,
he seems to symbolize, under the beauty and guardianship of his gracious
lady, a body of truth and a theory of life; and, as in Dante’s poem
Beatrice typified Divine Wisdom and theology, his Polia stood for the
new gospel of this world’s joy, for the loveliness of universal nature
and the perfection of ancient art; in adoring her he worships them, and
in celebrating her, as alike his goal and his guide through the mazes of
his changing dream, he exalts the virtue and the hope that lay in the
Renaissance ideal of life. There is, perhaps, no volume where the
exuberant vigor of that age is more clearly shown, or where the
objects for which that age was impassioned are more glowingly described.
This romantic and fantastic rhapsody mirrors every aspect of nature and
art in which the Italians then took delight--peaceful landscape, where
rivers flow by flower-starred banks and through bird-haunted woods;
noble architecture and exquisite sculpture, the music of soft
instruments, the ruins of antiquity, the legends of old mythology, the
motions of the dance, the elegance of the banquet, splendor of apparel,
courtesy of manners, even the manuscript, with its covers of purple
velvet sown with Eastern pearls--everything which was cared for and
sought in that time, when the gloom of asceticism lifted and disclosed
the wide prospect of the world lying, as it were, in the loveliness of
daybreak. Poliphilo wanders through fields and groves bright with this
morning beauty, voyages down streams and loiters in gardens that are
filled with gladness; he is graciously regaled in the palace, he attends
the sacrifice in the temple, where his eyes are charmed by every
exquisite ornament of art; he encounters in his progress triumphal
processions, as they wind along through the pleasant country,
bewildering the fancy with their lavish magnificence as of an Arabian
dream; chariots that are wrought out of entire precious stones, carved
with bass-reliefs from Grecian fables, and drawn by half-human centaurs
or strange animals,--elephants, panthers, unicorns, in trappings of silk
and jewels, pass before him, bearing exalted in their midst sculptured
figures, Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan, Danaë in the shower of
gold, and, last and most wonderful, a vase, beautifully engraved and
adorned, out of which springs a golden vine, with leaves of Persian
selenite and grapes of Oriental amethyst; and about all are groups of
attendant nymphs, fauns, satyrs, mænads, and lovely women, crowned with
flowers, with instruments of music in their hands, chanting the praise
of Valor and of Pleasure; again, he lingers among ancient ruins and
remembers their perished glory, and falls into reflection, like that of
the traveller whom he describes, “among those venerable monuments which
still make Rome the queen of cities; where he sees,” thinks Poliphilo,
“the hand of Time, which punishes the excess of pride; and, seeking then
on the steps of the amphitheatre the heads of the legions and that
conquering eagle, that Senate whose decrees made and unmade the kings of
the world, those profound historians, those eloquent orators, he finds
there only a rabble of beggars, to whom an ignorant and ofttimes lying
hermit preaches, only altars without honor and saints without a
believer; the artist reigns alone in that vast enclosure; pencil in
hand, rich with memories, he sees the whole of Rome, her pomp and her
glory, in one mutilated block which a fragment of bass-relief adorns.”
Inspired by these thoughts, Poliphilo delays among like relics of the
past, and reads on shattered tombs the brief inscriptions which tell the
history of the lost lovers who lie beneath, while the pagan burden of
their sorrow, and the pagan calm of the “adieu” with which each
inscription ends, fill him with tender sentiment. So his dream drifts on
through ever-shifting scenes of beauty and ever-dying moments of delight
to the hour of awakening. These scenes and these moments, which
Francesco Columna called out of his imagination, are pictured in the one
hundred and ninety-two designs (Figs. 27, 28, 29, 30) which adorn his
book; here in simple outline are the gardens, groves, and streams, the
noble buildings, the bath, the palace and the temple, the feast, the
allegory of life, the thronging triumphs, the sacrifices, the ruins, the
tombs, the lover and his beloved, the priestess and the goddess, cupids,
bacchanals, and nymphs--a profusion of loveliness, joy, and revel; here,
too, among the others, are some dramatic scenes: the lion and the
lovers, Poliphilo fainting before Polia, and his revival at the touch of
her lips; altogether, they are a precious memorial of the Renaissance
spirit, reflecting alike its passion for the new learning, passing into
useless and pedantic knowledge, and its ecstacy of the senses passing
into voluptuous delight.
[Illustration: FIG. 24.--The Peace of God. From “Epistole di San
Hieronymo Volgare.” Ferrara, 1497.]
[Illustration: FIG. 25.--Mary and the Risen Lord. From “Epistole di San
Hieronymo Volgare.” Ferrara, 1497.]
[Illustration: FIG. 26.--St. Baruch. From the “Catalogus Sanctorum.”
Venice, 1506.]
[Illustration: FIG. 27.--Poliphilo by the Stream. From the
“Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” Venice, 1499.]
[Illustration: FIG. 28.--Poliphilo and the Nymphs. From the
“Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” Venice, 1499.]
[Illustration: FIG. 29--Ornament. From the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.”
Venice, 1499.]