It is well to ride a hobby with at least a semblance of moderation, and
the thesis which this introduction is written to maintain does not
assert that the woodcuts of the fifteenth century are better than the
illustrations of the present day, only that our modern artists, if they
will condescend, may learn some useful lessons from them. At the outset
it may frankly be owned that the range of the earliest illustrators was
limited. They had no landscape art, no such out-of-door illustrations
as those which furnish the subject for one of Miss Sketchley's most
interesting chapters. Again, they had little humour, at least of the
voluntary kind, though this was hardly their own fault, for as the
admission is made the thought at once follows it that of all the many
deficiencies of fifteenth-century literature the lack of humour is one
of the most striking. The rough horseplay of the Life of Aesop prefixed
to editions of the Fables can hardly be counted an exception; the wit
combats of Solomon and Marcolphus produced no more than a title-cut
showing king and clown, and outside the 'Dialogus Creaturarum' I can
think of only a single valid exception, itself rather satirical than
funny, this curious picture of a family on the move from a French
treatise on the Joys of Marriage. On the 'Dialogus' itself it seems
fair to lay some stress, for surely the picture here shown of the Lion
and the Hare who applied for the post of his secretary may well
encourage us to believe that in two other departments of illustration
from which also they were shut out, those of Caricature (for which we
must go back to thirteenth-century prayer-books) and Christmas Books
for Children, the fifteenth-century artist would have made no mean
mark. It is, indeed, our Children's Gift-Books that come nearest both
to his feeling and his style.
[Illustration: FROM THE 'DIALOGUS CREATURARUM.' GOUDA, 1480.]
What remains for us here to consider is the achievement of the early
designers and woodcutters in the field of Decorative and Character
Illustrations with which Miss Sketchley deals in her first and third
chapters. Here the first point to be made is that by an invention of
the last twenty years they are brought nearer to the possible work of
our own day than to that of any previous time. It has been often enough
pointed out that, not from preference, but from inability to devise any
better plan, the art of woodcut illustration began on wholly wrong
lines. Starting, as was inevitable, from the colour-work of
illuminated manuscripts, the illustrators could think of no other
means of simplification than the reduction of pictures to their
outlines. With a piece of plank cut, not across the grain of the wood,
but with it, as his material, and a sharp knife and, perhaps, a gouge
as his only tools, the woodcutter had to reproduce these outlines as
best he could, and it is little to be wondered at if his lines were
often scratchy and angular, and many a good design was deplorably ill
handled. After a time, soft metal, presumably pewter, was used as an
alternative to wood, and perhaps, though probably slower, was a little
easier to work successfully. But save in some Florentine pictures and a
few designs by Geoffroy Tory, the craftsman's work was not to cut the
lines which the artist had drawn, but to cut away everything else. This
inverted method of work continued after the invention of crosshatching
to represent shading, and was undoubtedly the cause of the rapid
supersession of woodcuts by copper engravings during the sixteenth
century, the more natural method of work compensating for the trouble
caused when the illustrations no longer stood in relief like the type,
but had to be printed as incised plates, either on separate leaves, or
by passing the sheet through a different press. The eighteenth-century
invention of wood-engraving as opposed to woodcutting once again caused
pictures and text to be printed together, and the amazing dexterity of
successive schools of wood-engravers enabled them to produce, though at
the cost of immense labour, work which seemed to compete on equal terms
with engravings on copper. At its best the wood-engraving of the
nineteenth century was almost miraculously good; at its worst, in the
wood-engravings of commerce--the wood-engravings of the weekly papers,
for which the artist's drawing might come in on a Tuesday, to be cut up
into little squares and worked on all night as well as all day, in the
engravers' shops--it was unequivocally and deplorably, but hardly
surprisingly, bad.
Upon this strange medley of the miraculously good and the excusably
horrid came the invention of the process line-block, and the problem
which had baffled so many fifteenth-century woodcutters, of how to
preserve the beauty of simple outlines was solved at a single stroke.
Have our modern artists made anything like adequate use of this
excellent invention? My own answer would be that they have used it,
skilfully enough, to save themselves trouble, but that its artistic
possibilities have been allowed to remain almost unexplored. As for the
trouble-saving--and trouble-saving is not only legitimate but
commendable--the photographer's camera is the most obliging of
craftsmen. Only leave your work fairly open and you may draw on as
large a scale and with as coarse lines as you please, and the camera
will photograph it down for you to the exact space the illustration has
to fill and will win you undeserved credit for delicacy and fineness of
touch as well. Thus to save trouble is well, but to produce beautiful
work is better, and what use has been made of the fidelity with which
beautiful and gracious line can now be reproduced? The caricaturists,
it is true, have seen their opportunity. Cleverness could hardly be
carried further than it is by Mr. Phil May, and a caricaturist of
another sort, the late Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, degenerate and despicable
as was almost every figure he drew, yet saw and used the possibilities
which artists of happier temperament have neglected. With all the
disadvantages under which they laboured in the reproduction of fine
line the craftsmen of Venice and Florence essayed and achieved more
than this. Witness the fine rendering into pure line of a picture by
Gentile Bellini of a tall preacher preceded by his little crossbearer
in the 'Doctrina' of Lorenzo Giustiniano printed at Venice in 1494, or
again the impressiveness, surviving even its little touch of the
grotesque, of this armed warrior kneeling at the feet of a pope, which
I have unearthed from a favourite volume of Venetian chapbooks at the
British Museum. A Florentine picture of Jacopone da Todi on his knees
before a vision of the Blessed Virgin (from Bonacorsi's edition of his
'Laude,' 1490) gives another instance of what can be done by simple
line in a different style. We have yet other examples in many of the
illustrations to the famous romance, the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,'
printed at Venice in 1499. Of similar cuts on a much smaller scale, a
specimen will be given later. Here, lest anyone should despise these
fifteenth-century efforts, I would once more recall the fact that at
the time they were made the execution of such woodcuts required the
greatest possible dexterity, in cutting away on each side so as to
leave the line as the artist drew it with any semblance of its original
grace. In many illustrated books which have come down to us what must
have been beautiful designs have been completely spoilt, rendered even
grotesque, by the fine curves of the drawing being translated into
scratchy angularities. But draw he never so finely no artist nowadays
need fear that his work will be made scratchy or angular by
photographic process. It is only when he crowds lines together, from
inability to work simply, that the process block aggravates his
defects.
[Illustration: La Lega Facta Nouamente a Morte e Destructione de li
Franzosi & suoi Seguaci.